This book offers a prescription for reform that includes freedom of choice among public and private schools.

In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court declared segregated public schools unconstitutional. The ruling in Brown v. Board of Education set public education on a course toward equality. Yet, five decades later, schools are not equal. Minority children living in America’s inner cities suffer disproportionately from a failing education system, with black and Hispanic students dropping out of public high schools at much higher rates than whites. There is, however, reason for hope. The expansion of school choice offers new opportunities for children struggling in failing schools. In this collection, a dozen leading scholars, educators, and reformers—including Andrew Coulson, Floyd Flake, Frederick Hess, and Paul E. Peterson—examine the legacy of Brown v. Board and its relation to the modern-day school choice movement. A school administrator and a charter school founder also reveal the challenges and obstacles faced by enterprising teachers in trying to help their students. Together these experts expose the modern barriers that deprive inner-city children of a good education and call for increased school choice as the most effective way to achieve the goals of Brown v. Board. Educational Freedom in Urban America is essential reading for anyone concerned with the condition of our inner-city schools and the racial and social inequities that still exist in American education.

This book draws out the critical lessons for U.S. policymakers and shows how freedom to choose schools and healthy competition among schools can create strong academic success.

Winner of the 2020 Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book Award Drawing on personal stories, research, and historical events, an esteemed educator offers a vision of educational justice inspired by the rebellious spirit and methods of abolitionists. Drawing on her life’s work of teaching and researching in urban schools, Bettina Love persuasively argues that educators must teach students about racial violence, oppression, and how to make sustainable change in their communities through radical civic initiatives and movements. She argues that the US educational system is maintained by and profits from the suffering of children of color. Instead of trying to repair a flawed system, educational reformers offer survival tactics in the forms of test-taking skills, acronyms, grit labs, and character education, which Love calls the educational survival complex. To dismantle the educational survival complex and to achieve educational freedom—not merely reform—teachers, parents, and community leaders must approach education with the imagination, determination, boldness, and urgency of an abolitionist. Following in the tradition of activists like Ella Baker, Bayard Rustin, and Fannie Lou Hamer, We Want to Do More Than Survive introduces an alternative to traditional modes of educational reform and expands our ideas of civic engagement and intersectional justice.

With critical issues like desegregation and funding facing our schools, dissatisfaction with public education has reached a new high. Teachers decry inadequate resources while critics claim educators are more concerned with job security than effective teaching. Though urban education has reached crisis proportions, contending players have difficulty agreeing on a common program of action. This book tells why. Changing Urban Education confronts the prevailing naivete in school reform by examining the factors that shape, reinforce, or undermine reform efforts. Edited by one of the nation's leading urban scholars, it examines forces for change and resistance in urban education and proposes that the barrier to reform can only be overcome by understanding how schools fit into the broader political contexts of their cities. Much of the problem with our schools lies with the reluctance of educators to recognize the profoundly political character of public education. The contributors show how urban political contexts vary widely with factors like racial composition, the role of the teachers' union, and relations between cities and surrounding metropolitan areas. Presenting case studies of original field research in Baltimore, Chicago, Houston, and six other urban areas, they consider how resistance to desegregation and the concentration of the poor in central urban areas affect education, and they suggest how cities can build support for reform through the involvement of business and other community players. By demonstrating the complex interrelationship between urban education and politics, this book shows schools to be not just places for educating children, but also major employers and large spenders of tax dollars. It also introduces the concept of civic capacity—the ability of educators and non-educators to work together on common goals—and suggests that this key issue must be addressed before education can be improved. Changing Urban Education makes it clear to educators that the outcome of reform efforts depends heavily on their political context as it reminds political scientists that education is a major part of the urban mix. While its prognosis is not entirely optimistic, it sets forth important guidelines that cannot be ignored if our schools are to successfully prepare children for the future.