As it "illuminates the crisis of liberal education and offers proposals for reform which deserve full debate" (Morton Halperin, American Civil Liberties Union), "Illiberal Education" "documents how the politics of race and gender in our universities are rapidly eating away traditions of scholarship and reward for individual achievement" (Robert H. Bork). (Education/Teaching)

The universality of the problematics with urban education, together with the importance of understanding the context of improvement interventions, brings into sharp focus the importance of an undertaking like the International Handbook of Urban Education. An important focus of this book is the interrogation of both the social and political factors that lead to different problem posing and subsequent solutions within each region.

The interrelation among race, schooling, and labor market opportunities of American blacks can help us make sense of the relatively poor economic status of blacks in contemporary society. The role of these factors in slavery and the economic consequences for blacks has received much attention, but the post-slave experience of blacks in the American economy has been less studied. To deepen our understanding of that experience, Robert A. Margo mines a wealth of newly available census data and school district records. By analyzing evidence concerning occupational discrimination, educational expenditures, taxation, and teachers' salaries, he clarifies the costs for blacks of post-slave segregation. "A concise, lucid account of the bases of racial inequality in the South between Reconstruction and the Civil Rights era. . . . Deserves the careful attention of anyone concerned with historical and contemporary race stratification."—Kathryn M. Neckerman, Contemporary Sociology "Margo has produced an excellent study, which can serve as a model for aspiring cliometricians. To describe it as 'required reading' would fail to indicate just how important, indeed indispensable, the book will be to scholars interested in racial economic differences, past or present."—Robert Higgs, Journal of Economic Literature "Margo shows that history is important in understanding present domestic problems; his study has significant implications for understanding post-1950s black economic development."—Joe M. Richardson, Journal of American History

Winner of the New Scholar’s Book Award from the American Educational Research Association The abolitionist movement not only helped bring an end to slavery in the United States but also inspired the large-scale admission of African Americans to the country’s colleges and universities. Oberlin College changed the face of American higher education in 1835 when it began enrolling students irrespective of race and sex. Camaraderie among races flourished at the Ohio institution and at two other leading abolitionist colleges, Berea in Kentucky and New York Central, where Black and white students allied in the fight for emancipation and civil rights. After Reconstruction, however, color lines emerged on even the most progressive campuses. For new generations of white students and faculty, ideas of fairness toward African Americans rarely extended beyond tolerating their presence in the classroom, and overt acts of racial discrimination grew increasingly common by the 1880s. John Frederick Bell’s Degrees of Equality analyzes the trajectory of interracial reform at Oberlin, New York Central, and Berea, noting its implications for the progress of racial justice in both the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries. Drawing on student and alumni writings, institutional records, and promotional materials, Bell interrogates how abolitionists and their successors put their principles into practice. The ultimate failure of these social experiments illustrates a tragic irony of abolitionism, as the achievement of African American freedom and citizenship led whites to divest from the project of racial pluralism.

In The Politics of White Rights, Joseph Bagley recounts the history of school desegregation litigation in Alabama, focusing on the malleability and durability of white resistance. He argues that the litigious battles of 1954–73 taught Alabama’s segregationists how to fashion a more subtle defense of white privilege, placing them in the vanguard of a new conservatism oriented toward the Sunbelt, not the South. Scholars have recently begun uncovering the ways in which segregationists abandoned violent backlash and overt economic reprisal and learned how to rearticulate their resistance and blind others to their racial motivations. Bagley is most interested in a creedal commitment to maintaining “law and order,” which lay at the heart of this transition. Before it was a buzz phrase meant to conjure up fears of urban black violence, “law and order” represented a politics that allowed self-styled white moderates to begrudgingly accept token desegregation and to begin to stake their own claims to constitutional rights without forcing them to repudiate segregation or white supremacy. Federal courts have, as recently as 2014, agreed that Alabama’s property tax system is crippling black education. Bagley argues that this is because, in the late 1960s, the politics of law and order became a politics of white rights, which supported not only white flight to suburbs and private schools but also nominally color-blind changes in the state’s tax code. These changes were designed to shield white money from the needs of increasingly black public education. Activists and courts have been powerless to do anything about them, because twenty years of desperate litigious combat finally taught Alabama lawmakers how to erect constitutional bulwarks that could withstand a legal assault.

This collection of essays invites readers to think through critical questions concerning anti-racism education, such as: How does anti-racism education centre race as an analytic and simultaneously work with multiple sites of oppression, without reifying hierarchies of difference? How can anti-racism education be engaged to speak to historical questions of power and privilege, within conventional schooling practices? How do we recognize anti-racism education in its many iterations? In this book the authors explore the knowledge that constitutes anti-racism education and the ways in which knowledge constitutive of anti-racism education becomes embodied through particular pedagogues. The authors are anti-racism educators with experiences in diverse settings: the chapters cover various fields and socio-historic geographies, address contemporary educational issues, and are situated within personal-political, historical and philosophical conversations. Anti-racism education is a discursive stance and steeped in politics that shape and are shaped by everyday conversations, theories, and practices. The essays in this collection work through many of the possibilities and limitations of engaging in counter-hegemonic education for transformative learning. Readers will discover lived experiences, theory, practice and critical reflexivity.