In-depth empirical examination of city versus metropolitan schools is a significant addition to the literature on desegregation policy.

Analyzes the history and law of school desegregation, including its benefits and costs over the last half decade, and suggests future policy likely to have a better cost-benefit ratio.

How we provide equal educational opportunity to an increasingly diverse, highly urbanized student population is one of the central concerns facing our nation. As Genevieve Siegel-Hawley argues in this thought-provoking book, within our metropolitan areas we are currently allowing a labyrinthine system of school-district boundaries to divide students--and opportunities--along racial and economic lines. Rather than confronting these realities, though, most contemporary educational policies focus on improving schools by raising academic standards, holding teachers and students accountable through test performance, and promoting private-sector competition. Siegel-Hawley takes us into the heart of the metropolitan South to explore what happens when communities instead focus squarely on overcoming the educational divide between city and suburb. Based on evidence from metropolitan school desegregation efforts in Richmond, Virginia; Louisville, Kentucky; Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina; and Chattanooga, Tennessee, between 1990 and 2010, Siegel-Hawley uses quantitative methods and innovative mapping tools both to underscore the damages wrought by school-district boundary lines and to raise awareness about communities that have sought to counteract them. She shows that city-suburban school desegregation policy is related to clear, measurable progress on both school and housing desegregation. Revisiting educational policies that in many cases were abruptly halted--or never begun--this book will spur an open conversation about the creation of the healthy, integrated schools and communities critical to our multiracial future.

Access to a quality education remains the primary mechanism for improving one’s life chances in the United States, and for children of color, a “good education” is particularly linked to their individual and collective well-being. Despite the popular perception that America is in a “post-racial” epoch, opportunities to access quality learning environments and human development resources remain determined according to race, class, gender, and ability. Taking a more nuanced approach to race and the resegregation of the American school system, this volume examines how and why the education quality for the majority of students of color in America remains fundamentally unequal.

Most observers have assumed that school segregation in the United States was exclusively a southern phenomenon. In fact, many northern communities, until recently, engaged in explicit "southern style" school segregation whereby black children were assigned to "colored" schools and white children to white schools. Davison Douglas examines why so many northern communities did engage in school segregation (in violation of state laws that prohibited such segregation) and how northern blacks challenged this illegal activity. He analyzes the competing visions of black empowerment in the northern black community as reflected in the debate over school integration.

An acclaimed economist reveals that school integration efforts in the 1970s and 1980s were overwhelmingly successful -- and argues that we must renew our commitment to integration for the sake of all Americans We are frequently told that school integration was a social experiment doomed from the start. But as Rucker C. Johnson demonstrates in Children of the Dream, it was, in fact, a spectacular achievement. Drawing on longitudinal studies going back to the 1960s, he shows that students who attended integrated and well-funded schools were more successful in life than those who did not -- and this held true for children of all races. Yet as a society we have given up on integration. Since the high point of integration in 1988, we have regressed and segregation again prevails. Contending that integrated, well-funded schools are the primary engine of social mobility, Children of the Dream offers a radical new take on social policy. It is essential reading in our divided times.

In this compelling book, the authors put a human face on desegregation practices in the South. Focusing on an African American community in Alabama, they document not only the gains but also the significant losses experienced by students when their community school was closed and they were forced to attend a White desegregated school across town. This in-depth volume includes: A letter by Dr. William Hooper Councill and speeches by George Washington Trenholm—two African American leaders who worked with communities to provide quality schooling for African American children during segregation.An insider’s view of what life was like inside a segregated African American school—including interviews with graduates who discuss how it felt to be in a caring and nurturing school that provided an atmosphere much like that of a family.Actual events that demonstrate the profound negative impact of using skin color and race as a basis for preferential treatment—including testimonials from parents and students who experienced racial discrimination in their new school. A valuable look at the unmet promises of school desegregation that can help us provide a quality education for all children in the 21st century. “Morris and Morris through their careful research have painted a picture of reality, the type of picture that educators, community leaders, and policymakers must see in order to give a proper assessment of what is going on and what should be done. This clear, straightforward presentation is as necessary as it is powerful.” —From the Foreword by Asa G. Hilliard, III “I found it difficult to put this book down. The Price They Paid is one of the few books that looks at changes in the desegregation of education from the point of view of those living the changes.” —Lucindia H. Chance, Dean, College Of Education, Georgia Southern University