Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in Post-Civil Rights America

by Paul Street

Fifty years after the US Supreme Court ruled that "separate but equal" was "inherently unequal," Paul Street argues that little progress has been made to meaningful reform America's schools. In fact, Street considers the racial make-up of today's schools as a state of de facto apartheid. With an eye to historical development of segregated education, Street examines the current state of school funding and investigates disparities in teacher quality, teacher stability, curriculum, classroom supplies, faculties, student-teacher ratios, teacher' expectations for students and students' expectations for themselves. Books in the series offer short, polemic takes on hot topics in education, providing a basic entry point into contemporary issues for courses and general; readers.

232 pages, Paperback

First published August 28, 2005

About the author

Paul Street is an independent radical-democratic policy researcher, journalist, historian, author and speaker based in Iowa City, Iowa, and Chicago, Illinois. He is the author of six books to date: Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2004); Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in the Post-Civil Rights Era(New York: Routledge, 2005); Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis: a Living Black Chicago History (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007); Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2008); The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power (Paradigm, 2010); and (with Anthony DiMaggio) Crashing the Tea Party: Mass Media and the Campaign to Remake American Politics (Paradigm, 2011).

Street’s essays, articles, reviews, interviews, and commentaries have appeared in numerous outlets, including CounterPunch, Truthout, the Chicago Tribune, Capital City Times, In These Times, Chicago History, Critical Sociology, Journal of American Ethnic History, Social History, Review of Educational, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, Dissent, Black Agenda Report, Economic & Political Weekly (India), Tinanbantu (South Africa), New Left Project (United Kingdom), Press TV (Iran), The Times of India (India), Morning Star (England), Al-Alkhbar (The News in Beirut, Lebanon), Dissident Voice, Black Commentator, Monthly Review, History News Network, Tom’sDispatch, AlterNet., the Capital City Times (Madison, WI), and the Iowa City Press Citizen, and (above all) ZNet and Z Magazine. Street’s essays are picked up and reproduced in numerous languages) across the planet/World Wide Web in venues too numerous to track and mention.

Street’s writings, research findings, and commentary have been featured in a large number and wide variety of media venues, including The New York Times, CNN, Al Jazeera, the Chicago Tribune, WGN (Chicago/national), WLS (ABC-Chicago), Fox News, and the Chicago Sun Times.

Street has appeared in more than 100 radio and television interviews/broadcasts and on the popular live Web book-chat at “Firedog.” Lake

Street has taught various aspects of U.S. history at a large number of Chicago-area colleges and universities and was the Director of Research at The Chicago Urban League (from 2000 through 2005), where he published two major grant-funded studies: The Vicious Circle: Race, Prison, Jobs and Community in Chicago, Illinois, and the Nation (October 2002) and Still Separate, Unequal: Race, Place, Policy and the State of Black Chicago (2005).

Reviews

[Sam Whitehill · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a concise accounting of the “savage inequalities” that persist in American schools and the forces that push to deepen them. Racial apartheid is alive and well today, and our segregated schools are a reflection of our society more generally.

[Cami · Rating 3 out of 5]

While the author brought up valid points about the education system in America, some of which are quite horrifying, I found his style repetitive. He went on and on about the same problems that exist, listing off statistics, and only included about a paragraph of ideas with possible solutions at the very end of the book. Being aware of these issues is important, especially as an educator, but how are we suppose to do anything when he claims it to be a systemic problem that teachers don't have much control over?

[Erin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Think schools are equal? Nope! Think we live in a post-racial society? Nope!

[Lacey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty heavy stuff.

[Drake · Rating 4 out of 5]

FYI, Brown v. Board of Eduction did not desegregate the school system. And Northern schools tend to be more segregated now than Southern schools.