Separate and Unequal

Grant’s latest book touches on almost
every hot button issue in the national debate on education. Vouchers,
busing, desegregation, testing, No Child Left Behind—they’re all part
of the story that Grant tells in his just-off-the-presses Hope and Despair in the American City: Why There Are no Bad Schools in Raleigh
(Harvard University Press; 204 pages/hardcover; $25.95). Grant will be
speaking at Barnes and Noble, 3454 Erie Blvd. E., DeWitt, Thursday, May
28, 7 p.m. The event is free.

For those who care about the state of Syracuse city schools, his message is not a heartening one. Hope and Despair
compares the experience of public education in Syracuse with that in
Raleigh, N.C. Unfortunately, Raleigh plays the role of hope, while
Syracuse becomes, in Grant’s narrative, the emblem of despair. 

Grant, interviewed by phone while on a
book tour in Raleigh, said he hopes to get the sorry state of schools
in cities like Syracuse back on the national agenda. Grant, 71, who
serves as the Hannah Hammond Professor of Education and Sociology,
Emeritus at SU, is best known for his groundbreaking 1988 study of the
impact of school desegregation efforts at Nottingham High School,
entitled The World We Created at Hamilton High, also published by Harvard. 

His storytelling weaves serious social
science with hard-earned personal experience in a way that will allow
many readers to see themselves and their kids’ stories on the pages. Hope and Despair
contains one of the most compact and compelling descriptions in print
of how Syracuse changed through the 1970s and 1980s, and why.

“The basic metaphor in the book is
this—that in most of urban America, including Syracuse, we’ve built
this invisible wall between city and suburbs,” Grant noted. “Raleigh
had the courage to tear down that wall, with enormous benefit to kids.”
Raleigh merged its city schools with surrounding Wake County in 1976,
and that, to quote Robert Frost, has made all the difference.

Grant’s son Robert lives in Raleigh, and
the author bears this striking witness to his thesis that the city has
no bad schools. “In Raleigh, when they did the
merger, they converted one-third of their schools to magnet schools,
and they started two-way busing. You had suburban parents sending their
kids to urban schools. 

“Both of my grandkids are in inner-city,
formerly majority black schools and both schools have waiting lists of
kids from the suburbs wanting to get in. It’s as if Levy {Middle
School} had a waiting list of 300 kids from Fayetteville.”

Drawing on his own years of research,
community activism in the Westcott area, the experience of his wife
Judy, a teacher at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School, and
others, Grant writes in great detail of the opportunities we missed to
turn our schools around. He contrasts this with the progress made in
Raleigh. Only the merger of schools in a way that achieves real social
integration, believes Grant, can make the promise of equal educational
opportunity a reality for all children.

The time for a merger of city and
suburban schools in Central New York, Grant fears, may have passed us
by. Instead he hopes to be part of a national debate when George W.
Bush’s No Child Left Behind legislation comes up for renewal next year.
He sees that debate as an opportunity to open up discussion about the
need for genuine social integration in education.

“These two cities illustrate a national
problem,” he said. “I hope that this book can get this debate back on
the national agenda. The debate about equal education has been put on
the shelf with the notion that you can beef up the city schools.”

Grant isn’t convinced that even the best
of efforts to strengthen urban schools will equalize the opportunities
available to city and suburban kids. “Courts again and again have found
that there are inequities that are unconstitutional, but they throw it
back to the legislatures, which are controlled by the suburbs. The pie
is cut a bit more equitably; it does some good, but we are a long way
from equity.”

You don’t need new legislation to start
to bridge the gap, contended Grant. “We need to reopen the debate on
renewing No Child Left Behind. You already have a law saying that
children who are in a school that fails for three consecutive years are
to be given an option of going to another school. So give them vouchers
and let them go to suburban schools.”

Grant calls the failure of urban schools
not only cause for despair, but a national shame. “This is a dagger at
the heart of democracy. In a society that allows for huge inequalities
in income and wealth, the promise is that education is a way for people
to get ahead, to level the field. We can’t provide equal education
opportunity by throwing money over the wall. We’ve tried separate but
equal: It doesn’t work.”

—Ed Griffin-Nolan