Book Review: Hope and Despair in the American City

Review:

Hope and Despair in the American City: Why There Are No Bad Schools in Raleigh

By Gerald Grant

The book’s title is flattering enough, but sociologist Gerald Grant finds plenty of laudatory things to say about Wake County’s public schools in this 2009 study of urban blight and education reform. Grant is a retired professor of Education and Sociology at Syracuse University who grew up in Syracuse, NY and returned to it in 1978. Clearly distressed by the steady decline and uneven recovery of the core sections of Syracuse, Grant has done extensive archival research about both segregation and urban planning in preparation for writing this book, which benefits from his interwoven personal experiences.

A scholarly project, Hope and Despair in the American City uses accessible language and detailed examples to make an interesting point about urban renewal: in Grant’s view, cities stand only a very slim chance of avoiding economic decline and population depletion if they do not implement a well-thought-out and publicly supported plan to reduce segregation in the local public schools. Other discussions of K-12 education reform approach the subject from the opposite direction and assume that urban blight causes failing schools, and not the reverse. Scholars tend to divert blame for poor academic performance away from teachers and administrators, placing it on the conditions of deprivation and violence in which urban students often live. Grant argues that failing and segregated public schools are a prime cause of the deprivation and violence.

Grant structures his book around a comparison of Syracuse and Raleigh. The cities appear to have little in common, either historically, culturally, or sociologically, but he uses the stark differences between them to serve his larger argument about integrated public schools. In 2003, as Grant makes his first trip to Raleigh to visit some local schools and meet with administrators, he notes that “I had departed that morning from Syracuse, where only 25 percent of eighth graders passed state achievement tests in math and reading. In Raleigh, where city and suburbs had merged to form a single countywide school system that served children of all social classes and race, 91 percent passed” (91).

The book’s first chapter holds up Syracuse as an example of how misguided and downright discriminatory zoning, insurance, and construction policies destroyed the organic character of the zone of the city that borders the university to the east. He describes a massive housing project that replaced a stretch of single-family houses with yards and gardens as “a treeless, dense concrete-and-brick zone five blocks long, surrounded by a six-foot spiked black iron fence” (13). The neighborhood had formerly offered “jobs, informal mentoring, and community support,” all of which were “destroyed when the buildings were leveled” (13). With additional research into the blatantly racist federal housing insurance practices known as “redlining,” which identify majority-African American neighborhoods as too risky to insure, Grant argues that “The story of Syracuse is but a small part of a larger web of social policies and programs that shaped urban decline across the nation” (14).

That iron fence functions as a metaphor for the stark segregation of Syracuse’s schools. Syracuse failed to launch an integration program that would bus inner-city students to majority-white suburban schools, and Grant describes how such a program had prospered in Boston (the METCO program). Grant favors integrated schools for multiple reasons, but his chief interest seems to be their ability to help children develop “social networks” that increase upward mobility for poor families, and whose coherence benefits the entire community. He cites the work of sociologist William Julius Wilson, whose analysis of conditions among the urban poor in Chicago suggested that their “isolation from middle-class information networks and lack of social skills to negotiate across class lines were the greatest barriers to upward mobility” (24). The METCO program, which was never emulated in Syracuse, despite the support of a few vocal residents, provided many of these benefits to students who traveled from inner-city Boston to suburban schools in Brookline and other surrounding areas, according to Grant.

Discussing Raleigh, Grant claims that the benefits for schoolchildren who have attended high-quality, integrated schools throughout Wake County extend not only to their families and neighborhoods, but also to the economic health of the larger metropolitan area. In Grant’s view, high-quality, integrated public schools can contribute a great deal to a locality’s “social capital,” a concept he describes as follows:

My own earlier work had been a study of the theories of James Coleman, a sociologist who had written about the importance of the human relationships and supportive networks that enrich the cognitive and social development of children and sustain the norms of a good community. Take away those relationships—the “glue” that holds civil society together—and we progressively reduce our ability to take effective cooperative action toward any goal. (43-44)

Integrated, high-quality public schools are a critical source of that cultural glue, in Grant’s view, and when you consider how many jobs that the schools support and how many relationships that they foster among local residents who would otherwise remain strangers, the argument makes sense.

But long bus rides are not the ideal way to integrate a city’s public schools. In preparing to write this book, Grant found that Raleigh and Wake County had achieved a more effective model for integrating the public schools than busing. He spends one chapter discussing the history of the city through a racial lens and argues that Raleigh has a long history of settling interracial disputes democratically. Grant sees the merger of Wake County’s and the City of Raleigh’s school districts in 1976 as a key moment in the city’s history. He argues that one source of the all-important political support for the merger was the desire of local business professionals to avoid the urban decay that was already besetting neighboring Durham, whose city and county school systems remained independent until 1992 (89).

Once the merger was completed, instead of continuing to transport students from the inner city to suburban schools in North Raleigh and Cary, the merged Wake County Public School System came up with an innovative strategy. Grant considers the creation of the magnet program to be another key decision point for Raleigh and Wake County. Crucially, the magnet strategy emphasized parental choice, creating unique academic programs to draw more affluent students toward the central city and improve the quality of education at struggling schools.

Magnet programs were only the most popular method of integrating the schools, however. Wake County also adopted a policy of balancing school populations according to the socioeconomic status of the students; the goal was that no school would have a student body consisting of more than 30% of students who qualified for free and reduced federal lunch subsidies. Grant praises the success of both programs, citing “stunning test scores across the whole county” and the fact that “virtually all of the teachers in each school that I visited enrolled their own children in Wake County’s public schools, most often in the same school where they taught” (92).

Nine years after Grant completed his study, whose subtitle proclaims that all schools in Raleigh are at least of average quality, test scores are not exactly “stunning.” The magnet program appears to be stronger than ever. However, the socio-economic balance of Wake’s schools leaves quite a bit to be desired. Multiple schools have far too large a percentage of students who qualify for free or reduced lunch, and these schools’ performance grades and test scores suffer as a result.

However, Grant is correct to laud Wake’s school system, and to take note of the support that Wake’s public schools enjoy from parents, local politicians, and business owners alike. In his final chapter, he discusses the state of Wake and Syracuse schools in 2008, noting that although increasing numbers of low-income students had negatively affected school performance in the WCPSS school system, Wake was still significantly outperforming Syracuse:  “In Syracuse, where nearly three fourths of students qualified for subsidized lunches, only 29 percent of all students passed eighth grade reading. In Wake County’s schools, 75 percent of poor blacks and 87 percent of blacks above the poverty line passed reading in grades 3 through 8. For Hispanics, 72 percent of poor students and 88 percent of others passed,” despite the fact that many newly arrived Hispanic students were English learners who had never learned to read in Spanish (189).

The portrait that Grant paints of Syracuse is a sad object lesson in urban blight–a fate that Raleigh must avoid. Racial segregation in Syracuse was quite extreme in 2008, with 98% of black residents of Onondaga County residing within Syracuse city limits, despite composing only 9% of the county’s population. Grant cites sociologist Coleman’s key discovery that “The social composition of the student body is more highly related to achievement, independent of the student’s own social background, than is any other school factor” and summarizes, “what really counted was who you went to school with” (159). Grant claims that Coleman’s theory about the factors that create high-quality schools has been supported by multiple subsequent studies.

Grant presents Syracuse as a foil for Raleigh, an alternate path, where leaders missed out on multiple opportunities to alter the devastating trajectory. Unlike Raleigh, though, Syracuse rejected opportunities to merge city and county school systems and has since—Grant would say as a result—failed in other attempts to revive the central city.

The NC General Assembly passed a law in 2017 that established a special legislative committee charged with determining whether to break apart school systems that were previously merged. Charlotte-Mecklenburg and Wake are clearly in the crosshairs. The committee will present a report by May 1. Members of this committee would do well to read Hope and Despair in the American City as part of their research.