In 1949, T. H. Marshall defended universal education “as the right of the adult citizen to have been educated” (Marshall Lectures, 1964, p. 82). He went on to claim that education was a prerequisite for an engaged and free citizenry. It is with this social right that the two texts under review concern themselves. In The Color of Mind, Derrick Darby and John L. Rury ask how unequal schooling opportunities have denied African Americans “dignitary justice” through historically racialized practices that continue in ever-changing forms to the present day. In Common Core, Nicholas Tampio provides a compelling case for local decision making in the design of education standards, and argues against the centralized standards of the Common Core.

The Color of Mind provides a comprehensive historical account of the construction, emergence, and evolution of a racial ideology that portrayed African Americans as inferior to whites in “intelligence, character, or conduct” (p. 2). Darby and Rury coin this the “Color of Mind.” The authors are centrally concerned with closing achievement gaps by addressing this “dignitary injustice” (p. 3). To this end, they aim to put aside concerns around distributive justice (p. 2), as well as that which cannot be changed outside of the school building; nevertheless, they return to these issues time and again.

Tracing the emergence of the Color of Mind to Aristotle, Kant, and Hume, the book argues that although this racial ideology does not manifest itself in the same form today, it is present in how society and the education system tracks (p. 112), disciplines (p. 118), and diagnoses African American children as requiring special education (p. 122) even now. While the original versions of this ideology maintained that African Americans were not worthy of being educated in the same buildings (p. 45) or in the same subjects as whites (p. 48) in the United States, this evolved through the “cultural turn” in education emerging from the Moynihan Report (p. 81) to classroom practices that continue to stigmatize and discriminate against African American students today (p. 111).

Darby and Rury are not satisfied to merely diagnose historical and contemporary dignitary injustices, however. The authors advocate for a “Color of Mind Index” (p. 150) that would hold teachers and school leaders accountable for perpetuating dignitary injustices within schools. For example, if a school did not have equal proportions of black students in higher track classes, they would be docked on the Color of Mind Index (p. 150). Darby and Rury identify three implications of their argument: Racial desegregation of schools will be insufficient to remedy Color of Mind ideology, fixing problems outside of schools will be by itself insufficient to eliminate Color of Mind ideology within schools, and the measures they advocate do not require a massive outlay of resources (p. 13). In short, the authors believe that we can address dignitary injustice on the cheap. To any scholar of distributive politics, or the politics of education, this immediately raises a number of issues.

The book is quick to identify a litany of problems that happen outside of the school setting to which educators need to pay attention if they truly wish to fight for educational equality. These include a lack of support for public education (p. 46), segregation (p. 47), unequal funding (p. 48), outright banning of students from schools (p. 49), voter disenfranchisement (p. 51), segregated housing markets (p. 91), and poverty (p. 125), among others. It is in this diagnosis, however, where the problem emerges. For example, while Darby and Rury argue that residential desegregation will be insufficient to fix Color of Mind ideology (p. 13), they also provide extensive evidence that residential desegregation contributed to African American educational progress up to the 1970s (p. 93).

It is hard for this reader to understand how we can achieve dignitary justice inside of schools without addressing these issues outside of schools. The authors label those making such criticisms “integration idealists,” and an entire chapter is dedicated to their concerns (Chapter 6), yet those concerns extend to more than integration. What is to happen to African American children when they leave school at the end of the day and are subject to poor-quality public services and discriminatory police practices, and African American adults when they are subject to discriminatory labor markets? Are these not also instances of dignitary injustice? While the authors are right to argue that these are difficult problems for educators to address (pp. 11–12), it is hard to imagine a world where Color of Mind practices inside of schools are not affected by discriminatory practices outside of schools.

In Common Core, political theorist Nicholas Tampio passionately argues for local control of education standards. Inveighing against the design of national education standards in a large, diverse democracy such as the United States (pp. 2, 6, 15), Tampio dissects in great detail the folly of the Common Core across four subjects, English Language Arts (ELA), Math, Science, and History, as well as the teaching of gender and sexuality. His position is not a dispassionate one—his children are currently subject to the standards he writes about—and the personal investment is a refreshing one.

This book owes a great deal to John Dewey and progressive educators (p. 10). It builds a case for local control over education around four claims. First, in a diverse democracy, education standards should reflect this diversity by engaging multiple stakeholders. Second, society should be centrally concerned with the organization of schools, and local control is one way to encourage participation in this endeavor. Third, the form that current educational standards take, with their excessive focus on testing and rote memorization, “crushes the creativity and entrepreneurship of its young people,” (p. 34). Finally, all children deserve the opportunity to engage in more creative forms of learning, and to deny this is inegalitarian (p. 38). In this final argument, Common Core has parallels to The Color of Mind, where the latter details how the history of American education has often pushed African American children into forms of education like vocational training (p. 52).

Tampio is fair in his critique of national education standards—he dedicates an entire chapter to discussing the arguments presented by their advocates, although it is clear that he is unconvinced by them (Chapter 1). Through a close examination of standards in four subjects—English, math, history, Science–and the teaching of gender and sexuality, he clearly makes his case: Centralized control of education standards and curricula fails when implemented. Whether it is a controversy over what types of history are taught, as was the case in Jefferson County, Colorado (pp. 108–11), or how the Common Core discriminates against non-native English speakers and children with autism for the way it requires English comprehension in addition to mathematical ability (pp. 68-71), the author is at his best when providing a close critique of how the Common Core functions in practice.

In moving beyond a specific critique of the Common Core and arguing for local control, however, Tampio forgets to stop and ask, “Well, who would wield power then?” And the answer is not always those we want. He makes his case using a Madisonian perspective on local control and federalism, but this makes more sense when thinking about divisions of power between local and federal governments, and less so when the concern is the monopolization of power by particular factions (p. 28), either at the local or federal level. Local control is no panacea for a more democratic education policymaking. Tampio is correct in calling for democratic deliberation over educational standards (pp. 33, 36, 54), but this concern is orthogonal to that of local control, which is just as prone to elite capture as national standards.

These two books deserve to be read together. While The Color of Mind is sharply focused on what educators can do inside of schools, Common Core turns its attention to the larger political struggle of how our schools should be organized. The Color of Mind repeatedly reminds the reader that many of the problems in schools are beyond the power of educators to fix, arguing that “[s]erious societal problems are for all Americans to address in the political and legal arena. . . . Such problems are clearly beyond the capacity and authority of schools and their leaders to wholly resolve” (p. 110; emphasis added). Common Core provides a useful reminder of how educators—together with parents, and civil society—should be engaged in a larger political process of how schools, curricula, and national standards are organized. You cannot have one (dignitary justice), without the other (the engagement of educators inside and outside of the house of learning). It is this fact one wishes had been given greater attention in the The Color of Mind. At the same time, this book provides useful correctives to Common Core. With its razor-sharp focus on the latest attempts at setting national education standards (there will likely be more), the reader gets the impression from Tampio’s argument that these policies are sui generis. Yet they are not, and remembering that such policies have a long history before this latest attempt would help us better understand why the Common Core is so problematic.

These two books should be read by political scientists for their impassioned cases for the improvement of American education. They both echo T. H. Marshall’s claim that education is the right of the future adult to have been educated. Most importantly, they address concerns that lie at the heart of our discipline: How should scarce resources be distributed? Who should wield power? And how should future citizens be educated?