In Structuring Inequality: How Schooling, Housing, and Tax Policies Shaped Metropolitan Development and Education, Tracy Steffes explores the creation of postwar metropolitan inequality across Chicago and its surrounding suburbs, arguing that it was constituted in three distinct stages of forging, fighting, and forgetting. Those familiar with Steffes’s first book, School, Society, and State: A New Education to Govern Modern America, 1890–1940 (University of Chicago Press, 2011), will find a familiar thread here—an interest in putting state government back into the history of public education and making visible its role in structuring the funding and operations of schooling. But in this context, Steffes approaches state-level governance as part and parcel of a broader, more modern narrative about public policy and inequality, and the various actors that influenced and shaped the way policy was conceived and enacted within “Chicagoland” in the second half of the twentieth century. The book centers this narrative on four primary topics: the co-constitution of metropolitan and educational inequality, with implications for racial and economic stratification; state government action (or inaction) in the context of metropolitan development; the affirmative strategies, or what Steffes terms “equity policy levers,” that reformers leveraged to address the “interconnected, structural dimensions of inequality”; and finally—and perhaps most importantly—the creation of a defense narrative in public policy and political discourse to naturalize not only the existence of inequality but also its durability (pp. 15–17).

In Part I, “Forging Metropolitan Inequality,” Steffes details how the state created the conditions for fragmented and unequal municipal governance well before the postwar period. Municipalities retained land-use power but were also subject to limits on debt and sources of local revenue, making incorporation appealing. While the state retained plenary power over education, the unpaid, biennial nature of the legislative session (up to 1970) did little to encourage professional buy-in among lawmakers. But as urban populations began to decline relative to the population and wealth of suburbs at midcentury, the dynamics of “competitive localism” (p. 29) were exacerbated. Yet state lawmakers consistently declined to address the inequality that fragmentation caused, and often actually promoted stratification. For example, Steffes profiles the Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission, created by the state legislature in 1957 to address issues of regional growth but ultimately poisoned by suburban pushback and a voluntary funding stream that ensured “deference to localism and inequality” (p. 53). She argues that this absence of state action gave suburbs wide latitude to treat inequality as a binary reflection of whether a municipality could pay for services it wanted (like education), rather than an indictment of a metropolitan-wide problem. In the context of spatialized inequality, this was a deliberate policy choice, however constrained, that knowingly set up a system of “winners and losers” (p. 51).

In Part II, “Fighting over Metropolitan Inequality,” Steffes explores the equity policy levers that reformers used, in the context of civil rights and federal policy, to challenge the segregated and “unequal status quo” (p. 84) in the 1960s and 1970s. Drawing on an impressive array of sources derived from local, state, and federal archives, she investigates how liberal reformers including the Chicago Urban League, the Congress of Racial Equality, and the Chicago Freedom Movement, among others, fought for equal protection and integration to be construed in affirmative policy terms across the terrain of school desegregation, fair and affordable housing, and school finance and property tax reform, recognizing the many layers of structural inequality. Despite some successes, she argues that reformers, while not monolithic in their outlook or methods, were ultimately limited by a spectrum of White actors who mobilized a defense that sought to “explain, legitimate, and erase inequality as a public policy problem” (p. 84). Such obstruction occurred at a variety of levels and was often difficult to indict. As Black parents and reformers pushed Chicago Public Schools to desegregate, for example, Steffes traces how they leveraged federal oversight that threatened CPS’s funding and prompted officials to implement a desegregation plan, albeit one of voluntary measures, under a consent decree. Ultimately CPS’s strategy of “evade, stall, and resist until cornered” (p. 103) worked to limit the potential for a more transformative version of desegregation. Steffes finds that in suburban districts, support for desegregation was not about racial justice or educational equality for Black students but rather “White people’s property interests and preferences” because these were “synonymous with the community’s value and future in the competitive metropolitan system” (p. 135). In the 1970s, the Illinois Board of Education (IBOE) pushed for more affirmative remedies to school desegregation, such as two-way busing, but state lawmakers hobbled the IBOE by refusing its budget requests and appointing a new Board membership; yet again, she argues, the localist interests of lawmakers ensured the period of “bureaucracy’s new activism” (p. 141) would not last.

In the fight for fair and affordable housing in the suburbs, reformers utilized equal protection laws and framed metropolitan inequality in terms of economic discrimination. But in a careful analysis of fair housing case law, Steffes demonstrates that courts did not see “wealth” as a category requiring strict scrutiny of government motive, effectively foreclosing the possibility that economic discrimination would qualify as a violation of anti-discrimination laws. Reformers, once optimistic about the power of federal law to enact broadscale change, were left to deploy moral persuasion in the fight to open the suburbs. Their occasional victories were “one-off solutions” (p. 181) that did little to undo systemic racial and economic discrimination or to acknowledge the racialized value of property. Likewise, school finance equalization and property tax relief were limited strategies for meaningful equality. Steffes deftly analyzes how hidden distributional inequities (e.g., a 73 percent tax assessment discount given by Cook County to the manufacturing company U.S. Steel) were not value-neutral in the context of metropolitan inequality but instead shifted cost burdens to other parts of the whole. The language of fiscal crisis, Steffes points out, belied Illinois’s comparative wealth among US states and served a narrative that obscured and defended the unequal status quo.

In Part III, “Forgetting Metropolitan Inequality,” Steffes examines the frustrated legacy of equity reform efforts into the 1980s and 1990s through policies that “utilized the dynamics of the market” (p. 214) to improve public services, including education. She argues that both political parties touted fiscal restraint as pragmatic governance in an inflationary economic climate, ignoring the obvious problem of inadequate revenue. CPS, for example, faced collapse after its credit rating was downgraded by Moody’s in 1979 and it could not meet payroll. But as Steffes reminds us yet again, “the fiscal precarity and underfunding of CPS were not givens” (p. 238)—this was a predictable result of the district’s chronic gulf between revenue and expenses that state lawmakers had consistently declined to address as a matter of structural inequality. By the 1990s, the influence of business and corporate elites to “exert power over policy” (p. 247) had accelerated, Steffes argues, in a way that naturalized inequality as an individual, rather than structural, condition. After the IBOE passed its own “excellence reforms” (p. 261) that included improvements for teacher quality, achievement tests, and publicly available district report cards (based on student tests) in 1998, her research documents how these cards turbocharged comparisons and valuations of school quality among parents, home seekers, and real estate agents. In the early twenty-first century, “rather than learn some humility from their multiple context-free attempts to discipline away low test scores,” Steffes argues, city leaders sought the addition of charter schools and have continued market-based reforms in education and beyond.

Steffes’s critical book leads a growing historiography that reexamines school finance and centers policies and practices of school administration, organization, and funding squarely in the locus of metropolitan, municipal, and public history.Footnote ¹ In adding to the canon of urban histories written about the city of Chicago, it offers a novel example of how to broaden the spatial lens beyond an urban-suburban binary, and instead consider intra-suburban trajectories in relation to the city, helpfully framed by a broader arc of state policy and legislative action. Given the particular fragmentation of suburban archives, this is a notable methodological accomplishment. In a powerful conclusion, Steffes challenges future research to take a more fulsome approach to interrogate the larger structures and narratives that surround the school—taxation, land use, state authority, and the defense of inequality—and shape students’ experience before they even walk in the front door. In the same vein, her work creatively expands the framework for state power, arguing not only that state inaction, including the devolution of authority, is as worthy of study as affirmative policy, but also that it must be analyzed as a deliberate policy choice, with real consequences for the present.

Still, Steffes might have better deployed “forgetting” as the framework for the third part of the book. While she acknowledges throughout the text that there were many people who did not, and could not, “forget” about the experience of inequality, especially in their schools, the text does not sufficiently grapple with the power imbalance inherent to the retrenchment of government activity and the narrowing of public policy goals: only some people had the privilege of being able to forget. That this “forgetting” was one of the few places of bipartisan consensus speaks to the elite impunity at work. Nor does Steffes address in much detail how the work of traditional liberal reform groups intersected with more radical options for racial equity presented by the Black Panther Party and its alliance with the Rainbow Coalition, which were highly visible in Chicago for their anti-poverty programs between the late 1960s and the early 1970s. This was a narrative choice claimed upfront. But including a broader spectrum of reformers would perhaps have yielded a more explicit critique of capitalism and the way in which it too mutually reinforced racial hierarchies and inequalities across Chicagoland. These concerns aside, Structuring Inequality is a critically important text that offers a rich starting point for a wide range of future work on the historical relationship between education and inequality, and on the technical and regulatory dimensions of policy at the municipal level.