Charles Clotfelter was moved to write his book because he discovered that his students at Duke had no real appreciation of the intense struggle to end racial isolation in public schools begun by the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. He felt some urgency in laying out the historical record since there were strong indications that contemporary schools were becoming resegregated. After Brown focuses on “interracial contact,” the physical proximity of the races in schools, because it is the necessary intermediary for all other potential benefits, including educational achievement, self-esteem, attitudes, and long-term social and economic success.

After a brief historical narrative, Clotfelter lays out the changes in interracial contact and segregation over the 50-year period following Brown. Gary Orfield did the basic work in this area and called attention to the resegregation of the nation's schools, and in this book, Clotfelter extends backward the trend analysis done by Orfield and uses newly calculated measures for more recent years. This is a significant contribution to the field. By region and in selected districts, Clotfelter shows the incremental decline in racial isolation after Brown, and its sharp decline in the South after the Swann decision in 1971, but he gives special emphasis to the harmful effects of the Milliken v. Bradley decision in 1974. In that case, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that courts could not reach beyond existing school district lines in fashioning a remedy. Predictably, since Milliken, the data show that while there were increases in interracial contact within districts, overall racial isolation grew as whites moved from city to suburb, particularly in the Northeast and Midwest.

Clotfelter cites other studies to show the dynamics of white flight from desegregation, but he pays particular attention to “white avoidance” of neighborhoods. If whites prefer to avoid racially mixed schools, desegregation will be accompanied by a decline in housing prices in areas served by such schools, and that is what Clotfelter found in his own analysis. Moreover, he found that whites with school-age children were more likely than other whites to move from neighborhoods served by racially mixed schools. In this chapter as in others, Clotfelter is reluctant to say why many whites prefer to avoid blacks. He offers two possibilities for “white avoidance,” assessments of educational services unrelated to race and racial prejudice. He cites other scholars' views on these likely causes, but, disappointingly, he offers no clear position based on his own authority.

When segregation patterns between private and public schools are taken up, Clotfelter shows that private schools' enrollments were increased by public school desegregation programs, a manifestation of white avoidance, but he also argues that private schools' contribution to the growing resegregation of the country is modest. In Table 4.4, he displays the segregation index scores for metropolitan and nonmetropolitan counties by region and nationally, and he shows that 62% of total segregation in recent years can be attributed to differences between school districts, 22% to disparities within school districts, and only 16% to differences among private schools (p. 121). Metropolitan districts in the Northeast showed the greatest contribution of private schools to total segregation.

The analysis of within-school segregation is hampered by lack of extensive data, but Clotfelter assembles original data from four North Carolina school systems to show that in recent years, there was significant within-school segregation due largely to academic tracking, especially at the high school level. A similar pattern was found in a study during the 1970s. Here again, he stops short of deep interpretation. He says that such patterns could be motivated by racist sentiments, but he also allows that active lobbying by concerned parents or prudent decisions by administrators anxious to hold high-status whites in the public schools could lead to the racial disparities he noted.

Clotfelter's data and analysis of interracial contact is extensive, and it is an important summary of this important aspect of the nation's most ambitious attempt to change its racial practices. Still, his caution mutes its impact. He tells us in the introduction: “Documenting changes in interracial contact is one thing. Assigning causation is another…. I generally sidestep the question of causation” (p. 6). And he does. One wonders if this helps his students.

Stephen Samuel Smith has taken another approach in Boom for Whom? Unlike Clotfelter's aggregate statistical summary, Smith gives us a single important case where school desegregation rose and receded over the same post-Brown decades. Regime theory, not pluralist theory, is used as the lens by which meaning is made in this account. In regime theory, the focus is not so much about how urban political power is used by one actor to control another (power over) as about how it is produced to accomplish goals (power to). The production of power is facilitated especially by privately controlled investment and the capacity to build and sustain coalitions. The theory also asserts that governance is not an issue-by-issue process, as pluralism suggests, but a continuing interrelated patchwork (p. 11).

The story Smith tells is compelling, and it cannot be recounted faithfully here. Selected elements can be stated, though, to give the gist. Prior to and after the Brown decision, business interests directed, if not controlled, Charlotte's path. Economic development was their civic glue. African-Americans in Charlotte, as in much of the South, had little political power because of at-large elections. When changing national policy stimulated local racial protest in 1963, the business-oriented mayor called black leaders and said, “Let's do lunch.” While not exactly co-opted, black leaders' common cause with business interests provided the political support necessary to undertake major change. This became the hallmark of Charlotte's image both to itself and others—racial progress supports economic development. When busing for racial balance was forced on Charlotte by the federal courts in the Swann decision, business interests became active again. In the 1972 election, three of the four candidates they actively supported were elected to the school board, and they guided the formation of the new busing plan. The economic development of Charlotte was so important that busing was made to work, and Charlotte became an icon to progressive leadership. It was rewarded when banking interests, among others, chose to make Charlotte their home. In time, though, development goals undermined the plan. When executives of a newly arrived business complained, adjustments were made to the plan. Taxes were not raised to support programs. Roads were built, school sites selected, and zone lines established to support economic development, notwithstanding that they also tended to resegregate the schools even before the court declared the system unitary and returned full authority to the school board in 1999. Today, parental choice among magnet-school options and an end to mandatory busing for racial balance have tended toward racial separation in the schools.

Politics matters in Smith's telling of the Charlotte story. Men and women act in specific ways at specific times, and clearly, civic capacity was enhanced by the strong and durable business-black coalition. Development accelerated. But while the schools' high-profile success aided that general movement, in the end the schools were put on the back burner. Smith asserts that the benefits promised to African Americans by school desegregation were not honored, and there is a certain bitter sadness as subtext in this account. Smith owns up to it, though. In the preface, he tells us that his own (white) children were bused when they lived in Charlotte and now have witnessed the near complete resegregation of their childhood school, a one-time desegregation showcase. And he pointedly asks, “Would not the upcoming fifty-year commemoration of Brown v. Board of Education more appropriately be called the last rites for much of that ruling's landmark promise?” (p. x).

Both books address school desegregation, the most important racial policy of the last three generations, with care and detail, and both are noteworthy scholarly assessments, using different approaches, as we take stock of what happened then and now. However much researchers may come to value Clotfelter's data and analysis, and we will, Smith's theory-embedded narrative is clearly the more teachable book.