Kyle Steele's Making a Mass Institution is a critical addition to a growing body of scholarship that examines the ways that educational institutions interact with class, race, and space to intensify inequality over time. In the introduction, he asserts that this book makes two unique contributions to this scholarship. First, the book examines how an American city, in this case Indianapolis, created a divided and unjust system of high schools over the course of the twentieth century. Specifically, he contends that this system of high schools effectively sorted students geographically, economically, and racially through various means, both in the institutions themselves, via the curriculum, and in the larger framework of the political system that governed these schools, that is, the school board. Steele writes, “The Indianapolis high school system mirrored the multiple forces of mass society that surrounded it. . . . As the high school became a mass institution, therefore, it maintained the status quo far more often than it challenged it” (p. 3). Steele's book shows, through detailed, on-the-ground analysis, how Indianapolis's system of high schools conferred advantages to middle-class White youth and limited opportunities for Black youth. In other words, the history of the American high school, or in this case schools, is central to our understanding of American inequality past and present.

The second contribution that the book makes to our field is that it situates the history of these schools against the experience of the students themselves. Unlike many authors, Steele takes a vested interest in understanding the formation of what he calls “a distinct, school-centered youth culture,” which, as he suggests, “has remained peripheral to historical inquiry” (p. 3). To do this work, Steele leverages a variety of historical sources, such as school yearbooks and newspapers. And this work yields important insights about youth experiences beyond the classroom and curriculum. This approach allows him, in his words, to show that “the high school, as it evolved into a mass institution, was never fully the domain of policy elites, school boards and administrators, or students but rather a complicated and ever-changing, contested meeting place of all three” (p. 4). We can see in this book how the policies and practices that the school board tried to implement were both resisted and recrafted by the youth who experienced them.

In the book, Steele outlines several chapters that carry the readers through the creation of a high school system through its differentiation in the early 1970s and into the 1980s. In the first chapter, Steele examines the founding of high schools in the city: Shortridge, Manual, and Arsenal High Schools. The founding of these schools occurred between 1890 and 1919 as the country itself was going through significant transformation and as high schools proliferated across the country and in the Midwest in particular. The chapter illustrates the challenges that school leaders faced in both convincing residents to support and taxpayers to pay for their schools; the intersections between high school attendance and labor market outcomes; and the stratification and intensification of inequality as the system expanded. After this chapter, Steele examines the early history of all-Black Crispus Attucks High School, an institution that “was forced to operate within a city teeming with racism and white supremacy” (p. 39). This chapter illustrates that this institution both conformed to and resisted the ideas of Indianapolis's “entirely Klan-backed school board” (p. 41). This chapter builds on and advances the history of segregated schools in the North.

Using a wealth of sources, including yearbooks, alumni magazines, and school newspapers, the next chapter shows how the Great Depression moved the high school from a peripheral institution that few graduated from to a central institution that shaped adolescent lives. In this way, Steele takes us inside the high school to examine the experiences of youth who attended and graduated from the high schools in his study. This is a major contribution of this text and one that he carries through the subsequent chapters on limits of racial equity in the postwar period and the movement toward life education and White suburbanization in the 1960s and early 1970s.

Steele's work allows us to see how Indianapolis's all-White school board shaped school policies around curriculum, integration, and enrollment throughout much of the twentieth century, but he does not stop there. Rather, he shows how these decisions affected the students who attended these schools, and perhaps most importantly, how these students actively resisted and challenged inequitable policies, particularly around race. This tension between the policies and practices that school officials pushed and the ways that these policies and practices affected Indianapolis youth is particularly evident in the book's final two chapters. In these chapters, Steele outlines the ways that race shaped the curriculum that students could access in their high schools and how White flight from the city eventually altered the demographics of these schools and ultimately the reputation that these schools had in the city. And as Steele aptly points out, the idea of life adjustment education was “a new label for a decades-old trend,” a trend where Black youth never had access to the school resources and curricula that White youth had (p. 115). He pushes this further in the conclusion when he shows the ways that housing and schools are intimately connected and how this connection fuels racial inequality. Steele writes, “As this book demonstrates, using systems of public schools—particularly high schools—to maintain the existing order is as old as the institution itself” (p. 143). Steele's work traces this history from the founding of these schools through the 1980s and thus provides a narrative arc for us to consider the long history of how these institutions have replicated and reinforced inequity in Indianapolis and elsewhere.

I want to commend Steele for digging through school-based archives to tell the history of the schools from the people who know it best—high school youth. Finding the myriad sources that he uses to tell the story of these institutions is tedious and time consuming, and as he notes in his acknowledgements, requires the cultivation of relationships with educators and officials inside the schools themselves. This approach allows him to tell the story from multiple vantage points—the school officials who passed the policies and practices that governed the schools and the individuals who experienced these policies inside them. This is an important contribution to the field. Steele paints a broad history of the city of Indianapolis and its system of high schools. In doing so, he builds on and advances our understanding of the history of school governance and politics and the experience of youth who called these institutions home.

That said, I wish that the source base had included oral histories from the students themselves. These sources would have allowed readers to hear the experiences of the youth firsthand rather than filtered through secondary sources found in archives. Moreover, the ideas and perspectives of educators seem to largely be missing from the story. Having their perspectives or the students’ perspectives about their teachers might be an important addition to the narrative. Finally, while class can be a difficult category to analyze, I often found that Steele downplayed its role in the history of these institutions, despite his attention to it in the introduction. While he does provide an analysis about the ways that the system of schools created systems of class- and race-based inequities, we do not see as much about how that operated inside the schools and how perhaps these inequities played out in the lives of students in and beyond the high school. Part of this might have to do with the source base that is available to historians, and we as historians of education need to play an active role in preserving institutional resources to make sure that they are available now and in the future. At the same time, historians of education need to think critically about the ways that class, along with the intersection of multiple other identities, such as gender and sexuality, shapes the experience of high-school-aged youth across the twentieth century.