If I were building a course on the politics of education around a single book, this would be the one. The authors base their examination of education policy and politics on a central feature of the nation's political tradition—the ideology of the American dream. As the book shows, the impact of this ideology runs broad and deep, and education is central to how the nation understands and puts into practice the American dream. Although the book is relatively short, its organizing theme is made concrete and informed by rich detail.

The dream has two parts. One venerates individual freedom and assumes that opportunity is open and widely available. The other part pays dues to good citizenship: “to respect those whose vision of success is different from my own, to help make sure that everyone has an equal chance to succeed, to participate in the democratic process, and to teach my children to be proud of this country” (p. 1). The politics of education revolves around the tension between these two parts, and that tension runs through a full canvass of major issues—desegregation, school finance, standards and accountability, the mainstreaming of special education students, vouchers and charter schools, systemic school reform, group identity and its place in the curriculum, creationism, and ability grouping. All and more are covered, not in a point–counterpoint way, but by testing the fine points of each against the criterion of a vital American democracy.

Behavior falls short of the democratic ideal. A recurring pattern is that, as abstract principle, majority opinion sup-ports claims under the banner of responsible citizenship, but in actual practice, noble sentiment often gives way to the desires of parents to see that in a competitive world, their off-spring enjoy maximum individual advantage. In a showdown between equality of opportunity (as an element of citizenship duty) and liberty (specifically the liberty of parents to pro-mote the chances of success for their children), equality of opportunity usually has the weaker hand. Citizenship duty in the form of pride in country, by contrast, holds its own with liberty. However, Jennifer Hochschild and Nathan Scovronick believe that neither ideological claim nor the pull of parent protectiveness is predestined to carry the day on all matters. Within bounds, political leaders make choices and shape public sentiment. They do so perhaps more by framing the agenda than by the treatment of particular points of controversy. The authors make the point that in the face of a changing demography, polarizing identity issues of the early 1990s gave way to more inclusive concerns about class size, teacher quality, and test scores.

The authors find that despite various crosscurrents, the nation has made significant gains over the past half century. The strongest are probably opportunities for children with disabilities. In addition, dropouts are generally lower (but not for Hispanics) and test scores have mostly gone up, with the greatest increases by black students. Systemic reform spurred by state-set standards has registered some significant successes, and schools are more sensitive to the varied backgrounds of students than in the past. Yet there are significant disappointments, many based in what Hochschild and Scovronick term “nested inequalities.” In a trend particularly unhelpful to democratic vitality, class separation is growing.

Overall, complacency about the future is not in order. Gains have come in an era of prosperity, and for that reason, the authors steer away from unguarded optimism about the future. In the past several decades, spending on education has gone up dramatically (much of it attributable to spending on special education). But the new demography gives cause for concern, particularly at a time when antitax rhetoric is at full stream. Hochschild and Scovronick trace projected changes involving both the graying of the baby boomer generation and the increasing share of the school-age population composed of immigrants and children of color. Current research suggests that people in retirement incline toward less school spending, especially when they are of a different ethnic group from the student population. As health and retirement income compete with spending on schoolchildren, the authors question whether political leaders “will inflame these divisions or ameliorate them” (p. 195). Hochschild and Scovronick caution that in the past, claims of those labeled as minorities and the poor have fared badly in the majoritarian politics of the nation.

In the treatment of sundry topics, The American Dream and the Public Schools is laden with telling facts, organized around central themes. For example, the authors cite a study showing that “while children from families with more than $100,000 annual income account for just thirteen percent of the test-taking population, they make up 27 percent of those who receive special accommodation when taking the SAT” (p. 140). Despite rhetoric about equality of opportunity, inequality has many ways of asserting itself.

If the book by Hochschild and Scovronick has a weakness, it lies in the enormous hope they place with the schools for overcoming the consequences of “nested inequalities.” By contrast, in Tinkering toward Utopia, David Tyack and Larry Cuban open by telling readers that education has often carried an unrealistic burden and that “the utopian tradition of social reform through schooling has often diverted attention from more costly, politically controversial, and difficult societal reforms” (1995, p. 3). In looking to education to undergird the vitality of American democracy, Hochschild and Scovronick emphasize the fact that public schools have been at the heart of the nation's social policy, including its effort to integrate an ongoing flow of immigrants into society. Still, looking back, one has to wonder, for example, what the consequences would have been if the leading push to end racial discrimination had been employment rather than education. Was education the best lever for social change? And, for today, what should be the balance between seeking improved wages for those at the lower end of the income ladder versus school reform under the slogan “no child left behind”? Hochschild and Scovronick make a powerful case for keeping public schools at the center of social policy. It would be interesting to see what an equally careful and incisive analysis of employment and wage policy would yield.