In Making the Unequal Metropolis, Ansley Erickson argues that during the postwar period educational inequality continued to expand in Nashville, Tennessee, long after the city's Jim Crow school system was dismantled. District policies that defined both the location of schools and their curriculum “made” inequality while hiding behind a common narrative that identified “de facto” residential segregation as the principal cause of educational inequality. Rather than question policies that limited opportunity, the dominant narrative promoted in the press and accepted by the courts emphasized the district's efforts to address inequality through desegregation, compensatory education programs such as Title I, and an expanded curriculum that included vocational education.
According to Erickson, Nashville is an important case study to counter the myth of de facto segregation because the district's countywide busing program achieved a level of statistical desegregation that was one of the highest in the nation. In addition, Nashville had a booming economy that produced the tax receipts necessary to buy more buses, implement a cutting-edge curriculum, and build new comprehensive high schools. Thus, policy decisions that impeded educational equality were not forced by economic limitations but were made specifically to appease white residents in the suburbs. The relentless focus on the needs of white students (and the labor needs of the growing economy) led to decisions that undercut efforts to achieve greater equality. Erickson argues that the lessons to be learned in Nashville are not about the failure of busing and other liberal policies; they are about the multilayered decisions that ultimately undermined those efforts.
The book is divided into two sections. The first section analyzes the period from 1945 to 1968, “when continued segregation and unequal power made educational inequality” (p. 11). During this period, Erickson maintains, “pro-growth elites” supported metropolitan consolidation as the best means to spur further economic growth, yet the political process favored the suburbs on almost every measure. For example, black voting strength became diluted among the larger number of white suburban voters in the county. This loss of black political power meant less influence over urban renewal and other policies that had a direct impact on black communities. In addition, compensatory education programs such as Title I emphasized federal aid to certain schools rather than specific individuals. As a result, the discourse of educational opportunity further reinforced racial separation by strengthening white ideas about the differences between schools in distinct areas of the metropolis.
The second section analyzes the period from 1968 to 1998, when “desegregation proceeded in ways that remade educational inequality in the metropolitan landscape” (p. 11). Erickson recounts the many missed opportunities to advance educational equality through the city's metropolitan-wide busing program, starting with the court's narrow interpretation of the district's responsibility for residential segregation. The legal team for the plaintiffs in Kelley v. Metropolitan Nashville Board of Education, the desegregation case that oversaw the busing program for the greater Nashville area, outlined important ways that district policy contributed to residential segregation. Nevertheless, court rulings ignored important links between school construction and housing development and instead concluded that busing was needed primarily to combat de facto residential segregation, contributing to the common narrative that minimized district accountability. Moreover, since progrowth elites remained more concerned about sustaining the number of white suburban students in district schools than promoting racial equality, the district's busing policy consistently favored the suburbs. White children attended neighborhood schools for the majority of their schooling, while black children endured long bus rides for most of theirs.
According to Erickson, district administrators undermined the ability of busing to effectively address student needs from the very start of the program. They refused to purchase the number of buses necessary to avoid long bus rides and grossly staggered school start times. In addition, the board of education built large comprehensive high schools predominantly in the suburbs where white administrators and teachers tracked students by race, class, and gender, segregating them within classrooms despite technically desegregated campuses. The result pleased no one, and district administrators, in collaboration with progrowth elites, quickly sought release from the court order as soon as they could. The district made no effort to assess the benefits of desegregation, including higher test scores and greater multicultural competence, largely because progrowth elites were not interested. Instead, they hoped the end of busing would bring white affluent students back into the district, but to no avail.
Making the Unequal Metropolis combines the literature on urban development and residential segregation with the literature on educational inequality and desegregation. The result yields important new insights for both fields. This book contributes to our growing understanding of the importance of schools in urban history, demonstrating that schools are an essential component of any comprehensive analysis of urban development. Using legal documents, extensive archival material, and more than sixty oral interviews, Erickson demonstrates that schools are not isolated actors; they interact with the dominant social, political, and economic forces of the city. Thus, school policy must be seen in this light. For example, Erickson explains how urban planners influenced school location through Nashville's urban renewal program: the planning commission refused to approve school sites in areas slated for the bulldozer, even when new school facilities were desperately needed in those areas. Likewise, urban planners argued that dilapidated and overcrowded schools should not be replaced until after the completion of public housing projects in those areas. As a result, they contributed to deteriorating housing values and ensured that the new schools would serve segregated public housing communities only.
As with all important and complex histories, Making the Unequal Metropolis raises new questions that require additional research. The implementation of the district's discipline policy is one example of an area in need of further analysis. What role did racially disparate discipline practices contribute to remaking inequality in desegregated schools? Although Nashville achieved greater rates of statistical desegregation, it also had sky-high suspension rates for black youth. How did these severe discipline practices broaden inequality within schools, and how did they shape the narrative of segregation that Erickson so skillfully describes?
Making the Unequal Metropolis provides the model for a comprehensive history that explores how factors both within the school system and without have interacted to increase inequality. Erickson convincingly demonstrates that neither white flight nor de facto residential segregation were the dominant factors that gutted policy efforts aimed at increasing equality; instead, it was the district's enactment of those policies. In making multiple and varied decisions that redistributed “material, human, and social” resources to privileged white suburban students—“even within policy interventions ostensibly targeting equality”—educational inequality was remade (p. 21).
