Stirring discussions of race and education

Tatum's first essay on school resegregation is straightforwardly powerful in its assertion that state and federal courts have worked quietly and consistently to undermine the letter and spirit of Brown. Tatum shows how housing patterns in cities such as Boston have created a landscape of de facto segregation that gets reflected in increasingly segregated schools. Attempts to work around these housing patterns and create larger school districts encompassing both urban areas and predominantly white suburbs have been struck down by the courts. The author cites the example of Detroit, whose plan to include suburban schools in its desegregation efforts was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1974.

Tatum does a fine job explaining white flight from urban schools (in 1970, 59,000 white students were enrolled in the Boston public schools; by 2000, only 9,300 were enrolled) and the impact this has had in diminishing the overall educational experience. While the statistics are sobering, she spends little time discussing the larger political backlash against desegregation and civil rights in general. This backlash, a feeling that the nation had gone too far in pursuing a civil rights agenda, has been a constant, dominating theme in American politics from Richard Nixon down to George W. Bush.

The book's second essay is a historical argument tracing the anti-immigrant, racist roots of standardized testing in the United States. The early proponents of such testing, Tatum persuasively shows, were wedded to a philosophy "inherently rooted in the racism of the eugenics movement" and wanted to use testing to limit opportunities for incoming immigrant groups as a way of maintaining American purity.