Anyon, Jean. (1997). Ghetto schooling: A political economy of urban educational reform. Reviewed by David E. Ashwell Jr.

Anyon, Jean. (1997). Ghetto schooling: A political economy of urban educational reform. New York: Teachers College Press 186 pp. + xix $18.95 (Paper)         ISBN 0-8077-3662-7 $45.00 (Cloth)         ISBN 0-8077-3663-5 Reviewed by David E. Ashwell Jr. University of Florida February 27, 1999           Jean Anyon's book, Ghetto Schooling, should have been unnecessary by now. For thirty years, authors from James Coleman to Jonathan Kozol have described and analyzed in excruciating detail the privations of inner-city youths trapped in failed urban schools. One might have expected at least a decade of successful educational reform. As Anyon shows, however, such repair has not occurred. One might wonder whether Anyon could possibly tell us anything new. She does just that. Her work is the rarest of treatises on reform, in that she writes more about the past than the future. She grasps what the intelligent reformer must: that iconoclasm without historical knowledge is mere vandalism. She demonstrates cogently that because the failure of urban education is rooted in a social and historical context of concentrated poverty and racial isolation, reform efforts with any hope of success will be cognizant of that context and will address it directly and radically. Although her recommendations for reform are ultimately incomplete in one quite significant respect, Anyon's analysis commands attention.           Anyon shows that concentrated poverty and racial isolation result from a long historical evolution, in part the product of political and corporate decisions about which the urban poor had no say. She takes as her focus Newark, New Jersey, the third oldest major city in the United States and among the first to experience industrial decay and a majority black population. She documents that by the 1920s, a decade of economic strength and the crystallization of the modern school, the definitive problems of twentieth-century urban America were already evident. The vast majority of foreign immigrants flooding Newark's schools were not successfully educated. Such failure of the schools at the height of progressive educational reform did not bode well for future efforts in a less prosperous Newark to overcome poverty and "racial" difference--the latter an expression commonly applied to European immigrants at the time. Anyon also notes the manifest lack of corporate responsibility in this decade. She mentions in this connection the absence of capital investment to address the problems that attended industrialization as well as early evidence of business flight from the city. Further, as early as 1918, Newarkers had worried about a diminished tax base as affluent families moved to the countryside. This was important because property taxes were by now established as the principal source of school revenue. Organized crime, which would be a potent destructive force in city and state for the next half century, was enhanced by Prohibition. Corrupt ethnic political machines, whose regimes were defined by mismanagement and graft, filled a growing void as the city became isolated from state and national political power. These were all features of Newark at the end of a relatively prosperous period.           Anyon argues that the educational decline that followed from these incipient problems began most significantly in the 1930s and culminated in the 1960s. In doing so, she contributes to a growing revisionist literature on the chronology and character of urban educational deterioration. David Tyack and colleagues (1984) influentially maintain that the 1930s was a decade of continuity in American education. Anyon adds her research on Newark to Jeffrey Mirel's (1993) work on Detroit, throwing this view into question. Echoing Mirel, Anyon calls the 1930s the "watershed" decade of urban educational decline (p.73). Decreased economic resources in the period lessened city services and left infrastructure to decay. Schools suffered apace, especially those of ethnic and racial minorities. Business leaders fought educational and social spending of any sort. Interestingly, Anyon demonstrates that Newark's decline thus began when it was still a predominantly white and working-class city. Yet, although African Americans made up only 10% of Newark's population in the thirties, the pattern of racial segregation and ghettoization taking shape in that decade would by the 1960s be inextricably bound up with class in defining urban educational inequality. By 1961, 55% of Newark's students were black, and nearly another 4% were Hispanic. Cities such as Newark would thereafter find it very difficult to get financial support--much less reparations--from white, suburb-dominated state legislatures. The degree of racial segregation evident by the 1960s meant that, more than ever before, urban children were other people's children, not worthy of educational investment. Such a judgement is not idle speculation either on Anyon's part or mine. The state of New Jersey made arguments to this effect in court cases involving educational finance inequality that stretched into the 1990s (p.139). Anyon's discussion of the 1960s is, like her discussion of the 1930s, revisionist. She takes to task such authors as Diane Ravitch (1983) who have perpetuated the common but fallacious assumption that a long slide in the quality of American education began in the sixties. Anyon shows that the educational deterioration of the 1960s was the culmination of trends stretching back to the Great Depression, trends whose causes were visible in the heyday of progressive urban reform.           Far-reaching though they are, Anyon's recommendations for present-day reform largely ignore the importance of racial desegregation pointed up by her own analysis. She advocates a renewed war on poverty, reminiscent of President Johnson's effort in the late 1960s. Moreover, she emphasizes programs to address joblessness, taking the WPA jobs of the 1930s as her model. She feels that if we are to eliminate ghetto schools, we must ultimately "eliminate poverty" itself (p.164). Such radical proposals, befitting her structural analysis, are redolent of William Julius Wilson's suggestions at the end of The Truly Disadvantaged (1987). Like Wilson, Anyon places class before race in importance. Yet, if Massey and Denton (1993) are right that housing segregation is essential to contemporary poverty, and I believe that they are, then simply pumping temporary jobs into inner cities--or otherwise sprucing these areas up--will not achieve the end Anyon seeks. She encourages the nation to address the "effects" of ghettoization (164). But why not break up the racially defined ghettoes, or at least the ghetto schools? Reformers would do better to look at the work of Gary Orfield (1996) than Anyon for strategy. Orfield recognizes that if we are to break up the concentrated poverty that overwhelms urban schools, we must racially desegregate metropolitan school systems. He additionally suggests that such efforts be combined with housing desegregation, as has been the case in Charlotte, North Carolina--one of the nation's success stories for its metropolitan desegregation. Such an approach is surely no more quixotic than that of Wilson and Anyon and has the added advantage of addressing the entwined problems of concentrated poverty and racial isolation so adeptly explored in Ghetto Schooling.           Criticism aside, Anyon has done both the reform and historical literature a service by indicating how well the two can speak to each other. She successfully contextualizes educational reform, challenging some conventional historiography along the way. She powerfully demonstrates through her analysis that educational inequality is inseparable from class and racial inequality. The history she details explains how poverty has come to be so concentrated in hypersegregated inner cities and their schools. Her vision of reform misses the signal importance of racial desegregation in breaking up concentrated poverty, but she leaves no doubt that as urban education's failure is rooted in social and historical context, so must its reform be. References Massey, D.S., & Denton, N. (1993). American apartheid: Segregation and the making of the underclass. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mirel, J. (1993). The rise and fall of an urban school system: Detroit, 1907-1981. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Orfield, G., & Eaton, S.E. (1996). Dismantling desegregation: The quiet reversal of Brown v. Board of Education. New York: The New Press. Ravitch, D. (1983). The troubled crusade: American education, 1945-1980. New York: Basic Books. Tyack, D., Lowe, R., & Hansot, E. (1984). Public schools in hard times: The Great Depression and recent years. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wilson, W.J. (1987). The truly disadvantaged: The inner city, the underclass, and public policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. About the Reviewer David E. Ashwell Jr. David Ashwell is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Florida. He teaches courses on the social and historical context of American education and emphasizes the interrelated problems of concentrated poverty, racial segregation, and educational inequality in that coursework. He is completing a dissertation on the history of school desegregation, particularly its costs for African Americans.