Ghetto Schooling: A Political Economy of Urban Educational Reform

Nobody disputes the fact that inner-city schools are going to the dogs. Poor facilities, shell-shocked teachers, and hostile, apathetic students are frequent topics on the evening news, as are the supposed solutions for these problems: school vouchers, school uniforms, teacher testing, and the like. In Ghetto Schooling, author Jean Anyon exposes the futility of such social band-aids on the gaping wound that is ghetto education. Anyon starts with the premise that urban education's problems lie not within the schools themselves but rather in the "economic and political devastation" of the cities. It is the poverty, the racial isolation, and the lack of political clout that dooms inner-city schools to failure, Anyon posits, and she backs up her thesis with solid evidence: her own experiences as a school reformer in Newark, New Jersey.

Ghetto Schooling is filled with interviews, media reports and Anyon's eyewitness account of the sorry state of Newark schools and reformers' Sisyphean task of trying to make changes in the midst of urban decay and governmental indifference. Anyon concludes that it is racial, class, and ethnic discrimination at governmental levels that has led to the neglect of inner cities and, by association, their schools. The problems Anyon discusses and the solutions she proposes are not limited to the Newark city schools; they could be implemented in other urban school districts across the country. For anyone interested in the state of education in America's cities today, Ghetto Schooling is an important, if troubling, read.