Structuring Inequality - by Tracy L Steffes

About the Book

"As in many American cities, inequality in Chicago and its suburbs is mappable across its neighborhoods. Anyone driving west along Chicago Avenue from downtown can tell where Austin turns into Oak Park without looking at a map. These borders are not natural, of course; they are carefully maintained through policies like zoning and school districting; some neighborhoods even annex themselves into distinct municipalities. In other words, they are all policy decisions. In Structuring Inequality, historian Tracy Steffes explores how metropolitan inequality was structured, contested, and naturalized through public policy in the Chicagoland area, especially through public education and state government. This metropolitan inequality deepened even amid civil rights mobilizations and efforts to challenge racial discrimination and promote equal opportunity. She argues that educational and metropolitan inequality were mutually constitutive: unequal schools and unequal places cocreated and reinforced one another. School districts not only reflected the characteristics and inequalities between places, but they also played an active role in shaping those communities over time. Throughout the Chicago metropolitan area, school districts defined community in part by reinforcing or undermining racial and economic segregation. Their perceived quality shaped the identity and value of the community, and schooling and its costs could drive development decisions, including what kind of property to allow and residents to attract. Decisions about school construction, student assignment, and school support were often important components of development strategy. By denaturalizing policy to explore the choices that have brought us here and looking at efforts to challenge them, this history helps us understand the inequality we live with today and inspire us to change it"--

Book Synopsis

How inequality was forged, fought over, and forgotten through public policy in metropolitan Chicago.

As in many American metropolitan areas, inequality in Chicagoland is visible in its neighborhoods. These inequalities are not inevitable, however. They have been constructed and deepened by public policies around housing, schooling, taxation, and local governance, including hidden state government policies.

In Structuring Inequality, historian Tracy L. Steffes shows how metropolitan inequality in Chicagoland was structured, contested, and naturalized over time even as reformers tried to change it through school desegregation, affordable housing, and property tax reform. While these efforts had modest successes in the city and the suburbs, reformers faced significant resistance and counter-mobilization from affluent suburbanites, real estate developers, and other defenders of the status quo who defended inequality and reshaped the policy conversation about it. Grounded in comprehensive archival research and policy analysis, Structuring Inequality examines the history of Chicagoland's established systems of inequality and provides perspective on the inequality we live with today.

Review Quotes

"Zones of privilege and privation are carved into the U.S. landscape by school district and municipal boundaries. Who makes and maintains those lines? Tracy Steffes brings long-needed attention and exacting research to state governments, whose actions and inactions she proves to be a key force in perpetuating racial injustice in the U.S."

--Ansley T. Erickson, author of Making the Unequal Metropolis: School Desegregation and Its Limits

"How can we 'reform' our schools to improve academic 'outcomes, ' especially in poor communities? That's the wrong question. We need to look back in time, to the political and economic decisions that rendered our schools--and our cities--so unequal in the first place. Tracy Steffes has produced the first complete, sophisticated history of education and inequality in a modern American metropolis. Along the way, she demonstrates the hollowness of our present-day reformist rhetoric and the need to think in bigger--and more historical--ways. This is history with an edge and a heart, by a sharp and passionate scholar at the very top of her game."--Jonathan Zimmerman, author of Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools

About the Author

Tracy L. Steffes is associate professor of education and history at Brown University. She is the author of School, Society, & State: A New Education to Govern Modern America, 1890-1940.