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This book tells the story of the sweeping makeover of the 200-year old campus of the University of North Carolina. Six million square feet of new buildings were constructed and a million square feet of historic buildings were renovated during one vibrant ten-year period. To make this massive growth work required bold thinking. A new Master Plan created a vision for combining historic preservation, green building, and long-range development. A statewide bond issue for higher education capital facilities, supplemented with outside support, generated $1.5 billion in capital funding. Previous town-gown tensions were swept aside as university officials and elected leaders collaborated on critical planning and zoning innovations. Award-winning plans and designs inspired new student living and learning communities. University facilities and construction staff doubled and a design review board formed to handle the increased load of new projects. Detailed design guidelines ensured that new development would be compatible with the traditional campus landscape as well as sensitive to environmental conservation. Written by authors who held major planning roles and supplemented with key player interviews, the book describes the politics, planning, and design that shaped the Dynamic Decade. Illustrated with color photographs and maps, this comprehensive account offers lessons to all concerned with sustainable university growth.

Since World War II, the American discourse around children and science has been held in the form of a postmortem: a series of diagnoses pointing to a commitment gap that never seems to be fixed. The formation “Children don’t love science like they used to” points to an imagined past, full of the joy of experimentation and discovery. Although some now argue that we no longer actually face a scientific “manpower shortage,” the popular belief that we do is deeply ingrained, coming, as it does, from this vision of a lost time of utopian explorations. This book, a twentieth-century cultural history of the “science kid,” asks what the stakes of this belief might be. It argues that the nostalgic vision of “a time when American kids loved science” tends to represent these “science kids” as male. If we’re stuck associating the qualities of a potential young scientist—curiosity, mischievousness, a certain free way of thinking that sometimes borders on the antisocial—with masculinity, what effect might this persistent set of associations have on the attempt to recruit women into STEM fields?

As a result of tremendous social, legal, and political movements after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, the South led the nation in school desegregation from the late 1960s through the beginning of the twenty-first century. However, following a series of court cases in the past two decades—including a 2007 U.S. Supreme Court decision that raised potentially strong barriers for districts wishing to pursue integration—public schools in the South and across the nation are now resegregating faster than ever. In this comprehensive volume, a roster of leading scholars in educational policy and related fields offer eighteen essays seeking to illuminate new ways for American public education to counter persistent racial and socioeconomic inequality in American society. Drawing on extensive research, the contributors reinforce the key benefits of racially integrated schools, examine remaining options to pursue multiracial integration, and discuss case examples that suggest how to build support for those efforts. Framed by the editors' introduction and a conclusion by Gary Orfield, these essays engage the heated debates over school reform and advance new arguments about the dangers of resegregation while offering practical, research-grounded solutions to one of the most pressing issues in American education.

Reparation and Reconciliation is the first book to reveal the nineteenth-century struggle for racial integration on U.S. college campuses. As the Civil War ended, the need to heal the scars of slavery, expand the middle class, and reunite the nation engendered a dramatic interest in higher education by policy makers, voluntary associations, and African Americans more broadly. Formed in 1846 by Protestant abolitionists, the American Missionary Association united a network of colleges open to all, designed especially to educate African American and white students together, both male and female. The AMA and its affiliates envisioned integrated campuses as a training ground to produce a new leadership class for a racially integrated democracy. Case studies at three colleges--Berea College, Oberlin College, and Howard University--reveal the strategies administrators used and the challenges they faced as higher education quickly developed as a competitive social field.

How we provide equal educational opportunity to an increasingly diverse, highly urbanized student population is one of the central concerns facing our nation. We are currently allowing a labyrinthine system of school district boundaries to cleave students—and opportunities—along racial and economic lines. Rather than confronting these realities, though, most contemporary educational policies focus on improving schools by raising academic standards, holding teachers and students accountable through test performance, and promoting private-sector competition. WHEN THE FENCES COME DOWN takes us into the heart of the metropolitan South to explore what happens when communities instead focus squarely on overcoming the educational divide between city and suburb. Based on widely differing and highly illustrative experiences with regional school desegregation in Richmond, Virginia; Louisville, Kentucky; Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina; and Chattanooga, Tennessee between 1990 and 2010, Genevieve Siegel-Hawley uses quantitative methods and innovative mapping tools to both underscore the damages wrought by school district boundary lines and raise awareness about communities that have sought to counteract them. She shows that city-suburban school desegregation policy is related to clear-cut progress on both school and housing desegregation. WHEN THE FENCES COME DOWN revisits educational policies that in many cases were abruptly halted—or never begun—to spur an open conversation about the creation of the healthy, integrated schools and communities critical to our multiracial future.

From headlines to documentaries, urban schools are at the center of current education debates. But from these accounts, one would never know that 56 million Americans live in rural communities and depend on their rural public schools to meet their educational and, often, their economic and social needs. This book shares the untold narratives of rural education. Drawing upon extensive ethnographic research in two rural Southern towns, the book exposes the complicated ways in which schools shape the racial dynamics of their towns and nurture the communities that surround them. It argues that current education policies, both limiting the roles these schools play and threatening to close them, also endanger rural communities. The book issues a warning: the state's growing powers—and the current narrowing of a school's purpose to academic achievement alone—endanger rural America and undermine the potential of a school, whether rural or urban, to sustain a community. Demonstrating the effects of narrow definitions of public education in an era of economic turmoil and widening social inequality, the book calls for a more contextual approach to education policymaking, involving both state and community.

The academy may claim to seek and value diversity in its professoriate, but reports from faculty of color around the country make clear that departments and administrators discriminate in ways that range from unintentional to malignant. Stories abound of scholars--despite impressive records of publication, excellent teaching evaluations, and exemplary service to their universities--struggling on the tenure track. These stories, however, are rarely shared for public consumption. Written/Unwritten reveals that faculty of color often face two sets of rules when applying for reappointment, tenure, and promotion: those made explicit in handbooks and faculty orientations or determined by union contracts and those that operate beneath the surface. It is this second, unwritten set of rules that disproportionally affects faculty who are hired to "diversify" academic departments and then expected to meet ever-shifting requirements set by tenured colleagues and administrators. Patricia A. Matthew and her contributors reveal how these implicit processes undermine the quality of research and teaching in American colleges and universities. They also show what is possible when universities persist in their efforts to create a diverse and more equitable professorate. These narratives hold the academy accountable while providing a pragmatic view about how it might improve itself and how that improvement can extend to academic culture at large.