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 in ... More

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.