Could City-Suburb Schools Bring Rust Belt Cities Back?
Racism, institutionalized by the bent politicians whom Richard Nixon appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court, hastened the demise of the Great Lakes cities, and only metropolitan-wide school reorganization offers any hope of fixing what is so terribly broken. That’s the gist of a new book — “Hope and Despair in the American City” by Gerald Grant ( Harvard University Press 2009) — that compares the sorry recent history of Syracuse, N.Y., with the glad success of Raleigh, N.C. One town tried desegregation within the boundaries of the old city and failed, and is dying, while the other town regionalized schools and has been growing by leaps and bounds. City and suburbs in the North Carolina cities of Raleigh, Durham and Charlotte all got unified school management in the 1970s and 1980s. So did other now-booming Southern metros that were ordered to desegregate before Nixon’s guys changed the rules.
