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Origins of Urban Public-School Delegitimation

Kathryn Neckerman’s Schools Betrayed: Roots of Failure in Inner-City Education effectively uses a combination of archival sources and census microdata to undercut popular explanations of student failure in urban schools. Focusing on Chicago schools between 1900 and 1960, her goal is to explain the development of hostile relationships between teacher and students in innercity schools. She takes Kenneth Clark’s word at face value, that in 1965 teachers and students treated each other as enemies: “The dominant and disturbing fact about the ghetto school is that the teachers and students regard each other as adversaries. Under these conditions the teachers are reluctant to teach and the students retaliate and resist learning” (Clark 1965, 137). Neckerman then tackles the three most common explanations of that hostility with a range of evidence. Neckerman’s argument begins with three common explanations of the modern achievement/attainment gap and innercity school ineffectiveness: the deindustrialization of major cities, labor-market discrimination, and the development of a culture within working-class African American communities that denigrated academic achievement, known as the oppositional-culture thesis. The first half of the book is devoted to testing these explanations with evidence from Chicago’s public school documents, newspapers, contemporary accounts, and census microdata from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Sample collection at the Minnesota Population Center (available to all researchers at www.ipums.org). In each case, Neckerman marshals persuasive evidence that the common thumbnail histories of urban education do not account for the post–World War II rise of hostility