Jacobs: Getting Around Brown

Getting Around Brown

Desegregation, Development, and the Columbus Public Schools

Gregory S. Jacobs

Getting Around Brown is both the first history of school desegregation in Columbus, Ohio, and the first case study to explore the interplay of desegregation, business, and urban development in America.

Drawing on a broad range of sources, including over sixty interviews, the book details the causes and consequences of Penick v. Columbus Board of Education (1977). Gregory S. Jacobs argues that school desegregation in Columbus failed to produce equal educational opportunity, not because it was inherently detrimental to learning, but because it was intrinsically incompatible with urban development. As a consequence, the long-term health of the city school district was sacrificed to preserve the growth of the city itself. The resulting middle-class abandonment of urban education in Columbus produced an increasingly poor, African-American city school system and a powerful form of defensive activism within the overwhelmingly white suburban systems.

The title of the book refers not only to the elaborate tools used to circumvent the spirit of the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision but also to the need to move beyond the flawed dichotomies and failed policies that have come to define desegregation. The book calls for a reconsideration of the complicated relationship race, class, and housing patterns have with city school reform efforts, a relationship obscured by this country’s vitriolic and occasionally violent battle over busing. Jacobs concludes his study with a “modest proposal,” in which he recommends the abolition of the Columbus Public School District, the dispersal of its students throughout surrounding suburban systems, and the creation of a choice-based “experimental education zone” within the old city school district boundaries.

Readable and relevant, Getting around Brown is essential reading for scholars of recent American history, urban studies, civil rights and race relations, and educational policy, as well as anyone interested in public education and politics.

http://www.ohiostatepress.org

Rabinowitz: Before Reading

Before Reading

Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation

Peter J. Rabinowitz

“A landmark book, one that makes important and original contributions to reader-response theory, ideological criticism, and current work on canon formation.” —Novel

“This study is provocative, nicely illustrated, clearly aware of work in literary hermeneutics. It usefully systematizes insights based upon actual classroom practice, a feature too often absent from critical work.” —Choice

“This is a well-written theoretical discussion in favour of the new hermeneutics of reader-centered criticism. . . . An admirable book, warmly recommended to comparatists.” —Literary Research

“The book is ambitious and daring, filled with objections to the canonical critics of our time—Gerald Prince, Jonathan Culler, Umberto Eco, Stanley Fish, Wolfgang Iser, to name only a few. . . . A pleasure to read.” —Philosophy and Literature

How does what we know shape the ways we read? Starting from the premise that any productive theory of narrative must take into account the presuppositions the reader brings to the text, Before Reading explores how our prior knowledge of literary conventions influences the processes of interpretation and evaluation. Available again with a new preface by James Phelan, Before Reading offers a valuable and coherent framework for approaching the study of narrative.

http://www.ohiostatepress.org