Abstract
Authentic integration at Miller High over the second half of the twentieth century had been the experience of too few students across generations. Interracial friendships that lasted beyond school years were mostly forged during the 1970s and early 1980s, an anomaly in this fifty-year history. A propitious convergence of social forces sustained the Border-Crossing Generation: a broadly shared middle-class status across racial divides; a population of black Miller High students who were both minorities and mostly children of families long established in the region; a student body accustomed to desegregated institutional settings; and a national consciousness of civil rights that stirred the imagination of an otherwise conservative student population in a conservative town.
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Notes
The state of Maryland, along with most other U.S. states in the 1990s, made changes to its laws governing juvenile justice and held more young offenders accountable through adult sentencing. See Megan C. Kurlycheck and Brian D. Johnson, “The Juvenile Penalty: A Comparison of Juvenile and Young Adult Sentencing Outcomes in Criminal Court,” Criminology 42 (2004): 485–515. Wiley InterScience.
For examples of histories of education that address the high school’s sorting mechanisms, see works by Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America (NY: Basic Books, 1976).
James Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North arolina Press, 1988).
William Reece, The Origins of the American High School (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995). According to Bowles and Gintis, school hierarchy of power and authority parallels the organization of power and authority in the workplace. The authors liken the role of grades to that of wages and establish a direct correspondence between competition among students and their lack of control over the curriculum with competition among workers and their lack of control over required contents of their assigned tasks. Bowles and Gintis advance that the American educational system serves the purposes and needs of the “production process and structure of class relations in the United States.” In The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935, Anderson identifies dominant paradigms of social reproduction in the Hampton Model of Normal School Industrial Education for blacks (Chapter 2) and tracks reproduction of castes in the black public high school of the South (Chapter 6). For reflections on the sorting mechanisms of public schools in general.
see works by David Tyack, The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974).
David Tyack and Elizabeth Hansot, Managers of Virtue: Public School Leadership in America, 1820–1980 (NY: Basic Books, 1982).
Michael Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform (NY: Teachers College Press, 1968). These historians of education identify the modernizing tendency of schools to prepare youth for various workstations in society, to assure that youth is “properly socialized to the new modes of production, attuned to hierarchy, affective neutrality, role-specific demands, extrinsic incentives for achievement” (Tyack, 1974, p. 73). For ethnographies that focus on the high school and expose its divisive and exclusionary practices, see Michelle Fine, Framing Dropouts (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991).
Ellen Bratlinger, The Politics of Class in Secondary School (NY: Teachers College Press, 1993).
Jay MacLeod, Ain’t No Makin It (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995.
Anne Locke-Davidson, Making and Molding Identity in School (NY: SUNY Press, 1996).
See also Jeanie Oakes, Keeping Track: How Schools Structure Inequality (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006).
Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools (NY: Harper Collins, 1991).
Schofield (1989), quoted in Amy Stuart et al, “How Society Failed School Desegregation Policy: Looking Past the Schools to Understand Them,” Review of Research in Education 28 (2005): 71.
Jencks, quoted in Amy Stuart Wells et al, “How Society Failed School Desegregation Policy: Looking Past the Schools to Understand Them,” Review of Research in Education 28 (2005): 71.
Patrick Ryan, “A Case Study in the Cultural Origins of a Superpower: Liberal Individualism, American Nationalism, and the Rise of High School Life, A Study of Cleveland’s Central and East Technical High Schools, 1890–1918,” History of Education Quarterly, 45 (Spring 2005): 67.
Patrick Ryan, “A Case Study in the Cultural Origins of a Superpower: Liberalism, Individualism, American Nationalism, and the Rise of High School Life, A Study of Cleveland’s Central and East Technical High Schools,” History of Education Quarterly, 45 (Spring 2005): 94.
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© 2010 Caroline Eick
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Eick, C. (2010). Conclusion. In: Race-Class Relations and Integration in Secondary Education. Secondary Education in a Changing World. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230114425_8
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