So I often wonder what drives people to become superintendents of large urban districts. The newcomer to Philadelphia, Arlene Ackerman, will arrive to this situation: a grim budget with little chance of any real increase in funding.

Why would take a position when you wouldn’t really be given the tools to do the job? Unless you’re a politician with an understanding of how to leverage certain kinds of funding from the state (see Vallas, Paul), you’ve got no real chance of success.

In the introduction to her recent book, Schools Betrayed, Kathryn Neckerman quotes Kenneth Clark:

“The dominant and disturbing fact about the ghetto schools is that the teachers and the students regard each other as adversaries. Under these conditions the teachers are reluctant to teach and the students retaliate and resist learning.”

It’s a cool quote, for its continued relevance, and I’m very interested in this book. I’m particularly interested in two portions of her argument:

One, she claims in the introduction that the policies and institutional structure created in the early portion of the twentieth century would play a critical role in the creation of an unequal education after 1945. I’d like to see how she makes her argument as I can see both sides for Philadelphia. On one hand, many of the kinds of inequalities that would become pervasive in the 1960s and 1970s already existed; on the other, the vast new migrations shifted the political and social fabric of the city during the 1950s.

Two, she seems ready to base her argument on the daily interactions occurring in classrooms and hallways across Chicago’s schools. I’m very interested in the source base for this portion of the argument.

Neckerman, Kathryn M. Schools Betrayed: Roots of Failure in Inner-city Education. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.

This article describes the difficulty most parents who want to remain in the city face in negotiating the bureaucracies of large school systems.

Twelve years of constant struggle vs. six months of deciding which suburb to live in, selling one’s home, and moving.

I don’t want to live in the ‘burbs but I do envy the ability of folks to buy a home and not have to face the “which school” question again.