Abstract
From the 1950s to the 2000s, American public education has been shaped by several national changes, including desegregation, the No Child Left Behind policy, and economic instability. In Lessons from the Heartland: A Turbulent Half-century of Public Education in an Iconic American City (2013), Journalist Barbara J. Miner charts how one city––Milwaukee, Wisconsin is affected by larger shifts in the country’s social and political climate. This allows readers to see how national change played out in a microcosm of the country, particularly focusing on racial and class inequities. Miner divides the book into three parts, each focusing on two decades: “Segregation, Prosperity, and Protests: 1950s and 1960s,” “Desegregation, Deindustrialization, and Backlash: 1970s and 1980s,” and “Resegregation, Abandonment, and a New Era of Protest: 1990s and 2000s.”
The first part provides an overview of the city of Milwaukee in the 1950s as a blue-collar city with a flourishing economy. Miner explains that while Milwaukee may have seemed to be a great American city, it was actually one of the most segregated cities in the United States (p. 14). This portion of the book extensively discusses the history of Freedom Schools and other grassroots organizing in Milwaukee. Additionally, Miner is careful to also give attention to racism, and includes an equally detailed history of racist resistance to blacks in Milwaukee, such as whites going to extreme lengths to prevent busing policies that would reduce segregation, and voting against open housing.
In the second division of Miner’s text, she expands the attention given to white backlash, now particularly focusing on the 70 s and 80 s. She highlights white resistance to desegregation, support of (or at least disregard for the cruelty of) police brutality against blacks, and “white flight” to the suburbs as the city of Milwaukee became increasingly populated by blacks and Latinos. In this section, Miner spends a significant amount of time discussing deindustrialization of Milwaukee and how the change in economic landscape affected public education as well as racial inequalities in general. She states that in 1970, the median income for a black family was 19 percent higher than the national average for black families, but by the 1980s, it was 23 percent lower than the average black family in the nation (p. 116).
The final section of Lessons from the Heartland focuses primarily on voucher schools and their problematic implications for inequality in public school systems. Voucher schools are private schools that are often extremely religiously oriented. These particular types of private schools are an important part of the discussion of public education and inequalities within the public school system because voucher schools use public tax money to fund the tuition of their students through tuition vouchers. One of Miner’s major concerns with voucher schools is that they are not subject to observing constitutional rights; Miner firmly believes that the voucher system abandons both the children and large democracy writ large. Another concern Miner raises in this section of her book is that the development of the No Child Left Behind policy was not as progressive as it was thought to be in its early stages. She argues that the policy produced racially unequal outcomes, particularly for black students. However, the No Child Left Behind policy was useful, for Miner, because it illuminated the failings of voucher schools in educating their students. Not long after the No Child Left Behind policy was put into action, voucher schools were required to administer the same standardized tests to their students as public schools, and voucher schools lagged far behind in math for all students, with reading scores significantly lower for students with special needs. Throughout the section, Miner weaves in resistance to an unequal public school system, and devotes attention to teacher protests, such as a significant protest for equity in public schooling that took place in Madison, Wisconsin.
Miner’s detailed account of Milwaukee’s public schools is in direct conversation with race and class inequalities that continue to plague the entire nation. Miner ends on a hopeful note, suggesting that commitment to public education, and critical resistance to inequality within it, could lead to a brighter future. Miner’s text is useful for sociologists because she is concerned with how broader sociopolitical shifts function within subsets of society. Her longitudinal analysis of the educational system offers key insights into how racial and class inequalities are reproduced, maintained, and resisted.