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Ghetto Schooling: A Political Economy of Urban Education Reform, by Jean Anyon. New York: Teacher's College Press, 1997. 217 pp. $18.95, paper.
Emanating from a multiyear, consultative process with a cluster of schools in Newark, New Jersey, this work joins other recent analyses of inner-city education which purport to address the larger issues of educational reform. According to the foreword by William Julius Wilson, Anyon's work attempts to present a positive diversion from most of the work on educational reform, particularly in the public schools, in that she deliberately situates the analyses of urban education within the contexts of poverty and racial isolation. In Anyon's own words, she uses this research to "reveal ways in which poverty and racial isolation have often trivialized efforts in [the] city to teach, learn, and to bring about change" (p. xiv). However, Anyon's work is not merely intended to be an alternative way of looking at educational reform in the inner city. Instead, she proposes that her methodology for doing research there is generalizable and that pivotal to such generalizability is the incorporation of two important factors: (a) an understanding of how innercity schools have come to be what they are, and (b) a strategy to improve the lives and life chances of inner-city residents.
The book is divided into three main parts in addition to an introduction. In part one, which focuses on the effects of race and social class on educational reform, the author goes to some length in demonstrating the importance of these factors in the educational reform process and the futility of engaging in educational reform when they are not taken into account. Part two describes the plans for educational reform in Newark within the local historical context and the wider context of American cities generally. Finally, in part three, Anyon recapitulates some of the main issues raised earlier in the book and offers her vision of urban educational reform.
Anyon's engagement with race and class as important variables in the analysis of educational issues is not that of a neophyte; she is widely published in this area. She is equally aware that use of such variables is not without contention. Nevertheless, she chooses to focus on such issues...