ABOUT THIS BOOK

How inequality was forged, fought over, and forgotten through public policy in metropolitan Chicago.

As in many American metropolitan areas, inequality in Chicagoland is visible in its neighborhoods. These inequalities are not inevitable, however. They have been constructed and deepened by public policies around housing, schooling, taxation, and local governance, including hidden state government policies.

In Structuring Inequality, historian Tracy L. Steffes shows how metropolitan inequality in Chicagoland was structured, contested, and naturalized over time even as reformers tried to change it through school desegregation, affordable housing, and property tax reform. While these efforts had modest successes in the city and the suburbs, reformers faced significant resistance and counter-mobilization from affluent suburbanites, real estate developers, and other defenders of the status quo who defended inequality and reshaped the policy conversation about it. Grounded in comprehensive archival research and policy analysis, Structuring Inequality examines the history of Chicagoland’s established systems of inequality and provides perspective on the inequality we live with today.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Tracy L. Steffes is associate professor of education and history at Brown University. She is the author of School, Society, & State: A New Education to Govern Modern America, 1890–1940.

REVIEWS

"Zones of privilege and privation are carved into the U.S. landscape by school district and municipal boundaries. Who makes and maintains those lines? Tracy Steffes brings long-needed attention and exacting research to state governments, whose actions and inactions she proves to be a key force in perpetuating racial injustice in the U.S."

— Ansley T. Erickson, author of Making the Unequal Metropolis: School Desegregation and Its Limits

“How can we ‘reform’ our schools to improve academic ‘outcomes,’ especially in poor communities? That's the wrong question. We need to look back in time, to the political and economic decisions that rendered our schools—and our cities—so unequal in the first place. Tracy Steffes has produced the first complete, sophisticated history of education and inequality in a modern American metropolis. Along the way, she demonstrates the hollowness of our present-day reformist rhetoric and the need to think in bigger—and more historical—ways. This is history with an edge and a heart, by a sharp and passionate scholar at the very top of her game.”

— Jonathan Zimmerman, author of Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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