A provocative examination of how systemic racism in education funding is sustained.
 
For people who care about urban school districts like Philadelphia’s, addressing the challenges that these schools face often boils down to the need for more money. But why are urban districts that serve Black and Brown students still so perennially underfunded compared to majority-white ones? Why is racial equity in school funding so hard to achieve?

In Designed to Fail, Roseann Liu provides an inside look at the Pennsylvania state legislature and campaigns for fair funding to show how those responsible for the distribution of school funding work to maintain the privileges of majority-white school districts. Liu analyzes how colorblind policies, political structures, and the maintenance of the status quo by people in power perpetuate wide and deepening racial disparities in education funding. Taking a lesson from community organizers fighting for a racially equitable school funding system, Liu’s work is a bold call to address structural racism at the root and organize from a place of abundant justice.
 

Early college classrooms provide essential opportunities for students to grapple and contend with the racial geographies that shape their lives. Based on a mixed methods study of students’ writing in a first-year-writing course themed around racial identities and language varieties at St. John’s University, Mapping Racial Literacies shows college student writing that directly confronts lived experiences of segregation—and, overwhelmingly, of resegregation.
 
This textual ethnography embeds early college students’ writing in deep historical and theoretical contexts and looks for new ways that their writing contributes to and reshapes contemporary understandings of how US and global citizens are thinking about race. The book is a teaching narrative, tracing a teaching journey that considers student writing not only in the moments it is assigned but also in continual revisions of the course, making it a useful tool in helping college-age students see, explore, and articulate the role of race in determining their life experiences and opportunities.
 
Sophie Bell’s work narrates the experiences of a white teacher making mistakes in teaching about race and moving forward through those mistakes, considering that process valuable and, in fact, necessary. Providing a model for future scholars on how to carve out a pedagogically responsive identity as a teacher, Mapping Racial Literacies contributes to the scholarship on race and writing pedagogy and encourages teachers of early college classes to bring these issues front and center on the page, in the classroom, and on campus.