Beginning with the premise that education is a business monopoly supplying clientele for the marketplace, equity in education falls short. Comparing the populations in low socioeconomic schools with those that are advantaged and mostly white clarifies that inequity exists. The former is of less value to consumers. Further, equity in education is not necessary to provide the skills required. It does not mirror marketplace reality. Though redistribution of diverse populations through desegregation was a noble civil rights goal, it sped up segregation. Mandated attempts achieved nothing more than an initial appearance of equity, and mandated redistribution encouraged the advantaged to relocate. Deciding where they could get the best education for their children, such as private, parochial, or magnet schools, middle- and upper-class families moved. This mobility, ‘white flight,’ demographically reestablished the gap that desegregation was intended to address. One chapter provides several in-depth examples of desegregation failures. Another chapter outlines those claiming success, such as in-school desegregation; however, even those suffered from many of the same maladies. In short, after decades of desegregation in the US, desegregation has proved to be ineffective in providing educational equity.

Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students; faculty.

Choice Reviews

Carl Bankston and Stephen Caldas have once again produced an iconoclastic, insightful book on the failure of school desegregation to produce the outcomes that most of us thought were possible after the Coleman Report of 1966. Their argument is that education, whether public or private, is a marketplace and the problem with mandatory reassignment school desegregation plans is that it converts the education marketplace into a monopoly. Those with the means to do so opt out of this monopoly and those who do not have the means stay and the outcome has been a decline in integration rather than an increase. My own research shows the same thing.

Christine Rossell, professor emerita of political science, Boston University

This book breaks new ground in the Sociology of Education. Bankston and Caldas deftly describe how market forces play a powerful role in shaping the education of our youth.

John C. Kilburn Jr., associate dean of research, Texas A&M International University

If you want to know anything about school desegregation, its successes but mostly failures, then you MUST read this book. In a short 162 pages, it is positively encyclopedic in its coverage of this important issue. This book is not limited to an empirical examination of the phenomenon. It also delves into the philosophical and ethical aspects of school desegregation. It is a scholarly book, but accessible to anyone interested in the subject, and that should include just about everyone.

Walter E. Block