Book Review

Abstract

In the 2007 Supreme Court ruling Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 and Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education, Chief Justice John Roberts declared, "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis on race." This decision found unconstitutional school districts' explicit use of race in deciding where students should attend public schools. As argued by Wells and associates in Both Sides Now: The Story of School Desegregations Graduates, the experiences of high school graduates in 1980 are posed to help policy makers contend with present and future policies related to school desegregation. As Vanessa Siddle Walker writes in the foreword, Both Sides Now "unveils through first-person accounts a world of teaching and learning and school climate often masked in traditional desegregation studies" (p. xiii). Such studies either focus on the mistreatment of black children in the short term or offer accounts of rising test scores and graduation rates in the long term (p. xii). In unmasking new desegregation accounts, the authors frame this study with considerations of continuing structural inequality, the prevalence of racial segregation in housing patterns, the resegregation of public schooling, and the racial consciousness or "double consciousness" of their participants. In explaining their decision to use these specific graduates, the authors write that "the class of 1980 more than any other cohort of students before or after them ... has looked at racial equality from both sides now—from experiences in both desegregated and more segregated contexts, from the preReagan and the post-Reagan political eras" (p. 35). From an initial list of twenty desegregated school districts that were demographically and geographically diverse, these scholars chose six high schools from which to interview the graduates: Austin High School (Texas); Dwight Morrow High School (New Jersey); John Muir High School (California); Shaker Heights High School (Ohio); Topeka High School (Kansas); and West Charlotte High School (New Carolina). In addition to utilizing historical documents, data were largely drawn from interviews with policy makers, lawyers, educators, community members, and graduates (primarily African American, Latino, and white) from the class of 1980. Although the total number of interviews