Race, Schools, and Hope: African Americans and School Choice After Brown

How can school choice be a form of both giving up on public education and a form of hope and faith in American schooling? This book helps us to make sense of why and how African Americans participate in and lead school choice reforms. The author argues that regardless of the success or failure of these reforms, they represent an important political phenomenon in American schooling and in African American history and politics. The first section of the book focuses on African American school choice in the post-Brown period, examining how these reforms became a response to desegregation politics and policies. The second section focuses on the author’s experience as a cofounder of a charter school in Oakland, California at a time when Oakland’s public schools were found to be severely under-serving African-American students.