Race, Class And Education Justice: Educational Reforms In Detroit, 1999-2017

The purpose of this thesis is to look into the school resource differences and inequalities between urban and suburban schools due to the spatial segregation between African Americans and white Americans.This thesis is centered around Detroit city,to explore the reasons behind this unequal allocation of education resources.The overall school education and their reforms around the United States should be examined within the scope of historical context and the neo-liberalism ideology that has been driving behind the whole education system for years.Meanwhile,it is also necessary to analyze the problems of a particular school district in order to better understand the correlations behind all the factors involved in education,including government body,finance problems,city development,and structure,etc.The reason for choosing Detroit specifically as a research site and a city for case study,is related to the facts that it has a long history of racial segregation issue and that the city also faces the challenges of shrinking population and the conflict between suburbanization and inner city.Through one-year fieldwork in Detroit,the author found that the factors that directly and influentially impact the Detroit education can be generally categorized into three aspects: governance,finance and urban restructuring,and this thesis would try to analyze the Detroit education in these three layers accordingly.The thesis would focus on how education,like any other public institutions,reproduces and perpetuates inequality by depriving black students of their rights for the same education that their white peers have and maintaining white privilege and benefits through systemic mechanism and structural problems such as lack of institutional progress,inequitable funding approach,and urban restructuring.In this sense,race and class are very much intertwined with education equality and opportunity,which is why the analysis of education equity should always go beyond education itself and extend to other key components that may be factored into its current dilemma.With this purpose in mind,the author divided the main body of the thesis into three sections: 1)governance changes in education reforms;2)financial distress in the school district;and 3)implication and effects of urban restructuring.