Lawrence Blum and Zoë Burkholder’s Integrations provides a historical and philosophical examination of racial inequality in American public schools. By illuminating the origins and nature of racial inequality in public education, the authors seek to identify mechanisms for more equitable schooling. They center Black, Indigenous, Latino, and Asian American educational experiences, focusing their analysis on integration as a historical and contemporary response to educational inequality.
The authors assert that a robust approach to integration can enhance both public education’s civic potential and the pursuit of educational equality. Specifically, they advocate for “a conception of integration closely tied to egalitarian, civic-minded schools committed to the training of future citizens for a pluralistic democracy” (p. 4). But they conclude that neither integration nor public schools can independently eradicate educational inequality. To achieve that end, Americans must first “dismantle the interlocking external structures of racial and class injustice” (p. 184) that shape and constrain public education.
While historians of education have long argued that educational inequality stems from factors external to schools, Blum and Burkholder effectively distill the significance of that history for the present. Given the sweep of their historical synthesis, the cogency of their analysis, and the clarity of their prose, their book is particularly well suited for undergraduate classes in educational foundations and the history of American education. Graduate students and specialists will also benefit from tackling the pressing and provocative questions the authors raise about public education, racial justice, and democratic society.
Published as a volume in a history and philosophy of education series, the book’s first half is historical, and its second half is philosophical. The historical section includes two chapters: one focused on segregation, the other on desegregation. The first historical chapter surveys Black, Indigenous, Latino, and Asian American educational experiences from the common school era through World War II. The authors show how the state created and maintained educational inequality through exclusion, segregation, and differentiation in curriculum and funding. They also document people of color’s diverse responses to educational racism, highlighting that communities of color emphasized and defined integration in varied ways based upon their circumstances.
The second historical chapter assesses the impact of desegregation from the 1954 Brown decision to the present. While desegregation “dramatically improved educational opportunities for many students of color” (p. 50), particularly in the South, the authors demonstrate that it never equalized education. They also note that 1990s policy retreats, such as the Supreme Court’s permissive approach to ending desegregation orders, undermined desegregation’s long-term effectiveness. As with the first chapter, they stress that some people of color favored self-deterministic alternatives to integration, and that local context significantly shaped the approaches to and consequences of desegregation.
A strength of the book’s historical section is its synthesis—across more than 150 years—of educational histories of racially marginalized groups whom scholars typically examine in isolation from one another. While relying upon secondary sources, the authors effectively incorporate primary sources to enhance their bottom-up view of struggles for educational equality. An example is their examination of Chinese American experiences with school desegregation in Boston, which is a topic that historians have overwhelmingly approached via a Black-White binary.
Historical synthesis involves inherent challenges, and the breadth of coverage occasionally impinges upon nuance and clarity. When introducing the Brown decision, for instance, the authors assert that it “served as notice to all citizens that the judiciary viewed equal education as a basic civil right” (p. 52). Yet in a footnote attached to a much later discussion of the equalization of school funding, they clarify that “a constitutionally based right to equal educational opportunity” was “strongly suggested but not quite affirmed in the Brown decision” (p. 248n52). While potentially confusing, minor inconsistencies such as this do not undermine the book’s core arguments.
The book’s philosophical section assumes the gargantuan task of defining equal education and evaluating integration as a mechanism for equality and racial justice in education. The authors propose understanding equality of education in relation to the inherently valuable “educational goods” that students acquire through schooling rather than in relation to the educational opportunities they are afforded or the outcomes they achieve. Blum and Burkholder specifically argue that all students should leave school with a “robust threshold” (p. 129) of academic, personal, moral, and civic educational goods. They contend that acquiring these educational goods requires students to critically examine social injustice and White supremacy, and teachers to “view advocacy for greater overall economic equality, and more specifically a reduction of poverty, as part of their professional responsibilities” (p. 114).
The author’s examination of integration analyzes its plural nature in terms of the multiple ways people have defined and ascribed meaning to it. Some, for instance, have defined integration strictly in terms of the elimination of race-based distinctions or the demographic composition of schools; others have stressed the different values that can be realized through demographically diverse schooling.
Blum and Burkholder reject approaches to integration that do not directly challenge systemic inequalities, observing that many approaches to integration depend upon the persistence of inequality outside of schools and permit its continuation within them. The “capital” argument, they note, posits that integrated schools are advantageous because they enable financial, cultural, and other resources to flow from middle-class White people to lower-income people of color. Yet this approach ignores the assets that exist within communities of color, and it leaves the race- and class-based inequities that structure American society and schools unchecked.
The authors contend that the strongest argument for integration is a civic one. They argue that in its ideal form, an integrated school does not simply bring students from different backgrounds together in the same building. It also fosters a mutually respectful, caring, and appreciative community across categories of difference; affirms ethno-racial group identities; and confronts systemic inequality. Without this sort of genuine integration, the authors conclude, public schools cannot fulfill their civic purpose, which they define as “the development of an informed, knowledgeable citizenry committed to democracy and justice” (p. 134). Yet even with an ideal form of integration, they stress, educational equality requires vast structural change beyond schooling.
Blum and Burkholder’s book is engaging and accessible, and they are clear-eyed about integration’s limits as well as the broader challenges to achieving educational equality. Yet the tension that they identify between the civic potential of public schools and their dependence upon external structures begs further consideration. That tension hinges on the relationship between public schools and the state, which is a problem Blum and Burkholder do not fully interrogate. It also calls to mind a paradox that James Baldwin discussed in his essay “A Talk to Teachers” (1963): “that the whole process of education occurs within a social framework and is designed to perpetuate the aims of society.” If that is the case, then to what extent can state-run institutions simultaneously prepare future citizens and encourage them to critically analyze—and perhaps even question the utility of—the state?
Baldwin concluded that “as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated,” ultimately finding themselves “at war with [their] society.” Can public schools start this war? Should they? That Integrations raises questions such as these speaks to its value for scholars and students.
