Abstract
As there is increasing recognition of the link between schools and the carceral state, Carla Shedd brings much needed voices into the conversation in Unequal City: Race, Schools, and Perceptions of Injustice. Her account of schools in Chicago is largely drawn from the voices of young people who provide insight into their perceptions of injustice. What emerges is an account that does more than simply document young people's experiences and perceptions of injustice in schools and neighborhoods. She is interested in a more nuanced analysis that incorporates student voice, examines the agentic role of place, and forces us to consider how studying the social world through discrete units (e.g., a neighborhood) can often times be incomplete.
Shedd draws from both quantitative and qualitative data to understand young people's sense of injustice, or their awareness of how opportunities are distributed unequally based on race, ethnicity, gender, or class. Situated in four urban high schools varying from highly segregated to integrated, Shedd uses both survey and interview data to tap into young people's perceptions and experiences. The survey from the Chicago Consortium on School Research provides a broad overview on Chicago high school students' experiences with police, perceptions of safety and injustice, and background information on neighborhood and individual characteristics. Complementing the survey results were interviews conducted with ten students from each school, for a total of forty interview participants. These young people provided in–depth accounts of their experiences at school, in their neighborhoods, and the passage between the two.
The interviews with students who come from vastly different high school and neighborhood contexts reveal the boundary crossing, or lack thereof, that characterizes the journey from home to school each day. While the opportunity to attend school outside of a disadvantaged and segregated neighborhood is often viewed as an opportunity for upward mobility, the students in Shedd's study demonstrate that this journey from neighborhood to school is wrought with perceptions of injustice. Students who crossed boundaries to attend more integrated schools were more likely to see the differential distribution of injustice in contrast to students who remained in segregated schooling contexts (similar to their neighborhoods) and were less aware of discrimination.
Shedd also brings student voices to bear on the within–school segregation that occurs in more mixed and integrated schools. While a large body of literature is devoted to within–school segregation vis–à–vis academic tracking, there have been fewer studies examining how students segregate themselves in social spaces at school. The students attending the mixed and integrated schools demonstrate, as Shedd remarks, the paradox of increasing racial diversity but decreasing social integration; students tended to be friends with and socialize with same–race students.
Place was foregrounded in Shedd's analysis, with her findings emerging from youths’ experiences at school, in their neighborhood, and the journey between. Young people's knowledge of social and structural hierarchies was impacted by the different places they moved within and informed how they understood social injustice. While the survey data showed that the perceptions of injustice were higher in community areas with a higher concentration of blacks and Hispanics, the interview data revealed a more complex story about how place shapes perceptions related to injustice and policing. For example, some students who experienced disparities between the police presence at their school and the police presence in their neighborhood understood that as an indication of police indifference toward them and their community. And there were important differences in perceptions of insecurity between the students attending segregated and those attending more integrated schools. Some students at the most segregated school reported that they would like to see greater police presence at school. Students also learned about social hierarchies through vicarious and personal experiences that were gleaned by traversing greater distances across a city. Some students that were rooted in place did not express perceptions of injustice that others gained by witnessing firsthand subordination and deprivation.
Perhaps one of the most important contributions Shedd makes is to raise, through her analysis and findings, questions about the way in which we so often study the social world: Most analyses focus on discrete units (i.e., a neighborhood or school). While Shedd's work demonstrates that indeed neighborhoods and schools are important, her findings also reveal that the passages between the two are profoundly important as well. Students who made passages between radically different neighborhood and school contexts had very different perceptions of injustice based on their mobility between these environments. Shedd argues that her research demonstrates how discrete units are incomplete because they neglect important social spaces, in this case the journey from neighborhood to school. When much research encompasses only one scale of analysis, Shedd's work highlights the need for creative methods that more fully capture the many passages we traverse in our daily lives. Unequal City would interest people both inside and outside academia, from those considering methodological issues around how to capture young people's experiences in schools and neighborhoods, to those who work and make policy in the schools and neighborhoods. This work may also be very useful for teachers in training to explore the links between neighborhood and school segregation from the perspective of young people.
Shedd presents a compelling account of the ways in which schools, neighborhoods, and the journey between the two shape how young people understand the social world around them, and in particular, their perception of injustice. As researchers, policymakers, and school districts are debating the scope of the school–to–prison pipeline, Shedd shows that there should be a greater focus on the voices of students to understand the relationship between schools, neighborhoods, and the carceral state.