She previously reported on the White House, presidential politics, immigration, and health care for the Wall Street Journal, as well as health and social policy for the Associated Press. Her honors include a Nieman Fellowship and Livingston Award for National Reporting, and she was part of a team that won the George Polk Award for Justice Reporting. She lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband and two sons.
Meckler applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Dream Town: Shaker Heights and the Quest for Racial Equity, and reported the following:
Page 99 of my book comes near the beginning of Chapter 6, the story of how Jack Lawson, superintendent of the Shaker Heights City School District, led the community to adopt a voluntary school busing program to desegregate the elementary schools. The plan’s focus was on Moreland Elementary School, where 88 percent of the students were Black. This page describes Lawson’s planning. That includes how he and his staff developed the arguments he would make for the plan, as well as how he secured private foundation funding for it. It also covers his vision of busing children out of Moreland and into majority white schools and turning Moreland into a special services school, where students from across the district would rotate for certain programming and services. Finally, the page shows Lawson’s political savvy, as he scheduled a school board meeting to discuss the plan at a time when he correctly predicted board members would be in a good mood (right after a tax levy increase had been approved by voters). The very end of the page sets up one of the central tensions of the chapter: “It’s unclear how much, if at all, he consulted with the Moreland community itself about the details or even the general concept. A meeting in November 1969 suggests any attempt to win buy-in was minimal.”Visit Laura Meckler's website.
After being invited to participate in the page 99 challenge, and after re-reading page 99, my first feeling was disappointment. Page 99 of my book is not all that exciting. There are no great scenes or interesting bits of dialogue or huge revelations. It does not contain particularly exciting or vivid descriptions. Other pages are far more compelling.
However, I do think my page 99 gives readers a sense of one of the book’s important themes: the work Shaker Heights has done over the years toward racial integration. This page deals with integration of the schools; previous chapters discuss housing integration; and subsequent chapters examine integration of classrooms. It also is important in setting up the events described in the rest of the chapter, where we learn how school Superintendent Jack Lawson’s busing proposal played out.
The page also speaks to another theme in the book. There generally are not heroes or villains--just good people with good intentions, making progress and making mistakes. In this case, we see Lawson’s good intentions and his truly visionary leadership. He led the district to adopt a voluntary busing plan at a time when other communities were fighting court orders to do the same. But we also see his limits. He proposed a one-way busing plan, where virtually the only students to be bused would be Black, even as the Black community made clear that they opposed this. Ultimately, the district adopted a more equitable two-way busing plan. But that change came about only after white parents also argued that a one-way plan was unfair and volunteered to bus their own children into the majority-Black elementary school. So while the district eventually arrived at a balanced solution, and while Lawson rightfully gets the credit for this plan, he also had some blind spots.
Understanding that leadership does not mean perfection, and that progress is often accompanied by setbacks, is critical to understanding the story of Shaker Heights and the greater story of almost any effort to do hard things.
--Marshal Zeringue
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