She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Structuring Inequality: How Schooling, Housing, and Tax Policies Shaped Metropolitan Development and Education, and reported the following:
Page 99 describes the federal investigation of segregation in Chicago Public Schools in 1966-1967. This investigation was launched after civil rights groups filed a Title VI complaint under the Civil Rights Act with credible (and later validated) evidence of segregation in the district. Federal officials briefly withheld funds under the newly passed Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) but the political backlash from powerful White Democrats, including Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley, and their attacks on “federal overreach” and ESEA itself, led federal officials to release the funds and instead launch an investigation. Page 99 uses confidential internal correspondence among federal officials to show how they worried about the politics of the investigation—how to navigate the hostility of local politicians and school officials while also enforcing the law. Their solution was to stall and pull their punches: the substance of the final report documented segregation of students and teachers but sidestepped intent and legal culpability. In the report and their actions afterward, federal officials offered to help CPS officials address segregation and emphasized cooperation over coercion, but school officials read it as absolving them of responsibility, setting the stage for many years of local resistance, evasion, and delay to address segregative policies and practices.Learn more about Structuring Inequality at the University of Chicago Press website.
The Page 99 Test does not work very well for my book. This page is deep in the weeds of one policy fight in one place at one time—school desegregation in Chicago in the mid 1960s—and while it gives some sense of the dynamics of that fight, it does not give someone browsing it any sense of the book’s overall scope and arguments. The book explores how public policies, including state government policies around the boundaries and funding of schools and local governments, structured racial and socioeconomic inequality in Chicago and its suburbs from the end of WWII through the early 21st century. It explores how this metropolitan inequality was forged in the decades before the 1960s, fought over in the 1960s and 1970s through policy fights over three major sets of reforms (school desegregation, fair and affordable housing, and school finance and property tax reform), and virtually forgotten as a public policy problem to solve in the 1980s and 1990s amid calls for fiscal discipline and shifts toward neoliberal modes of governance. The book argues that this history helps us to understand our world today, including the way that public policy has structured inequality over time and space, and the ways it might be used or reimagined to dismantle it. Consequently, a person reading just page 99 would find themselves deep in the details of just one moment in one place, and it would not give that reader any sense of the stakes, how that relates to the book's larger arguments and questions, and why it matters for how we understand the past or present.
--Marshal Zeringue
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