Jennifer Jellison Holme

Learning Through Experience: What Graduates Gained by Attending Desegregated High Schools

In this article, we discuss one of the central findings from our study of the long-term impact of school desegregation on adult graduates of racially mixed high schools: what graduates said about the impact of their schooling experiences on their current understandings about race, and on their lives in a racially diverse society. Of the 242 graduates we interviewed, nearly all said that their high school experiences left them more prepared for life in a racially diverse society than they otherwise would be. In addition, every one of the graduates interviewed said that their high school experiences left them with a deeper understanding of people of other backgrounds and an increased sense of comfort in interracial settings. Many of these graduates stressed the importance of their daily experiences of negotiating race in high school as one of the most challenging yet rewarding aspects of their education. These lessons, they observed, could not be gained through multicultural curricula or student exchange programs; rather, such insights, they believed, could only be learned by the daily experience of attending racially diverse schools. In this way, the experiences of these graduates speak to the need to reconsider our national retreat from policies designed to foster diversity in public schools.

Marketization in Education: Looking Back to Move Forward with a Stronger Critique

Fifty years from now, when historians look back at the current era of educational policy making, they will no doubt see the many similarities between the present period and the first two decades of the 20th Century when policy makers and business leaders tried to make public schools more businesslike and efficient. Today, the optimal term for school reform driven by a business model is “marketization.” And while there are some important differences between then and now, much of the underlying sentiment is the same — public schools need to be more efficient, competitive, accountable, and more like private businesses than democratic institutions