The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
The residents of Boston have witnessed no small amount of debate and conflict in the city’s education and labor history. Schools have served as a flashpoint in this history, and a project that has taken form over the past five years, the creation of the Boston Teacher’s Union Collection (BTU Collection) strives to document and […]
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Our second entrant into the Fifth Annual UHA/The Metropole Graduate Student Blogging Contest is Rachel Klepper, who takes us back to New York City’s Yorkville neighborhood in the late 1940s to examine white, Black, and Latinx parents’ complicated embrace of an after-school program. At Public School 151, in the Yorkville neighborhood of Manhattan’s Upper East […]
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Marta Gutman You wear a lot of hats! What are your many and varied affiliations? I am Interim Dean and Professor of Architecture (History and Theory) at the Spitzer School of Architecture, City College of the City University of New York, and Professor of Art History and Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Graduate Center […]
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Groeger, Cristina Viviana. The Education Trap: Schools and the Remaking of Inequality in Boston. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021. Reviewed by Erika M. Kitzmiller For centuries, social reformers and elected officials have insisted that education is central to reducing the inequities between the rich and poor, and in turn, to generating a more equitable […]
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By Allison Raven Of the many abstract nouns in the world, “injustice” is perhaps the one best suited for seventh graders. Middle schoolers in general have very profound senses of justice, and certainly know when they are experiencing an injustice in school. Homework: injustice. Uniforms: injustice. Ms. Raven counting them tardy when they intended to […]
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Our second entrant into the Third Annual UHA/The Metropole Graduate Student Blogging Contest is Matt Kautz, who takes us to a very particular high school in Detroit. The life cycle of this one institution, Kautz shows, offers a peek at the birth of the school-to-prison pipeline. Detroit’s desegregation case, Milliken v. Bradley, is largely remembered […]
Read MoreMichael Glass Ph.D. Candidate, Princeton University @m_r_glass Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? As a former New York City high school teacher, I’ve long been interested in educational inequality. For my M.A. thesis, I studied the 1950s school desegregation movement in Harlem, portions of which were recently published in the JUH. […]
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All good things must come to an end, and this is especially true of summer school. Whether talking about the 1980s Mark Harmon feature or the classroom, digital and analog, it’s come time to shutter our doors for a couple weeks as The Metropole takes some time off. We’ll re-open after Labor Day with a […]
Read MoreRené Luís Alvarez, PhD Lecturer in History Arrupe College of Loyola University Chicago Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? I have researched and written about the history of American urban education, focusing mainly on Chicago’s Mexican American community. While the teaching and administrative responsibilities of my current position at Arrupe […]
Read MoreErika M. Kitzmiller Teachers College Columbia University Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? My scholarship examines the historical processes and current reform efforts that have contributed to and challenged inequalities in present-day urban spaces. My work leverages quantitative and qualitative data to understand the intersections of educational policy and the lives […]
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