Public Education in America
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The problems of public education in America have been given much attention in recent years, but few real solutions have been developed. In his book The School That Refused to Die, Daniel L. Duke tells the story of one high school that had the same menu of problems facing other schools across the country, from court-ordered busing to achieve racial balance to budget problems. Duke writes a history of the school from the 1930s to the present and shows how the institution was shaped, what forces were involved in shaping it, and how the institution was challenged by changing social, economic,and cultural factors over that history. The change that Duke sees as bringing the most tension to this school was desegregation. The school, Thomas Jefferson High School in Richmond, Virginia, also known throughout as Tee-Jay, is well-known to the author because he not only graduated from the school in the fist class to graduate a black student but also taught history there and served as a high school administrator. He is currently Professor of Education in the department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of Virginia. In this book he details the story of Tee-Jay, a school that survived several efforts to shut it down and that has adapted to changing circumstances in ways that suggest what other schools might do to alleviate similar problems. Duke describes Tee-Jay as an excellent high school and as a school that had to be nurtured to make it so. Once the
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t of a "massive-resistance" effort. Richmond schools did not close, but neither did they support the goals of integration, but slowly blacks did manage to enroll at schools in Richmond, including one black girl at Tee-Jay on September 6, 1962.
In fact, the process of integration at Tee-Jay seemed at first to be proceeding smoothly and with relatively little protest. This was important given that the rest of the system looked to Tee-Jay as its finest school and so as a school to be emulated:
In creating a high school without local parallel, those associated with Tee-Jay during its formative years unwittingly helped undermining the foundations of school segregation in Richmond (99).
In form, the school continued to prepare students for college and still did not develop vocational classes or similar programs:
Tee-Jay's mission continued to be well served by its culture. Among the most persistent aspects of this culture were high expectations for all students and a belief in the benefits of organization (101).
Desegregation was a token matter until 1970 when Judge Robert R. Merhige Jr. ordered the Richmond Public Schools to implement an interim desegregation plan including busing some 13,000 students from one district
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Approximate Word count = 1755
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
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