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 school achieved excellence, it had to struggle to maintain it in the face of various external and internal forces. Duke then draws a number of conclusions from the history of Tee-Jay and from the changes that school faced and weathered.
Tee-Jay is described as an impressive structure when it was first built, and Duke ties this idea to an analysis of the Richmond school system as a whole at that time. The building of this school came at the beginning of the...