PRESENTING SUPERB RESEARCH THAT ADVANCES THE FIELD OF EDUCATION

The Metropolitan Community

Partnering for Equality Across the Educational Divide

Paperback
June 2025
9781975507435
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  • Publisher
    Myers Education Press
  • Published
    11th June
  • ISBN 9781975507435
  • Language English
  • Pages 200 pp.
  • Size 6" x 9"
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$42.95
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June 2025
9781975507459
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In metropolitan areas across the United States, city and suburban public school students receive grossly unequal funding. Since funding is critical to student success, this means the primarily Black, Latinx, and low-income students attending city schools are being denied an equal education. So entrenched is this system, that it can feel normal, or too big to undo. Yet recent student activism in the form of an innovative, cross-community school partnership offers new hope. The Metropolitan Community: Partnering for Equality Across the Educational Divide tells the story of two Chicago-area schools—one suburban, one urban—whose students come together to examine the disparities between their schools and advocate for change. It follows these students over a year as they meet, tour each other’s schools, wrestle with how to discuss unfairness, and ultimately commit to fighting together for a more equal education. In-depth interviews and detailed observations chronicle the students’ advocacy, which unfolds in conversation with teachers and administrators and eventually brings them to the table with legislators, from whom they demand better policies. Through the examples set by students, readers are invited to develop their own “metro outlook,” to see how our seemingly separate worlds are connected by the educational system we hold in common and must work together to reshape. The first book to depict sustained allyship between city and suburban students, The Metropolitan Community offers an invigorating pedagogical approach, organizational model, and political strategy for achieving educational justice through youth-led partnerships and collaboration.

Perfect for courses such as: School and Society; Curriculum and Instruction; Diversity and Equity in Education; Socio-cultural Foundations; Educational Policy; Culturally Relevant Pedagogy; Sociology of Education; Urban Education; Social Studies Methods; Multicultural Education; Anthropology of Education; School Counseling; School Psychology; and School Social Work

“Taines delivers a complex and hopeful answer to her question, 'How do we get advantaged people—white and wealthier people—to contribute to inequality’s un-making?' She demonstrates that the answer, although riddled with misrecognitions—begins by enabling privileged young people to 'see' educational inequality and their stake in it—not to blame or burden them—but to invite them into activism alongside peers who find themselves disadvantaged by the inequality from which they benefit. This story of a city-suburban partnership, that is designed to do just that, makes evident how we can inspire and draw upon the power and agency of youth to help write a more just future.”

Carla O’Connor, University Diversity and Social Transformation Professor and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor, Marsal Family School of Education, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

“Americans sometimes claim to believe in equality, but you wouldn’t know it by how they fund public education. In a deeply-researched study of metropolitan Chicago that compares a poorly-resourced city school with a wealthy one in the suburbs, Cynthia Taines uses her enormous skills as a sociologist to illuminate the systemic inequalities that plague the nation’s schools. Taines does more than that. In sparkling prose, she tells a remarkable story about how a coalition of students from these two schools, with the support of dedicated teachers and community activists, lobbied legislators for more equitable public school funding in Illinois.”

William J. Reese, Vilas Research Professor, Educational Policy Studies and History, University of Wisconsin, Madison

“At a time when education, equity, and democracy are under attack, Cynthia Taines provides us with a powerful story of young people working together across lines of race and class to create a more just public school system. The students in the Metropolitan Community Project study, discuss, and forge common cause to upend educational inequality–and this process uplifts them all.”

John Rogers, Professor of Education and Associate Dean for Research and Public Scholarship, University of California, Los Angeles

Part I - An Introduction to Educational Inequality

Chapter 1 - Introduction

Chapter 2 - School Resources Lost & Found

Part II - Talking About Educational Inequality

Part II Introduction

Chapter 3 - Communicating the Educational Divide: Wyndham

Chapter 4 - Communicating the Educational Divide: Taylor

Part II Coda

Part III - Educational Activism

Chapter 5 - The Students and the Legislators

Part III Coda

Part IV - Metro Student Outcomes

Part IV Introduction

Chapter 6 - Personal Change: The Taylor students

Chapter 7 - Personal Change: The Wyndham students

Part IV Coda

Part V - The Metropolitan Community

Chapter 8 - Conclusion with Next Steps

Acknowledgments

Metro Directory

About the Author

Index

Cynthia Taines

Cynthia Taines is a sociologist of education who is fascinated by students’ perspectives about school and their actions for educational equality. She has published in highly regarded academic journals, including the American Educational Research Journal, The Journal of Educational Change, Education and Urban Society, Teachers College Record, and The Urban Review. With teachers and organizers, Cynthia co-founded the Metropolitan Community Project, a city/suburban partnership for educational justice. She is an Associate Professor in the College of Education at Northern Illinois University and holds a Ph.D. in Educational Policy Studies, with minors in Sociology and History, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Cynthia resides in Chicago.

school funding; racial disparities in education; public education crisis; student voice; school partnership; city-suburban alliance; metropolitan partnership; student activism; education equity; educational justice