As media reports declare crisis after crisis in public education,
Americans find themselves hotly debating educational inequalities that
seem to violate their nation's ideals. Why does success in school track
so closely with race and socioeconomic status? How to end these apparent
achievement gaps? In the Crossfire brings historical perspective to
these debates by tracing the life and work of Marcus Foster, an African
American educator who struggled to reform urban schools in the 1960s and
early 1970s.
As a teacher, principal, and superintendent--first in his native
Philadelphia and eventually in Oakland, California--Foster made success
stories of urban schools and children whom others had dismissed as
hopeless, only to be assassinated in 1973 by the previously unknown
Symbionese Liberation Army in a bizarre protest against an allegedly
racist school system. Foster's story encapsulates larger social changes
in the decades after World War II: the great black migration from South
to North, the civil rights movement, the decline of American cities, and
the ever-increasing emphasis on education as a ticket to success. Well
before the accountability agenda of the No Child Left Behind Act or the
rise of charter schools, Americans came into sharp conflict over urban
educational failure, with some blaming the schools and others pointing
to conditions in homes and neighborhoods. By focusing on an educator who
worked in the trenches and had a reputation for bridging divisions, In
the Crossfire sheds new light on the continuing ideological debates
over race, poverty, and achievement.
Foster charted a course between the extremes of demanding too little and
expecting too much of schools as agents of opportunity in America. He
called for accountability not only from educators but also from
families, taxpayers, and political and economic institutions. His effort
to mobilize multiple constituencies was a key to his success--and a
lesson for educators and policymakers who would take aim at achievement
gaps without addressing the full range of school and nonschool factors
that create them.
