Carla Shedd - Unequal City Chapter 2
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CHAPTER 2
“And We Are Not Saved”: Safe Passage
Through a Changing Educational Landscape
Law is more than logic: it is experience.
—Derrick Bell,
And We Are Not Saved: The
Elusive Quest for Racial Justice
(1987)
The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.
—Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes,
The Common Law
(1881)
E
very day young
people are given the task of navigating the spaces be-
tween home and school (and sometimes work and play). They do so un-
der the watchful, and sometimes not so watchful, eyes of authorities, families,
and peers. These journeys, whether safe or dangerous, are a central force in
the lives of America’s urban adolescents. If we examine the protections his-
torically deemed necessary to provide safe passage to school—from the inte-
gration struggles of the 1950s through the turbulent 1960s and the White
flight of the 1980s, and into the present—we find that only the race and age
of those making these passages unsafe have changed. During the most pitched
battles for school desegregation, National Guardsmen protected Black stu-
dents from segregationist mobs; now city policymakers protect Black stu-
dents from one another. This transformation masks a more important change:
police officers and other mechanisms of social control have become a central
feature of urban schools since the early 1990s, in tandem with the peak in
violent crime in large urban cities in this nation.
1
Moreover, police are simply
one flavor of the variety of authority figures encountered by these students in
their journeys. Besides the police, students encounter parents, teachers, coun-
selors, and social workers each day. Once seen as a group in need of societal
protection, urban students are now more commonly seen as the problem.
And yet, they still are not safe and we are not saved.
2
One of the most egregious cases of the failure of safe passage is that of Der-
20
Unequal City
rion Albert, a sixteen-year-old Fenger Academy student whose murder in
2009 precipitated a police presence outside that school that continues to this
day (see photo 2.1). Albert’s death serves as a vivid reminder of the dangers of
crossing neighborhood boundaries for educational purposes. Although Al-
bert’s murder is an extreme case, it heightened the safety concerns of Chicago
students and parents, even prompting the mayor at the time, Richard M.
Daley, to initiate a “Safe Passage” program that positioned adults along the
paths that kids took to and from school.
3
It also put the plight of Chicago
youth on the national news radar.
4
Albert was fatally beaten in September 2009 with a wooden plank from a
railroad tie in the shadow of the Agape Community Center at 342 West
111th Street in the Roseland neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago
(see photo 2.2).
5
Albert and his killers were all students at Christian Fenger
Academy, a high school located in a section of the neighborhood known as
“the Ville.” Fenger had recently taken in students who lived in a rival com-
munity, Altgeld Gardens, whose neighborhood school had been converted
into a military academy under the direction of Arne Duncan, then the CEO
of Chicago Public Schools (CPS).
6
Albert was an Altgeld resident and, ac-
cording to prosecutors, an innocent bystander: Albert unknowingly walked
into the path of an escalating fight between rival factions from each neigh-
borhood who, earlier in the day, had been shooting at one another outside
Fenger.
7
The irony of the beating next to the community center was brutal: that
Photo 2.1
Police Outside Fenger Academy High School, Chicago, in 2009
Source:
Photo by Scott Olson, courtesy Getty Images. http://www.gettyimages.com/detail
/news-photo/police-patrol-at-a-gathering-outside-fenger-high-school-to-news-photo/91223992.
“And We Are Not Saved”
21
day there was no sign of “agape”—an all-encompassing love—between the
students who spent their days together at Fenger. In Chicago place and gang
boundaries are socially organized in a reciprocal relationship, and there are
many long-standing institutionalized gangs that have deep ties within the
neighborhoods.
8
One prominent gang researcher describes Chicago gangs as
a “neighborhood tradition” for more than 100 years.
9
The gang influence re-
mains strong to this day, so much so that even teenagers who are not officially
in a gang are perceived to have an unavoidable allegiance to the gang in their
neighborhood. And high school—one of the most common mixing grounds
for people from different areas—becomes a staging ground where students
may be forced to defend all the components of their identity, including their
residential address.
10
Even so, young people move around all the time, and the gangs generally
have informal agreements about shared spaces that are relatively safe. The
fight occurred just past the railroad tracks at 111th and Stewart Avenue,
which both sides considered an unofficial safe zone for Altgeld Gardens resi-
dents walking east toward Michigan Avenue on 111th Street in order to be
able to take only one CTA bus home (see photo 2.3).
11
Photo 2.2
“Love RIP”: Agape Community Center, 342 West 111th Street,
Chicago, the Site of Derrion Albert’s Fatal Beating in 2009
Source:
Photo taken by Carla Shedd, August 26, 2010.
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22
Unequal City
In Chicago—and indeed, throughout urban America—young people’s af-
filiation and identification with a place can wholly change the trajectory of
their lives. This fight just beyond the schoolhouse grounds not only extin-
guished Albert’s life but also diminished the life chances of the five young
men convicted of his murder.
12
And it is likely that these young men would
have never crossed paths had they not been assigned to the same school across
fractious neighborhood borders. The policing of boundaries, both formal and
informal, internal and external, has shifted since the modern civil rights era;
today intraracial boundaries can be just as fraught as the long-standing inter-
racial boundaries seen prior to the 1960s. These boundaries both create and
sustain attachment to group membership.
13
Crossing Boundaries: Race, Place, and History
Chicago’s already stratified residential geography becomes even more compli-
cated when overlaid with its educational landscape. The intersection of race
and place in Chicago schools has profoundly disadvantaged African Ameri-
can students in recent history.
14
Before court-mandated desegregation in the
1950s, Chicago schools were intensely segregated, and the Chicago public
Photo 2.3
Looking from the East Toward Agape Community Center, Across
the Unofficial “Safe” Zone for Students Traveling Home to Altgeld
Gardens from Fenger Academy High School
Source:
Photo taken by Carla Shedd, August 26, 2010.
“And We Are Not Saved”
23
school system’s policies during the first half of the twentieth century rein-
forced racial and ethnic inequality in myriad ways. African American public
school students confronted educational institutions vastly different from
those of their White immigrant counterparts.
The racial and ethnic composition of schools had a significant impact on
school policies and resource allocation. Compared to schools that educated
White students, even immigrant White students, schools with a majority of
students of color had less-experienced teachers, the facilities were poorer, and
they lacked textbooks and libraries—let alone laboratories and specialized
curricula.
15
From 1900 to at least 1960, African Americans and White im-
migrants living in Chicago faced distinct educational trajectories fueled by
racial discrimination and entrenched poverty—a group plight only worsened
by the demographic pressures of Black migration to the city known as the
“promised land.”
16
The boundary crossing at the heart of this book is a product of several re-
cent attempts to desegregate Chicago’s public schools. The costs of transgress-
ing borders are borne by all members of our society, but they especially weigh
on the children who are tasked with crossing racial, class, and geographical
boundaries. Moving to a different school, outside of the familiar neighbor-
hood and social group, requires substantial adjustments. Young people mak-
ing these longer journeys to school may become more aware of their disad-
vantage; in addition, sending students from “bad” neighborhood schools to
“good” schools elsewhere inadvertently exposes them to new kinds of dangers
besides threats to their physical safety, including the danger of possibly nega-
tive encounters with the police.
School desegregation has been a crucial battle in the ongoing quest for
racial equality. Although rife with problems in both concept and execution,
desegregation in our schools has moved faster in important geographic ways
than in the rest of our society. Neighborhoods, in other words, are often still
more segregated than the schools located in them. Whether we are talking
about African American students who were bused to predominantly White
schools after the landmark 1954 school desegregation case Brown v. Board of
Education
or students of all racial and ethnic minority backgrounds whose
parents today enroll them in the “best” schools possible (schools that are of-
ten in White or wealthy neighborhoods), all of these students might be cross-
ing more boundaries to get an education than the rest of us do in any other
pursuit. The tensions around this adjustment from Jim Crow–era residential
and educational segregation to the more muddled situation of post–civil
rights era stratification remain palpable.
Supreme Court chief justice Earl Warren, in his majority opinion for
Brown v. Board of Education
,
proclaimed that education is “perhaps the
most important function of state and local governments. . . . It is a principal
instrument in awakening the child to cultural values, in preparing him for
later professional training, and in helping him to adjust normally to his envi-
24
Unequal City
ronment.” The phrase “adjust normally to his environment” is crucial, be-
cause there is much about many urban public school environments that is
not normal—and should not be perceived as normal. For many young peo-
ple, navigating through danger and social deprivation in their school setting
is their typical experience; they have no choice but to figure out how to adapt
to their environment.
The road to Brown v. Board of Education
was long and hard-fought, and
it was so challenging that the decision was broken down into two phases. The
first Brown decision, a compendium of cases from four states and the District
of Columbia, overturned the “separate but equal” doctrine adopted in the
Court’s 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision. The Brown
decision was a bold
declaration that segregation has no place in the field of public education.
17
This effectively shut down states’ right to prohibit Blacks from using the same
public services and facilities as Whites because legally mandated segregation
deprived Blacks of the “equal protection of the laws” guaranteed by the Four-
teenth Amendment. The second phase of Brown
,
decided one year later on
May 31, 1955, dealt with the implementation of the Court’s mandate to de-
segregate public schools, but it lacked enforcement provisions. A decade
would pass before passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 gave the executive
branch the power to enforce school desegregation. The Department of Justice
was given the authority to file lawsuits seeking school desegregation, and the
federal government also used the tactic of cutting funding to schools that
continued to segregate their students.
18
Widespread school integration did not begin until a 1971 Supreme Court
case brought from North Carolina, Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board
of Education
,
allowed busing as a means of integrating schools in racially
segregated neighborhoods.
19
After Swann
,
some areas of both the South and
North achieved the highest levels of school integration ever seen in the 1970s
and 1980s. Chicago schools, however, would not integrate as successfully.
Because of “White flight” from the city to the suburbs, and from public to
private schools, Chicago’s Black and Hispanic students were left behind in
the city’s public school system. Unlike districts elsewhere that experienced
“successful” integration, Chicago public schools, the largest school district in
Illinois, seemed to give up. In 1980 the student population of Chicago public
schools was approximately 18 percent White, 60 percent African American,
and 14 percent Hispanic.
20
These changes in Chicago were typical of what
happened in large urban school districts across the United States (see table
2.1) and would have a major impact on the life chances and life trajectories
of the Black and Hispanic youth left behind.
On September 24, 1980, the U.S. Justice Department filed a lawsuit
against the Board of Education of the City of Chicago in which it alleged
that the Board “operated a dual school system that segregated students on the
basis of race and ethnic origin in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of
the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution and Titles IV
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“And We Are Not Saved”
25
and VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”
21
The investigation found that school
attendance zones had been gerrymandered to perpetuate segregation. They
also charged the Chicago school board with underutilizing White schools
while using mobile classrooms to ease overcrowding in Black schools. Ac-
cording to a
Washington Post
report, “Federal officials found that the school
board had bused 300 children out of a severely overcrowded Black South
Side school to another all-Black school four miles away. A largely White
school sat less than two miles away with six empty classrooms.”
22
In addition, the lawsuit accused the Board of tracking students to create or
maintain segregation; maintaining racially segregated branches of schools;
race-matching teachers and staff to students; allowing White students to
avoid assigned schools when their race was in the minority in favor of atten-
dance at other schools where Whites were the majority; and lastly, associating
segregated schools with segregated housing projects.
23
This was said to have
happened over a “substantial period of time and in a substantial portion of
Chicago public schools”; continuance of these policies would result in the
Board operating in violation of the U.S. Constitution, thereby causing “im-
mediate, severe and irreparable harm.”
24
After extensive negotiations, a consent decree was entered requiring the
Board to desegregate as many schools as possible, “considering all the circum-
stances in Chicago,” and to provide supplemental resources for any majority-
Black or -Hispanic schools that remained segregated.
25
Like the Brown v.
Board of Education II
decision, this legal remedy provided no specific goal-
posts or enforcement provisions. The predictable result was lackluster and
Table 2.1
Racial Demographic Data on Pre-K Through Twelfth-Grade Students in the
Largest U.S. Public School Districts, 1987–2009
New York
a
Los
Angeles
Houston
Philadelphia
1990–
1991
2008–
2009
1987–
1988
2008–
2009
1987–
1988
2008–
2009
1987–
1988
2008–
2009
White
19%
n.a.
17%
9%
16%
8%
24%
13%
Black
38
n.a.
18
11
42
28
63
61
Hispanic
35
n.a.
57
73
39
61
9
17
Asian
8
n.a.
8
6
3
3
3
6
Total
943,969
589,311
625,073
191,708 200,225
194,698 159,867
Source:
National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), Common Core of Data (CCD), “Public Ele-
mentary/Secondary School Universe Survey,” 1987–1988, 1990–91 (version 1a), and 2008–2009 (ver-
sion 1b) for New York, Los Angeles, Houston, and Philadelphia.
a
New York data was unavailable for 1987–1988 and 2009–2009. Data for 1990–1991 was available as an
early comparison to the other largest U.S. public school districts.
26
Unequal City
halfhearted actions.
26
The Board’s minimal efforts in the 1960s, the 1980s,
and the early 2000s did little to redress the unequal racial and spatial order of
Chicagoans’ residential and educational lives. As detailed in table 2.2, segre-
gation has exponentially increased in Chicago in the last thirty years.
Since 2009, when a federal judge lifted the thirty-year-old consent decree
ordering desegregation in Chicago public schools, the Board has not faced
any legal requirement to improve the situation. This means that the school
system is no longer required to try to achieve greater racial balance in the
schools by busing or allocating school slots by racial demographics. The deci-
sion to lift the consent decree has exacerbated segregation by further restrict-
ing equal access to the city’s selective enrollment and magnet schools. Cur-
rently, fewer than 10 percent of school-age White students in Chicago attend
public high schools, and the majority of those attending public schools are
enrolled in the city’s better-resourced magnet schools.
27
The remaining popu-
lation of White students attend private and parochial schools inside and out-
side the city limits.
This is the context in which then-CEO of Chicago Public Schools Arne
Duncan (now the U.S. secretary of education) proposed a plan to restructure
the spatial organization of public schooling in Chicago. The stated goal of
this plan, launched in 2004, was to replace “underperforming” schools with
100 new high-quality elementary and high schools with innovative learning
approaches by the year 2010.
28
Chicago’s “Renaissance 2010” program—
which was designed to increase the “portfolio” of options (curricular, loca-
tional, and so on) that parents and students could choose to enhance their
educational experience and further their educational trajectory—has drasti-
cally reshaped the city’s educational landscape.
29
But the new availability of
“school choice” also shut students and parents
out
of options; familiar neigh-
borhood schools were closed, combined, and put on notice. The Renaissance
2010 plan, like court-ordered desegregation before it, led to some children
having to journey farther from their home neighborhoods to attend school.
The impact of this overhaul in education on young people’s school lives
was intensified by a simultaneous change in their residential lives, especially
those youth who resided in public housing. In 1999 the U.S. Department of
Housing and Urban Development approved the “Plan for Transformation”
developed by the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA). This effort, costing
over $1 billion, called for the demolition and replacement of eleven high-rise
housing developments and the rehabilitation of 10,000 units in low-rise and
senior housing facilities. In addition, nearly 38,000 families were given Hous-
ing Choice Vouchers to seek residences in the private rental market with the
assistance of a government subsidy.
30
The youth who were directly affected by
the CHA Plan for Transformation were tasked with moving from extremely
distressed environments to settle in neighborhoods that were still impover-
ished, still hypersegregated, and still perceived to be unsafe.
31
In fact, families
Table 2.2
Racial Demographic Data for Chicago Schools, Pre-K Through Twelfth Grade, While Under the Desegregation
Consent Decree, 1987–2009
1987–1988
1990–1991
1993–1994
1996–1997
1999–2000
2002–2003
2005–2006
2008–2009
White
54,276
48,367
46,834
44,108
42,970
40,515
33,945
37,488
13%
12%
11%
9%
10%
9%
8%
9%
Black
251,705
236,914
227,604
227,852
226,611
221,221
204,664
196,200
60%
58%
56%
49%
52%
51%
49%
47%
Hispanic
100,741
110,707
121,343
135,206
147,705
159,284
158,270
172,106
24%
27%
30%
29%
34%
37%
38%
41%
Asian
12,126
11,994
12,848
13,370
13,731
14,236
13,361
14,862
3%
3%
3%
3%
3%
3%
3%
4%
Total
419,537
408,830
409,499
469,098
431,750
436,048
420,982
421,430
Source:
National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), City of Chicago, School District 299, Common Core of Data (CCD), “Public Elementary/
Secondary School Universe Survey,” 1987–1988, 1990–1991, 1993–1994, 1996–1997, 2002–2003, and 2005–2006 (version 1a) and 1999–2000
and 2008–2009 (version 1b).
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28
Unequal City
who moved from housing developments to Black communities like Engle-
wood, where Harper High is located, reported greater fear and greater vio-
lence in comparison to those families who lived in traditional CHA develop-
ments. For most families required to move, the relocations were rushed,
proceeded without any substantive mobility counseling, and were often out
of sync with public school schedules.
32
Not surprisingly, this housing instability led to greater school instability.
The young people who had to move were sometimes able to continue in the
same school, but many were forced to move far from both their residential
and educational communities. Also perhaps unsurprisingly, these moves cor-
related with school disengagement. One study of CHA youth conducted at
the same time as this research found that one in three teens were academically
off-track—that is, not in the appropriate grade for their age.
33
Although these
extensive changes in school and housing policies were instituted to increase
educational opportunity and enhance quality of life, they often dramatically
upended the lives of youth in ways that policymakers did not anticipate.
These transformations have changed both the physical and mental land-
scapes for hundreds of thousands of youth in Chicago. Attending high school
is one of the primary reasons—sometimes the only reason—that young peo-
ple leave their racially and socioeconomically cloistered home environments;
paradoxically, for other students who attend the school as local residents it is
the reason they remain ensconced in their environment. So school, as an in-
stitution that structures life experiences and interactions, becomes even more
important than the neighborhood.
34
Many of the students whose stories are
told in this book leave the land of the “have-nots” to be educated with the
“haves.” Some “haves” and “have-nots,” meanwhile, get their education in
their respective advantaged or disadvantaged quarters. Finally, there are oth-
ers who leave nice neighborhoods where they attended private or parochial
schools to join the “haves” and the “have-nots,” who hail from their respec-
tive residential neighborhoods, to learn in selective public schools with no
attendance boundaries, like Payton Prep, or neighborhood schools with a
rigorous curriculum accessible via application, like Lincoln Park. Thus, these
young people daily navigate a racially ordered “geography of opportunity”
wherein the resources for improving school and life chances are meted out by
race, class, and zip code.
35
Understanding the danger and conflicts they in-
evitably encounter along the way requires a closer look at the spatial politics
of the city they call home.
The Segregated City
Chicago is a racially stratified city, a place where employment trends, housing
policies, and school conditions have long revealed and perpetuated the divide
“And We Are Not Saved”
29
between Whites and African Americans. The stark chasm between what used
to be the towering Cabrini-Green housing projects and the glittering wealth
of the “Gold Coast” on Michigan Avenue, just one mile east, is one of the
better-publicized examples of the separate and unequal worlds that African
Americans and Whites generally inhabit in “the Second City.”
36
According to
recent evidence, this ethnic divide is only becoming more pronounced as the
city’s diversity increases, with growing populations of Hispanics and Asians
and increasing gentrification of the city center.
Class also divides the city of Chicago. Well-marked physical and social
boundaries shape the perceptions and experiences of the people who live
within them. From the early work of Robert E. Park, St. Clair Drake, Horace
Cayton, and Gerald Suttles, through the groundbreaking efforts of William
Julius Wilson, researchers studying Chicago’s social ecology have shown that
concentrated poverty marks many neighborhoods, sealing their status and
determining their access to resources. The maps reproduced here and the
large-scale survey results I discuss are all drawn from Chicago neighborhood
and public high school data collected by the Consortium on Chicago School
Research (CCSR).
37
The CCSR data, which are mapped to depict the levels
of concentrated poverty as measured by the percentage of adult male unem-
ployment and the percentage of families living below the poverty line across
the city, underlie a later discussion of the distribution of perceptions of injus-
tice.
Even without intimate knowledge of Chicago neighborhoods, anyone
looking at map 2.1 can clearly see the stratification of poverty by neighbor-
hood and the great overlap between ethnicity, poverty, and place. Neighbor-
hoods that are predominantly African American, such as Englewood and
Greater Grand Crossing on the South Side (community areas 68 and 69, re-
spectively) and West Garfield Park and East Garfield Park on the West Side
(community areas 26 and 27, respectively), have many more inhabitants who
are unemployed and living below the poverty line, as denoted by the darker
shades of those areas on the map. The inhabitants of the neighborhoods on
the North Side and Southwest Side, which have the lightest shading, have
lower levels of poverty and unemployment. The flags on the concentrated
poverty map depict the four public high schools in this study—Lincoln Park
(7), Payton (8), Tilden (61), and Harper (67).
Several outlier communities make the larger neighborhood patterns even
more striking. On the North Side of Chicago, the Uptown and Logan Square
community areas have moderate to high levels of poverty, but their popula-
tions differ from their surrounding communities by ethnicity (more African
American and Hispanic), by housing stock, and by resources for the mentally
ill and the formerly incarcerated.
38
Neighborhood isolation or contiguity also
matters. Logan Square (community area 22) is adjacent on the north to the
30
Unequal City
n
m
n
m
n
m
n
m
o
76
51
25
2
28
7
55
6
70
61
49
30
8
24
10
4
56
15
19
3
71
17
23
22
53
69
54
66
5
46
75
16
29
12
72
67
68
1
52
44
65
43
31
73
58
74
64
13
11
63
50
60
42
57
21
27
14
9
33
48
38
77
32
35
41
40
59
26
45
62
20
39
34
18
47
36
37
Lake
Michigan
K
Map scale: 1:250,000
0
4
Miles
Legend
Composite measure of % male unemployment
(over 18) and % of families below the
poverty-line by quang415le classificag415on
n
m
Community Area Boundaries
Public High Schools
higher poverty
and unemployment
–0.40
to
–0.11
–0.10
to
0.41
0.42
to
1.75
–1.16
to
–0.41
Map 2.1
The Concentration of Poverty in Chicago by Community Area
Source:
CCSR data, 2001.
more impoverished West Side neighborhoods, while Uptown (community
area 3) is an island of concentrated poverty in comparison to neighboring
areas that are less impoverished and have higher employment rates.
39
Accord-
ing to a recent report on Chicago’s long-standing segregation by race and
class, “Ten of the city’s seventy-seven community areas have poverty rates
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“And We Are Not Saved”
31
above 40 percent”; conversely, “ten others have poverty rates below 10 per-
cent.”
40
The racial stratification across neighborhoods is inextricably linked with
the geographical class divisions in the city. The same report notes that in
thirty-two community areas fewer than 10 percent of residents are African
American (and twenty-seven of those are fewer than 5 percent African Amer-
ican). Moreover, 52 percent of the city’s Black population “lives in only 20 of
Chicago’s 77 community areas—neighborhoods that are each more than 90
percent Black.”
41
A stark geography of inequality operates as a social force
and a social product—that is, as both cause and consequence. This visual
representation of social inequality reveals the bounded nature of residents’
lives and hints at the degree of socialization involved in navigating Chicago’s
spatial divide.
42
The city’s geography also includes sharp social-psychological divisions.
Map 2.2 shows the CCSR school survey respondents’ perceptions of safety
across these same areas of Chicago. The neighborhoods with the lightest
shading are those considered the safest; the majority of the neighborhood
areas that are considered the least safe (darkest shading) overlap with the
communities that have higher levels of concentrated poverty. The flags de-
note public high schools (excluding charter, contract, and special education
schools) to demonstrate the various locations and densities of educational
institutions across the various neighborhoods.
Two of the four items in the perception of safety scale concern students’
assessments of their safety while in their school’s classrooms and hallways.
The other two ask about their perceptions of insecurity outside of school and
while traveling to and from school. The data can be interpreted in several dif-
ferent ways. On the one hand, crime levels are in fact higher in many of the
neighborhoods that students perceive as very unsafe.
43
On the other hand,
these same neighborhoods also usually include a high police presence that
does not always translate into its residents feeling safer.
44
In fact, greater
numbers of police in a neighborhood can lead to a stronger feeling of insecu-
rity. Safety means different things to different people, particularly to young
people of color who disproportionately feel harassed by the police.
In Chicago, neighborhoods that are mere miles away can be worlds apart
with regard to their residents’ perceptions and experiences. Chicago residents’
“divergent social worlds” rest heavily on their starkly contrasting resources
and opportunities, which particularly shape their experiences with crime and
policing.
45
Thus, the time and energy accorded to achieving safe passage is
also stratified by race, place, and circumstance.
Students’ perceptions of safety and their actual exposure to violence and
crime are heightened when they cross social and symbolic boundaries. Those
who live in a city learn certain things about how to “stay safe” in their neigh-
borhood. There, they may know the problem areas and even the problem
32
Unequal City
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76
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25
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37
Lake
Michigan
K
Map scale: 1:250,000
0
4
Miles
Legend
Student percepg415on of personal safety
inside and outside of school and traveling
to and from school by quang415le classificag415on
feels very unsafe
n
m
Community Area Boundaries
Public High Schools
5.27
to
5.59
5.06
to
5.26
4.38
to
5.05
5.60
to
7.04
Map 2.2
Perceptions of Safety Among Surveyed Chicago Youth
Source:
CCSR data, 2001.
people, but that knowledge is missing when they pass through less familiar
places. Over time students on their way to and from school may acquire
some knowledge about those passages, but the sheer amount of instability
and mobility inevitably exposes them to places whose rules they do not know
and where they may not resemble the residents.
“And We Are Not Saved”
33
Formation and Reformation in Chicago Schools
Although the most idealistic portrayal of schools holds them up to be institu-
tions where students are inculcated with democratic ideals and academic
knowledge, in reality schools have a variety of other functions as well. They
socialize students to mainstream societal norms and promote social integra-
tion across and within groups. They also create and reinforce social hierar-
chies.
46
Schools require that students interact with both peers and authority
figures whose identities and experiences may either be similar to theirs or be
the total opposite. What students take from these encounters indelibly shapes
their perceptions of both the larger social world and themselves.
Schools have long been understood as places of “formation,” which pro-
vide knowledge and skills to further the social and cultural development of
students, in contrast to places of “reformation,” such as workhouses and pris-
ons, which strive to correct individuals’ behavioral dysfunctions and to reha-
bilitate them and their standing in society. We as a country trust that schools
will shape our young; promote their social, intellectual, and emotional devel-
opment; and (in ways not often defined) prepare them for the experience of
being an adult. These tasks are considered so essential that for almost a cen-
tury school has been mandatory across the country.
47
In 2004 Illinois state
law mandated that children between ages seven and seventeen be enrolled in
school unless they had already received a high school degree or some equiva-
lent degree or were eligible for other exceptions.
48
The uniqueness in American society of a requirement applicable to every-
one—we must
all
attend school—makes evident the enormous trust our so-
ciety has in the public school system. It should also be clear that society as a
whole benefits when schools accomplish their missions of socialization and
acculturation. Students are taught to respect and obey authority, to follow
directions, to be on time and follow schedules, to meet deadlines, and much
more. Where those lessons are not learned, certain properties of reform
within educational institutions become apparent. The meaning of school
misconduct has expanded in the last two decades, and the consequences of
misbehavior, which may include detention, suspension, or expulsion, have
become increasingly severe.
49
Schools are a central mechanism influencing
the subsequent institutional paths taken by young people, whether toward
the labor force, toward higher education, or toward the prison system, and
young people daily experience and adapt to the universal carceral apparatus
present in these institutions.
50
After the home, school is the second-most-important place for socializa-
tion; at school we figure out who we are and how we are supposed to engage
with the rest of the world. Whether or not they were explicitly conceived that
way, schools thus act as structural forces. “Schools are not just places where
learning comprises how to read, compute, analyze, and synthesize informa-
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34
Unequal City
tion,” notes the sociologist Prudence Carter. “They are also key sites of social-
ization and cultural reproduction.”
51
The “powerful cultural dynamics” that
Carter sees as permeating our schools—such as teachers’ evaluations of stu-
dents’ language, style, and tastes in relation to the dominant culture—act in
concert with the social dynamics inherent not only in the curriculum but also
in students’ interactions with authority figures in the school as well as with
one another. Young people understand a great deal about their value, both
the value they assign to themselves and the value they believe others see in
them, by examining the state of their surroundings.
A school is generally assumed to be a safe haven, but depending on its lo-
cation, security and quality can vary enormously. Our nation’s most com-
petitive high schools, though not without their problems, are models of what
public education can achieve: they offer an astounding array of challenging
courses, training in music and art, and guidance that shepherds students into
the nation’s top colleges, all the while nurturing the social, psychological, and
emotional development of the future leaders of our country. The other end of
the spectrum seems like an entirely different universe: failing urban schools
are overused facilities stuffed with too many students, who are not stimulated
by the often meager intellectual offerings but are amply punished for acting
out. Nor do young people feel safe once they enter the highly securitized
space of an urban school.
Schools, in other words, are ambiguous places because of their multiple
meanings and purposes. Contemporary urban public high schools are simul-
taneously sites of both danger and refuge, places where adolescents negotiate
their identities, learn how to represent themselves to society, and manage
multiple external forces of social control. In effect, the societal microcosm
that schools represent can also be interpreted as a distortion of our society,
rather than as a true reflection of it. Schools, with their bell schedules, class-
room routines, and standard lunch and recreation times, are designed to re-
move the unpredictability at the heart of young people’s daily lives, to replace
uncertainty with consistency. We believe that such procedures will better
teach and socialize our children, but school—which should be an equalizing
force in American society—may also reproduce existing social stratification
by race, gender, class, and neighborhood.
52
Perceptions of Safety Among Chicago Youth
A central premise of this book is that schools and neighborhoods—and the
passages between them—are integral to shaping youth attitudes and experi-
ences. In addition, race, gender, and neighborhood also affect students’ views
of their own safety.
When students evaluate their sense of safety in the various places they visit
throughout their days, striking differences emerge among racial and ethnic
“And We Are Not Saved”
35
groups in Chicago schools, with African Americans reporting the most per-
vasive sense of danger (see figure 2.1). A clear majority of African American,
Hispanic, and Asian American students feel the least safe outside their school
environments. Nearly half of Blacks and Hispanics feel insecure while travel-
ing between home and school. Strikingly, a sizable number of students in all
racial groups, from 28 to 40 percent, feel unsafe in their schools’ hallways
and bathrooms. Finally, approximately 25 percent of African American youth
feel unsafe in their classrooms. And school is supposed to be a safe place?
Later chapters will address the distinctions in young people’s assessments
of school safety; here we examine the same survey measures with students’
school racial composition as the component of classification (in contrast to
the use of students’ race as the classifier in figure 2.1). The lines in figure 2.2
represent the responses of all students who attended a given type of school,
regardless of their individual race-ethnicity.
Once again, it is quite clear that a strong majority of students attending
Figure 2.1
Chicago High School Students’ Perceptions of Insecurity, by Race,
2001
Source:
CCSR data, 2001.
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
Outside
School
Home-School
Travel
Hall-Bathroom
In Classes
Black
Hispanic
Asian
White
36
Unequal City
schools that are predominantly (more than 85 percent) African American or
predominantly Hispanic feel unsafe outside those schools and when traveling
between home and school. There must be decisive factors shaping the environ-
ments around these predominantly minority schools and students’ passages
from home and school for them to be deemed very unsafe. In contrast, there is
a significant difference in perceptions of insecurity for young people attending
schools that are formally classified by Chicago Public Schools guidelines on
school racial composition as mixed (15 to 30 percent White) or integrated (30
to 45 percent White).
Gang activity, or at least the perception of it, is also critical to students’
assessment of school safety. Nearly half of surveyed students attending pre-
dominantly African American schools believe that more than 50 percent of
their peers were in a gang (see figure 2.3). Approximately one-third of the
students attending predominantly minority schools believe that more than
half their classmates are in a gang, in contrast to only one-fifth of those in
mixed-race and integrated schools.
These starkly different perceptions of their school environments raise an
Figure 2.2
Chicago High School Students’ Perceptions of Insecurity, by
School Racial Composition, 2001
Source:
CCSR data, 2001.
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
Outside
School
Home-School
Travel
Hall-Bathroom
In Classes
Hispanic
African American
Minority
Integrated
Mixed
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“And We Are Not Saved”
37
important question: what are the mechanisms and processes that shape stu-
dents’ perceptions?
Adolescent Geographies
Once young people begin high school, whether in Chicago or any other city,
they enter a stage when they are venturing farther and farther away from
home. This is the case not only because of the logistics of getting to school,
but also because adolescents are in the developmental phase in which they
seek exposure to more people and to varied experiences. Young people cross
all types of boundaries to attend school—racial and ethnic boundaries, gang
lines, and class barriers, to name only a few. What is more, the physical ter-
rain they are asked to cross is governed by various social norms concerning
where people should and should not go, how they should present themselves,
Figure 2.3
Chicago High School Students’ Perceptions of Gang Population,
by School Type, 2001
Source:
CCSR data, 2001.
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
African
American
Minority
Hispanic
Mixed
Integrated
38
Unequal City
and how they should behave. These journeys have consequences. The very act
of crossing boundaries—or just as important,
not
crossing boundaries—de-
termines for my study participants the people with whom they interact, their
experiences, and their perceptions of themselves and the world. A snapshot of
their journeys to four very different educational settings introduces us to
these consequences (see table 2.3).
F
OUR
J
OURNEYS
TO
S
CHOOL
A shrill alarm wakes Michelle every weekday morning. Grudgingly, she pre-
pares for her trek to Lincoln Park High School. If she does not get a ride from
Table 2.3
Distance Traveled by Chicago High School Students Between
Home and School, by School Racial Composition
Segregated
(Harper)
Predominantly
Minority
(Tilden)
Mixed
(Lincoln Park)
Integrated
(Payton Prep)
Short (less than
two miles)
Keisha
Michael
TB
David
Rina
Dewayne
Hunter
Joaquin
Louie
Andre
Gabrielle
Medium (two to
five miles)
Pink
Chris
Jackson
Max
Juan
Mike
Dre
Jasmine
Terry
Billy Pilgrim
Angelique
Jane
Tasha
Brianna
Carmen
Long (five miles
or more)
Jackson
Shay
Andrea
Boomer
Michelle
Janet
Angela
John
Amber
Freddy
Vanessa
Darrell
Alex
Source:
Author’s interviews and surveys, 2005.
Note:
The names of the students whose journeys to school are highlighted in this chapter are in
bold.
“And We Are Not Saved”
39
her aunt, who nearly always has to leave for work before Michelle has fin-
ished her morning routine, Michelle uses the “El,” the city’s aboveground
train system. She boards an eastbound bus that makes almost fifty stops, then
gets the Brown Line train at Belmont to travel south on Sheffield Avenue
through the tony, mostly upper-middle-class Lincoln Park neighborhood.
Michelle does not look forward to her daily journey, which takes an hour and
a half each way.
After attending a grammar school only a few blocks from her home in a
Northwest Side neighborhood that has changed from ethnic-White to majority-
Latino in the last two decades, Michelle misses her friends who continued on
to the area’s Catholic high school; she also deems Lincoln Park High unworthy
of the long commute. She says, “I have to wake up at, like, 5:15 and then get
out at 3:30 and then come home at, like, 5:00 PM. It’s like a whole day . . . a
waste.” Her strong distaste for traveling all the way across the city for school is
clear, but this ninth-grader has no choice in the matter. Michelle’s cousin went
to a top Ivy League school after graduating from Lincoln Park High, so her
Filipino parents are adamant that their daughter will fulfill their immigrant
dreams by following the same path. Lincoln Park acts as a guarantor of her suc-
cessful future.
Much farther south, on the other side of Chicago, Alex wakes up early
enough to leave his home by 7:00 AM. He begins his journey northward out
of his African American middle-class enclave neighborhood of Beverly to ar-
rive at Walter Payton College Preparatory High School, located just north of
Chicago’s downtown “Loop.”
Once Alex got the hang of his commute early in his freshman year, he be-
gan refusing a ride from his parents. “I sort of like taking the train a little bit
more than having my parents drive me everywhere ’cuz it gives me freedom
and I don’t have to be on their schedule,” he says. “I can do things on my own
without having to worry about, ‘Oh, I have to hurry up, I have five minutes
left to get out of the house.’” Alex relishes this small bit of freedom, but he is
always aware that he has to be cautious about what he does and how he acts
in certain areas. Alex never falls asleep on the train because he “sees everyone
as a potential attacker,” especially since one of his friends was mugged re-
cently. The Red Line connects the more racially heterogeneous North Side of
the city to the majority–African American neighborhoods south of the Loop,
straddling the path of Chicago’s Dan Ryan Expressway. Forty-five minutes
later, Alex exits the Red Line train at Clark and Division streets and walks the
few short blocks to his school, arriving just in time for first period.
Michael, an African American tenth-grader who attends Harper High School,
located in the often maligned, predominantly African American and low-
income West Englewood neighborhood, sometimes catches the bus when he
remembers to bring his pass, but usually walks the twenty minutes northeast
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40
Unequal City
to school on the edge of his own neighborhood. He has the luxury of sleeping
in until almost 8:00 AM, unlike his peers who commute to their schools on
the North Side.
Michael describes his block as quiet, with no drug dealers or violence; the
police are “around there every once in a while, but other than that, it’s all
good.” He never worries about anyone trying to mess with him; after living
in the area for five years, he mentions with obvious pride that he pretty much
knows everyone. Several of his grammar school friends attend Harper, and
they sometimes meet at the corner of Seventy-First and Wood Streets and
walk together. He has a strong attachment to his school and looks forward to
going each day. Michael adds that he would “rather go to school with people
in my community than go to a mixed-race school.”
Max, a ninth-grader with an easygoing demeanor, only needs about thirty
minutes between waking up and arriving at Tilden Career Community Acad-
emy. He would normally have a twenty-five-minute walk to school, but get-
ting a ride is much faster and safer. Max came to Chicago from Mexico a few
years ago, and he lives with his aunt, brother, and two cousins in a disputed
area between the territories of two warring gangs, the Black P. Stones, made
up mostly of Black youth, and the Razas, who are largely Hispanics. His aunt
began giving Max a ride even though he lives near the major bus route at
Forty-Seventh Street, which would drop him one block away from Tilden,
after his best friend was “jumped” (beaten up) by a number of guys at that
bus stop a few times. However, classmates affiliated with the Stones have
beaten up Max inside the school building. “By the bus stop is where more
Hispanics get jumped,” he tells me. “No, no, it’s not more,” he corrects him-
self, “it’s where
all
Hispanics get jumped. I know two or three people that
actually stopped coming to school because of that. They got too scared.”
By the end of his freshman year, Max is not as worried about being beaten
up, since he has gotten to know several members of the Black gangs—the
Black P. Stones and the Gangster Disciples—as well as what he calls “my own
kind” (Hispanics) in their respective gangs. Still, Max begins his day by step-
ping out of his aunt’s car, waving good-bye, and letting her know whether he
will need her to pick him up or will be taking his chances walking home with
his girlfriend.
Young people’s various journeys to school, like those of Michelle, Alex, Mi-
chael, and Max, expose them to different kinds of environments, raising their
awareness of their own social position and that of others. Instead of opening
up a new world of opportunity, traveling to a higher-ranked, better-resourced
school may present a student with evidence that the world he comes from is
worse than he thought. Instead of providing an escape from a bad area, the
commute may subject the student to greater scrutiny, surveillance, and vio-
lence—either physical or symbolic.
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“And We Are Not Saved”
41
Just as Michelle, Alex, Michael, and Max take different paths to begin
their school day—and as we will see, in large part precisely because of those
different paths—they will come to have very different understandings of the
world around them and of their place in that world. Schools become “bound-
ary objects,” or “organizational interfaces,” that make it necessary for adoles-
cents to develop and maintain coherence across their social worlds.
53
Under-
standing how this works requires that they systematically catalog the “key
mechanisms associated with the activation, maintenance, transposition or
the dispute, bridging and crossing of boundaries.”
54
The boundaries that young people cross and those that they construct
themselves give us insight into the few instances of agency they are able to
enact. Keisha, a tenth-grader at Harper High, is adamant about keeping to
herself. She recounted the following advice from a teacher and mentor at her
school: “Ms. J. will be like, ‘I told you everything will be all right, just stay to
yourself.’ She told me last year, ‘Don’t make new friends ’cuz they won’t do
nothing but get you in a whole lot of trouble.’ And that’s what I tried to do,
I stay to myself.”
55
Keisha’s words provide one portal to understanding how young people
adapt to the settings they must navigate each and every day. Keisha has put
boundaries up between herself and other people. She also thinks of “her
neighborhood” as the two blocks around her house. She tells me, “There’s
nothing for me outside.” Nevertheless, there are ways in which she trans-
gresses boundaries via her language and behavior. Keisha enacts a form of
“code switching”—that is, she approaches the distinct worlds of her high
school and her neighborhood by varying her self-presentation and language
to better negotiate these social worlds. Keisha believes that place is a causal
mechanism behind much of the behavior she witnesses in both contexts, es-
pecially the bad behavior. She emphatically states, “These kids are still gon’
act the way they act [bad]. This is Harper High, Englewood area! Kids are
outrageous here!” When I ask if she thinks that kids would act better if they
did not live in her area and moved to a different community, she replies:
Well, basically if they [were] out in the suburbs where none of this ghetto-ness
was happening, they’d be better. Or even if they was like me. (
pauses
) . . . I’m
from the [housing] projects, but I don’t show it, though. I could act normal in
here, but outside the school, I’m a totally different person. See, in school I
don’t come to play. I just come to do my work and wait for the bell to ring and
go home. Once the bell rings, I’m Ghetto-Keisha. I’m up outta here, for real.
I’m just out.
Keisha seems to take pride in her ability to straddle both worlds, showing
her serious, quiet side at school but also dealing with any issues in her neigh-
borhood by adhering to local mores. Her “world” is the few blocks between
home and school. In contrast to her thoughtful contemplation of others’
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42
Unequal City
worlds and experiences—“I need to go check out the suburbs and see how
they treat them out there, and then maybe I can put two and two together to
see what’s going on” (see chapter 1 epigraph)—she is preoccupied with man-
aging her own home and school worlds. When Keisha explains why she
avoids the daily fights that occur at Harper High and also does not venture
outside her home to hang out, the importance of her personal safety is clear:
“I’m just worried about a bullet, ’cuz a bullet ain’t got no name.” Therefore,
her strategy is to move from one context to the other as quickly as possible
while avoiding personal danger as best she can.
Keisha is not the only student in this study who routinely goes home im-
mediately after the bell rings at school, but this strategy has a different reso-
nance for the South Side students than it does for those attending the North
Side schools. When Boomer and Andre from Lincoln Park discuss the experi-
ence of the police telling them to move off school grounds, a listener does not
get the sense that they are in any imminent danger. In contrast, the students
attending Harper and Tilden have to understand the multiple dangers they
may face after the school bell rings.
As mentioned earlier, Max feels that waiting around for the bus or hang-
ing out on school grounds is unsafe for him and his fellow Hispanic students
because they are in danger of being beaten up by Blacks. By contrast, De-
wayne’s caution about hanging around after school highlights the danger he
might face from students who share his racial-ethnic background. “Like I
say,” he explains to me, “it’s good for you to go home after school than go
home
after
after-school.” I ask him why.
’Cuz you can go home
after
after-school and get jumped on [because] all the
kids is out of school. They won’t get in trouble for jumping on you ’cuz they
outta school [dismissed for the day]. It’s outta the school’s hands after that.
They won’t get in trouble for jumping on you. Now when the bell ring, they
can get in trouble ’cuz, like, they still on school premises and they still in
school until they make it home.
I cringe when I hear this. All of my interviews at Harper are taking place
in a back office of the library
after school.
Once his interview concludes, De-
wayne assures me that he will be fine, and he is in fact in class the following
day. But his explanation demonstrates why the Harper (and Tilden) students’
fears about remaining on school grounds once the dismissal bell rings are
profound and complex. The resentment some of them hold for the school
security guards and police officers who “hawk them” to go home (Dewayne’s
words) turns into longing if they are vulnerable to being “jumped on” once
the school day ends. This fear is also the reason for the reluctance of students
like Keisha and Dewayne to participate in after-school activities. They have
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“And We Are Not Saved”
43
thought about the danger of navigating from school to home during the off-
hours, when they would lack the protection of the crowd of students leaving
the school and the close watch of Chicago police officers, and decided that
the risk is not worth it.
However, Dewayne does not leave Harper High every day just to sequester
himself at home, as Keisha does. Instead, as he takes great pride in telling me,
he ventures all over the city instead of putting up walls. In fact, crossing
neighborhood lines has widened his perspective on how the world works and
given him greater options for both self-perception and behavior. Dewayne
has great disdain for the “bad kids” in his neighborhood. He knows that con-
text matters, so he uses his agency to change his context. This comes out
when I ask him whether he has any close friends, either at school or in his
neighborhood:
Dewayne: I don’t get too close to ’em. Never get too close to ’em. ’Cuz
they end up turnin’ they back on you when you really need ’em. Can’t
trust your friends all the time. Ain’t got no friends, got associates.
Author: Since you live in the neighborhood, do those “bad people”
influence you?
Dewayne: I don’t be around them. I travel. I get around. Out west, out
east, out north.
Author: By yourself?
Dewayne: Yeah. Ride my bike [south] to like, 105th. I go to my aun-
tie’s house up north. Just ride and see . . . I wanna see Chicago. Picture
the whole thing. Get around.
Like Keisha, Dewayne does not intimately associate with the other young
people around him. However, his closed social network creates an even stron-
ger urge in Dewayne to transgress the visible, durable, and salient spatial
boundaries that constrain him and others who both live and learn in homo-
geneous settings.
56
Unlike Dewayne and Keisha, the journeys of the students who travel every
day to Lincoln Park, Payton, or Tilden have eye-opening, rather than insulat-
ing, effects that shape their perceptions of safety. But no matter whether stu-
dents travel six miles or walk six minutes to attend school, safety is at the
forefront of their minds. They understand the role of place in shaping their
realities, but some do not have the benefit of using place to change their real-
ity in a positive way. Traveling to a higher-ranking, safer school in a different
neighborhood is one way of transgressing boundaries. But staying in your
own neighborhood to attend school, even if that school is not deemed high-
quality, can seem much safer than the alternative. The divergent paths and
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44
Unequal City
divergent outcomes of these young people reveal the great impact of physical
mobility on social mobility.
Conclusion
Chicago’s key structural institutions have long been permeated by deep racial
and spatial divides. From the beginning of the twentieth century to the pres-
ent, the city’s segregated residential neighborhoods have both positively and
negatively determined the life chances and outcomes of their inhabitants.
Correspondingly, its schools have weathered the shifts of populations of ra-
cial and ethnic groups, both within and beyond the city’s borders.
Chicago continues to be a “city of neighborhoods,” but its schools are no
longer neighborhood institutions. Schools need not be microcosms. Instead
of mirroring a city’s spatial concentration of poverty and inequality, schools
can upend those conditions by providing a space where racial, ethnic, and
class diversity is achieved. However, schools can also exacerbate existing strat-
ifications by further cloistering the young people who attend their neighbor-
hood school in segregated residential environs. This is why the large-scale
transformations of Chicago’s housing and educational stocks have made ado-
lescents’ adaptations to contemporary social realities even more intriguing to
researchers hoping to understand their perceptions and experiences. Students
now must incorporate new knowledge about neighborhoods and schools, as
well as navigate new social and symbolic boundaries that may include shift-
ing interracial residential boundaries or even intraracial gang boundaries.
It is imperative that students understand these social and symbolic bound-
aries if they are to achieve safe passage within and across neighborhood- and
school-based borders. For them, the lines of demarcation are stark. When
public policies—like school desegregation decrees and public housing demo-
lition and relocation programs—do not recognize the social realities of the
intended beneficiaries, these policies may make residents’ lives more chal-
lenging and present them with greater dangers. The following chapter ex-
plores in greater depth how Chicago public high school students experience
these institutionalized spaces.
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