Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in Post-Civil Rights America.

SEGREGATED SCHOOLS: Educational Apartheid in Post-Civil Rights America. Paul Street. New York: Routledge, 2005. 222 pp. $19.95. Paul Street draws our attention to what it means for the United States to have turned its back on Brown vs. Board of Education and Plessy vs. Ferguson. This alarm has been raised in many recent critical theory and literacy publications, but Street's scholarly passion gets the point across to a broader American public. His accessibility and sense of style make this book a compelling account of what it means when sociocultural arrangements can too conveniently interrupt the process of how we make sense of ourselves.

He succinctly describes how national legislation plays out in the everyday agendas of schoolchildren and their families. In an arena rife with ill-informed attempts to distract our attention away from the hard-won, hard-fought gains in human rights, we have succeeded in harvesting an indifference to black reality. But Paul Street's pedagogy is definitely on the side of hope; his advice is sound and theoretically grounded. He challenges us to consider the fate of democracy and pushes our thinking about the shameless legacy of educators who have been severely deprofessionalized by national agendas that push narrowly defined psycholinguistic processing skills.

This book should be required reading in university coursework that aims to uncover dialogic threads of relationships among pedagogy, content, and philosophy. Street's persuasive arguments serve as a potent reminder that we must consider the reality of education and apartheid in America in the year 2006. Reviewed by Joanna Marasco, Assistant Professor of Education, Graduate Reading Program, Barry University, Miami Shores, FL