An interview with Laura Meckler, author of 'Dream Town: Shaker Heights and The Quest For Racial Equity,' about her Ohio hometown.
of the history and hagiography of her hometown, which perhaps is the nation’s most-scrutinized case study for school desegregation. But Meckler’s sharp eye on Shaker Heights has a new resonance in the culture wars of today: in a way, the town’s efforts were a well-meaning but deeply imperfect effort at what today would be wrongly derided as wokeness.We're both from Northeast Ohio and, for a lot of folks, Shaker Heights is the gold standard in racial progress.
That's the million-dollar question. There are a lot of kids who have come from families with far fewer resources than others and are really struggling with life. I hope so. I think that Shaker is really trying, but I don't know. It's partly about what's in the curriculum, but in some ways those are the easier things. How do you make a mom who doesn't feel like she fits into the P.T.O. because nobody there looks like her? It takes work on the part of everybody in that room.
One good example is the superintendent who led the district towards the first busing plan. His original plan was a one-way busing plan that took Black kids out of the predominantly Black schools and sent them to other schools. White people in the community agreed that it was unfair to have it one-way and volunteered their kids to be part of a two-way busing plan. And that was what was adopted. I don't know if I would call that superintendent an accidental racist.
And also my childhood, I would add. That is why we care. It matters about resources and having kids all have access to high-quality education. It matters for our individual development of who we are and preparing us to live and work in a diverse country. If you talk to graduates of Shaker, people who are from here, people who still live here, they will almost uniformly tell you that they see the world in a different way because they grew up with people who are different than they are.
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