The Metropolitan Community
Partnering for Equality Across the Educational Divide
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Published: July 2025
9781975507459
$42.95
Publisher: Myers Education Press
6" x 9"Language: English
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
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
Reviews & Endorsements:
“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