A Political Education: Black Politics and Education Reform in Chicago since the 1960s by Elizabeth Todd-Breland (review)

Elizabeth Todd-Breland recognizes, in the early pages of A Political Education: Black Politics and Education Reform in Chicago since the 1960s, that "public schools are neither solely authoritarian state-controlled bureaucratic political spaces nor solely community spaces" (5). This point may seem commonsensical, but too frequently historians have approached education as if it was defined by, or as if it is possible only to study, one side of that formulation or the other. One of Todd-Breland's major contributions in this compelling, accessible, and important new book is to work effectively on both sides. She documents how schooling has been a venue and manifestation of black community struggle and theorizing, and then traces these struggles and ideas as they come into contact with and ultimately help transform the basic mechanisms of public education in Chicago. In the process, she reclaims the term "school reformer" from its recent association with (often white) billionaire dollars and their government and private allies. Chicago was home to generations of black school reformers who re-visioned education from the grassroots. Yet the outcomes were complex. Long-cultivated ideas about the "politics of black achievement" intersected with corporatist and neoliberal reforms in Chicago to create the landscape of educational CEOs, school closures, and charter school growth that the city sees today.

For Todd-Breland, the phrase "the politics of black achievement" represents "alternative Black self-determinist strategies for quality education that disrupted ideas of Black inferiority" (50). Recognizing that a commitment to autonomy binds black educational strategizing across the 1960s through the 1980s—more than any notion of public or private governance or particular pedagogical vision—Todd-Breland sets the stage to explain the complex, if not paradoxical, shifts in the decades that follow.

A Political Education is divided into two parts. Part I starts with a chapter showing how desegregation has been only one portion of black peoples' struggles for educational opportunity by recounting the "rise and fall of the desegregation paradigm" (11). Chapter two brings Chicago into the usually New York City-dominated conversation about "community control," or the struggle of black and Latinx communities for direct democratic control over their schools. Then turning to the history of independent black institutions—such as Carol Lee's and colleagues' Institute of Positive Education. Part I closes with a look at how black teachers organized outside of as well as within the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU). The CTU had a black majority by 1978, and it became a force in city politics, but separate black teacher organizations pushed for more radical action against racism and inequality in Chicago schools. "Black teachers sat at the pivot point of…divergent views of intraracial class dynamics," Todd-Breland writes (138). Her careful attention to the possibilities and tensions in teachers' identities as both workers and civil servants, especially for black workers in a city where municipal employment was a core source of stable employment, is welcome.

In Part II, Todd-Breland traces how each of the threads of the politics of black achievement explored in Part I come to relate to one another in new ways from the 1980s onward. Mayor Washington, Chicago's first black mayor, came to power in part because of unprecedented levels of participation by black voters, mobilized in part for political participation via the CTU. Having helped secure a mayoralty, teachers then lived to see how his mayorship exposed "the tensions between a politics of racial representation and a politics of progressive transformation" (144). Under Washington, the politics of black achievement converged with the neoliberal order (220), including turns toward school choice and waves of reorganization and school closures. The builders of black institutions, like Carol Lee of IPE, found in corporatebacked reforms openings for new autonomy in the form of a charter school, and thus found themselves both aligned with forces they usually opposed and opposing some...