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A lifelong resident of Baltimore, Md., Sondheim was appointed to the city's school board in 1948. He didn't think much of local and state laws that required "separate but equal" -- segregated -- schools for whites and blacks. By 1954 he was the board's president, and finally got his opening: the U.S. Supreme Court ordered schools to desegregate. Sondheim called all the board members and told them what he was going to do, and then the next day he did it. "It was the first item to vote on, so I asked for discussion and then for the vote," he remembered later. "The whole thing didn't take 45 seconds, and then we went on to the rest of the day's business." That made Baltimore's schools the first district south of the Mason-Dixon line to desegregate, but the state school board president wasn't happy and tried to overturn the decision. He told the man "that he could come to Baltimore and try to unscramble the egg that we had scrambled if he wanted to," Sondheim recalled. After the board's decision, a cross was burned on Sondheim's lawn, but "He wouldn't back off," said former Maryland Gov. William Schaefer. "He wouldn't step aside. He wouldn't do anything except what was right. I've never known a man with so much integrity in my life." Sondheim's impact on education -- and Baltimore -- didn't end there. He led the redevelopment of the downtown area, and then chaired the governor's panel on school performance, which led the nation in demanding improvements in education, holding schools accountable for their performance. In 1995, at the age of 86, he was appointed to the state school board, and three years later ended up as the board's president. Sondheim died February 15 in Baltimore from pneumonia. He was 98. From This is True for 11 February 2007 Suggestions for further reading:
 By: Osha Gray Davidson List Price: $19.95 Amazon Price: $13.57 Editorial Review: In a vivid portrait of a relationship that defied all odds in 1960s North Carolina, Davidson tells how C.P. Ellis (a poor white member of the KKK) and Ann Atwater (a poor black civil rights activist) went from being each other's worst and most hostile enemies to forming an incredible, long-lasting friendship. By placing this very personal story into broader context, Davidson demonstrates that race is intimately tied to issues of class, and that cooperation is possible--even in the most divisive situations--when people begin to listen to one another.  By: Gary OrfieldSusan E. Eaton List Price: $19.95 Amazon Price: $19.95 Editorial Review: Dismantling Desegregation explains the consequences of resegregation and offers direction for a more constructive route toward an equitable future. By citing case studies of ten school districts across the country, Orfield and Eaton uncover the demise of what many feel have been the only legally enforceable routes of access and opportunity for millions of school children in America.  By: Matthew D. Lassiter List Price: $21.50 Amazon Price: $21.50  By: James Fraser Amazon Price: $58.13 Editorial Review: Students come alive when dealing with primary sources. Yet no current History of Education text supplies primary source documents. Fraser’s unique text is a documentary history of education in the United States and can save the instructor from doing a good deal of photocopying. It consists of primary source documents which illustrate and map the establishment and evolution of education in America. For example, the text includes documents such as Beecher’s “Essay on the Education of Female Teachers,” “A Nation At Risk: Report of the National Commission on Excellence in Education,” and selections from Dewey’s School and Society and Holt’s How Children Fail. Introductions and explanations frame the primary sources to help students understand the background and context of the documents. The book can be used as a main or a supplemental text at either the undergraduate or graduate level.  By: Charles T. Clotfelter List Price: $20.95 Amazon Price: $20.95 Editorial Review: The United States Supreme Court's 1954 landmark decision, Brown v. Board of Education, set into motion a process of desegregation that would eventually transform American public schools. This book provides a comprehensive and up-to-date assessment of how Brown's most visible effect--contact between students of different racial groups--has changed over the fifty years since the decision. Using both published and unpublished data on school enrollments from across the country, Charles Clotfelter uses measures of interracial contact, racial isolation, and segregation to chronicle the changes. He goes beyond previous studies by drawing on heretofore unanalyzed enrollment data covering the first decade after Brown, calculating segregation for metropolitan areas rather than just school districts, accounting for private schools, presenting recent information on segregation within schools, and measuring segregation in college enrollment. Two main conclusions emerge. First, interracial contact in American schools and colleges increased markedly over the period, with the most dramatic changes occurring in the previously segregated South. Second, despite this change, four main factors prevented even larger increases: white reluctance to accept racially mixed schools, the multiplicity of options for avoiding such schools, the willingness of local officials to accommodate the wishes of reluctant whites, and the eventual loss of will on the part of those who had been the strongest protagonists in the push for desegregation. Thus decreases in segregation within districts were partially offset by growing disparities between districts and by selected increases in private school enrollment. |
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