I'm not sure the recommendations in this book would work for everyone or all school districts. I will say that if you're someone who thinks that there is equality in educational access in the United States, this book might shock you. For that reason, I think it's worth reading.

Education equality and why it doesn't exist and never will, is the discussion of this book. An informational and eye-opening book about how public schools manipulate and use location to keep kids from lower income neighborhoods from attending. Not state specific, but across the country. Horrific and heart breaking that because of a family's financial level, children who may or may not have potential, just don't even get a fair chance from the beginning.

As an educator, this hit a little too close to home. I hope people read this book to see what teaching in public school is really like. Thanks to the publisher for an advanced copy of the book in exchange for my opinions.

Are you ready to feel completely enraged at our public school systems while being enlightened about the gross injustice that is legally allowed to fester? The author dives deep into the confusing and serpentine system of boundary lines, housing prices, and school ratings that provide loopholes for redlining. In a time when we speak out about democracy and equality, the author shows that we have a long way to go.
Various practices are keeping poorer students out of the schools where they would flourish and instead places them in schools with outdated textbooks and overcrowded classrooms. Shifting boundary lines make the process for even finding a spot in a desirable school impossible to guarantee, even if you move to the "right" neighborhood. Reading this book made me think of the media I've consumed detailing NYC families completing robust application packages to get their (sometimes not even born yet) children into prestigious preschools. The hoops an average family is expected to jump through in order to find a spot in one of the better public schools are just as ridiculous and hard to understand.
I left this book feeling not just angry but befuddled. Why do we allow this? And more to the point, why isn't this an ongoing conversation? As this book shows, simply voting for more school funding isn't the answer, especially when that funding isn't equally distributed. There are deeper, more entrenched issues that we need to examine and bring to the light. Surely, if more people had an inkling of the unfairness behind placement within the more desirable schools, they, too, would be clamoring for action.
As others have mentioned, the author does not discuss solutions apart from instructions on reaching out to your representatives. I would have liked to have seen this addressed, because that boiling anger led to a desire to take some real action. However, hopefully enough other people will read this book that it will become widespread knowledge, and then we will start to see some real change.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for a complimentary advance copy. This did not impact my review.

This is a timely nonfiction book that reviews the distracting of the public schools in America. Despite the passage of laws to require an equality and desegregation in our schools, so many systems are based on the tax base in the area that the children live. This is a frank discussion of the factors that still enable discriminatory policies to occur and even be defended. Some schools have strict lines based on where people live, other schools are more by “choice”. The unfortunate outcome of so-called choice that we have seen locally is that our families can choose between schools within a system or even the opposite system. So, for instance, there is one system that is smaller and city based, where the choice is at the elementary school level and then all the schools filtering into the same middle and high schools. The other system is a county based system where there are single schools divided by grade so the kids are part of the same system throughout and all exposed to the same schools.
The issue is that the choice may not truly reflect a choice if the reason to choose a less successful school is proximity to home so the child can walk to school versus the best elementary school or the county alternative. This process that is presented as a choice makes the elementary levels much more segregated with all the kids being together after the 5th grade.
Finding a quality education that balances integration with a solid curriculum and great teaching is incredibly difficult. I found this book to be one of several books about education in America that I’ve come across recently and this one did not disappoint. Highly recommend if you are interested in the bias inherent in our public schools right now.
#AFineLine #Netgalley #RedtailPress

This was a really excellent book - so well written. A Fine Line by Tim DeRoche did a fantastic job of bringing this redlining/school attendance topic to light, and explaining it in a way that's easily understood to a broad range of people.

The content is definitely alarming and unsettling, but it's necessary to illuminate it so we can make the needed changes for this country. Informative and insightful, this book is a wonderful in-depth look at the legality of school attendance zones within school districts (and how that prevents some students from accessing higher-performing schools).

Thank you to Redtail Press for the advanced copy in exchange for my honest opinion.

The author discusses about how attendance lines are one cause of American schools are resegregated due to race and class. He goes into some possible ways to remedy the achievement gap in American schools and how to give every child who lives in an area with some great schools and horrible schools an equal chance to go to an equal school. He also talks about how some families actually buy into a neighborhood that has excellent public schools, even paying a premium in order to send their child to a particular school. I have experienced this first hand with the school district that I grew up in had a reputation for excellent schools, making it harder to find affordable housing in that area. Some of the former public housing apartment communities were converted into market rate homes making it harder for a lower income person to find a home in that area. My parents were lower middle class and if they had moved into that area today they may not be able to afford a home in that area.

A Fine Line by Tim DeRoche is a nonfiction work full of case studies across the country. It tells the sad but true story of public education and how low income zip codes cannot get access to the same level of education. This book is eye opening and it is an important read. I was not surprised at all by any of it, having taught at a public school in both the lowest income area and the highest income area of the same city. The differences are astronomical. I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher with no obligations. These opinions are entirely my own.

This book really opened my eyes to the issues facing different public schools and was very interesting. Infuriating at times, but interesting as well.

While the content and topic of this book are both interesting and timely, the writing is oddly casual and often awkward in reading. Its lack of seriousness does not suit the weight of the topic at hand.

This book was a very well thought out and well-researched look at attendance zones and their effect on segregation and the ability of students to attend high-performing schools. This book also looked at laws that would allow for a challenge to these kinds of districts. As a teacher, I don't agree with all of the author's remedies but do believe that all students should have access to a high-quality school.

Very good book and one that parents and educators alike need to read and digest. DeRoche lays it out in plain language what is happening to our educational system as far as the have’s and have nots. It is disheartening to see this happening in our neighborhoods. All children deserve a chance to excel.
Thanks to netgalley and the publisher for an ARC in return of an honest review.

In The Thin Line, DeRoche describes school segregation within urban school districts due to unfair, and often ridiculously drawn, school attendance zones. While he gives compelling examples of how poor and especially racial minority students are prohibited from attending the "best" public schools even if these schools are the closest to students' homes geographically, his "solutions" to the problem are weak and tired. Of course, most readers will find the examples of discrimination based on address DeRoche describes shameful and unfair, and I agree. However, I'm tired of listening to non-educators claim charter schools as the savior of our education system. Fix the failing schools, and stop promoting "public" charter schools that profit from taking away funding from traditional public schools. I'm not saying that public schools have no responsibility here, but if you're going to write a book about the problem, you'd better have at least one damned good solution.

I received an ARC from NetGalley and Redtail Press in exchange for my honest review.

Sixty-six years after the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case changed the face of segregated schools, it turns out that not all that much has really changed to equal the playing field for our children's educations. Arbitrary lines are now being drawn to edge out the already under-privileged families.

The facts presented in this are disheartening to say the least and seeing the attendance zone maps is disturbing. How is this something that is still being allowed in 2020?

I would not only recommend this book for your library collection, but I urge everyone to read it themselves.

This was book was equal parts interesting, infuriating, and puzzling. It makes a very convincing argument that both district boundaries and within-district school boundaries serve to keep poor children out of elite schools, distort housing markets (by $100s of thousands of dollars for houses in "good" school areas), fall afoul of equal protection under the law, and lead to outrages like school districts hiring investigators to spy on families and verify addresses and parent being charged with felonies for wanting to send their kids to a goo school. By taking examples from numerous cities it shows that many (most?) of these boundaries are based on redline housing boundaries created to prevent minority communities from receiving home loans! And often kids from poor communities are prevented from going to successful schools that are actually closer to their homes.

The last third of the book was a discussion of the types of legal arguments and counterarguments that might be successful in State and Federal courts. This might be interesting if you're a policy or constitutional law junkie but was less compelling for me.

The author clearly convinced me this was a major issue, so I was surprised that he spent little time on solutions. He only briefly discussed the idea of district-wide lotteries as have been used for places in charter schools. The other interesting thing was that this was continuously framed as an issue of poor and minority students being unfairly excluded from high performing schools and relegated to low performing schools. But he spent no time at all exploring how to improve low performing schools, which seems like it would make the districts issue moot. Admittedly, I don't know anything about the science or politics of school performance, but it was a curious omission.

An interesting read about a troubling US injustice.

Wow, it's a little eerie that this book would come out at such a time as this. I stumbled on this information shortly before finding this book. It feels like it was something that's always been intuitively known, but it's a very different thing to see the historical reasons why.

I really enjoyed this book. I learned a lot and it was very illuminating. It highlights inequities in our public school system that I hadn't really thought too much about. Really opened my eyes to these disparities in our educational system. Something has to change in public education. The system is rapidly becoming unsustainable.

A Fine Line raises many questions and gives food for thought. It is a book meant to be read and digested slowly.

Interesting, but dry, read about state and district school attendance zone policies and how they conspire to keep poor and minority students out of the best public schools. DeRoche shows how New Deal-era redlining helped contribute to these policies. What's missing is any discussion of the part played by inequitable state and district funding formulae, which is at least as much of a problem in the public school systems.

We still live in a country where zip code can determine destiny. A Fine Line explores the educational system and how zoning lines can determine the quality of opportunity. This is a book for policy makers, educators, and parents alike.

Many thanks to NetGalley, the publisher, and the author for providing me with a copy in exchange for an unbiased review.