When I began my student teaching experience in 2016, I started at a charter school in a Boston neighborhood. In discussions with the teachers about the unique issues they faced in their school community, many commented on the chronic tardiness and absenteeism due to the long commutes many of their students had. Many students chose to commute daily through the insanity that is downtown Boston transportation, by bus, by train, by car, by foot. Some students I talked to said their ride into school was usually more than an hour. All of these kids, and their families, made the conscious decision to add onto the daily stress that is high school mainly because they didn’t want to attend their neighborhood school, and wanted to pursue opportunities in the charter school system. I always found it depressing that they were not confident they could get a high-quality education in their own communities.

DeRoche helped me put a name to this practice: Controlled Choice. While not perfect, it’s still better than the alternative, DeRoche claims: attendance-zones drawn arbitrarily by school officials, often excluding people of color or those who are in the lower class. While I was aware of the level of segregation occurring nationally in our cities, DeRoche clearly articulated and visualized these issues in a digestible and logical way. Utilizing the term “educational redlining,” DeRoche compares how today’s practice of drawing street-level boundaries for school attendance zones essentially recreates maps that are eerily similar to those that were used 60+ years ago to discriminate against minorities when it came to home mortgages. Many often share similar shapes to counties affected by gerrymandering! These archaic practices are some of the main contributing factors to the inequality in public education in our country’s largest cities, an inequality based largely on race and social class.

DeRoche writing style is clear and digestible through, and I was easily able to access this content throughout the text. Usually I get lost in the statistics, numbers, and legal issues surrounding topics such as this, but I found the entire book approachable and understandable. The strongest aspect of this work is that rather than simply outlining all of the elements that are wrong with the current system, DeRoche addresses what can be done to approach solutions. He acknowledges that his recommendations will not fix the system overnight, but will start to move the cogs in the bureaucratic machine.

After reading this book, I’ve found myself thankful that in my current district, we utilize a lottery system rather than these discriminatory attendance-zone doodles. Like many cities across America, the disparity between neighborhoods, even streets, as DeRoche proves, can be alarming. While this issue is not immediately relevant to my community of students or my district (at the moment), I have been excited to find ways to integrate what I’ve learned into my curriculum. I plan on using this when I teach A Raisin in the Sun -- since we already discuss redlining, this is the perfect way to make students more knowledgeable about what is happening in other cities close by in 2020. I have already suggested this book to two of my colleagues in two separate departments, and will continue to do so.