Join us on Monday, April 18th at 7pm for a discussion with Ansley Erickson on her new book, Making the Unequal Metropolis: School Desegregation and Its Limits. She will be joined in conversation by Yasmeen Khan.

Synopsis: In a radically unequal United States, schools are often key sites in which injustice grows. Ansley T. Erickson’s Making the Unequal Metropolis presents a broad, detailed, and damning argument about the inextricable interrelatedness of school policies and the persistence of metropolitan-scale inequality. While many accounts of education in urban and metropolitan contexts describe schools as the victims of forces beyond their control, Erickson shows the many ways that schools have been intertwined with these forces and have in fact via land-use decisions, curricula, and other tools helped sustain inequality.

Ansley T. Erickson is assistant professor of history and education at Teachers College, Columbia University.

Yasmeen Khan is an education reporter for WNYC radio, focusing on the New York City public schools. Some of the issues she has covered extensively include school overcrowding, transgender children, the heated debate over state testing and learning standards, and issues of inequity in the city’s more than 1,800 schools. In fall of 2015, she covered the nitty gritty of a plan to rezone two elementary schools near the Brooklyn waterfront, which raised underlying issues of race, class and gentrifying neighborhoods.