E-book: Death of a Suburban Dream: Race and Schools in Compton, California

"Policymakers and historians alike will find valuable context here for contemporary educational debates. In what could have been a top-down, policy-heavy narrative, Straus does a beautiful job of humanizing Compton's troubled past with the use of oral history interviews and accounts from the black press that never appeared in the Los Angeles Times. For anyone invested in the future of public education, Straus's elegant rendering of these stories will serve as a haunting call to action." (Sarah Thuesen, American Historical Review) "Compton is a remarkable American story. A suburb that started white and modest, it convulsed its way toward racial diversity and now represents a new norm of American suburban life-fiscally strained, majority minority, struggling for survival. In this extraordinary journey through Compton's history, Emily E. Straus interweaves the structural and the local, showing how Compton and its schools fell victim to a vicious cycle of debt and despair. Anyone who cares about why our public schools are faltering should pay attention to this story." (Becky Nicolaides, University of California, Los Angeles) "Death of a Suburban Dream is a unique contribution to our understanding of the interplay of place and education with community and politics in the United States. Straus embeds the history of Compton schools and of educational reform firmly within a spatial analysis of suburban Los Angeles. She shows how past decisions, not only about schools but also about what kind of community Compton residents wanted, now limit the possibilities of reform by residents, politicians, and educators as they confront a dysfunctional system. The book will be of interest not only to metropolitan historians and historians of education, but to anyone interested in civil rights and the history of African Americans and Latinos in the American West." (Eric Schneider, author of Smack: Heroin and the American City) "Death of a Suburban Dream explains how Compton transformed from a blue-collar suburb into an emblem of African American poverty and violence. With meticulous research and engaging prose, Emily E. Straus offers a sweeping account of this singular suburb's rise and fall, as well as the educational system that contributed to both." (John Rury, University of Kansas)