This book, which had its origins in the Civic Capacity and Urban Education Project funded by the National Science Foundation and directed by Clarence Stone, examines the politics of race and education in four major U.S. cities—San Francisco, Los Angeles, Denver, and Boston. Each of these cities is multiracial, with substantial populations of Latinos and Asian Americans as well as African Americans and Anglos. The authors' objective is to determine how new ethnic interest groups fit into the politics of education reform, a politics that historically had focused on educational equity in the context of black–white politics.
Susan Clarke and her colleagues loosely use the concepts of urban regimes and two-tiered pluralism to discuss three key variables: interests, ideas, and institutions. Although the chapters are structured about common themes, the authors explicitly state that they are not constructing a comparative case study (p. x). Rather, they seek to illustrate a set of general points about the politics of education reform in multiethnic cities. They do so because some reforms and some issues are not considered part of the politics in all four cities. Equally important, the dependent variable—successful efforts by Asian Americans or Latinos to reform education—does not vary much across these cities.
The core of the argument is that institutions of education were reformed and redesigned in the 1960s and 1970s to address African American access to public education. This politics, fought out both in the courts and in the electoral arena, achieved some gains, but more importantly, spawned a set of institutional processes that incorporated the interests of African Americans into the education process. Similar successes for Latinos or Asian Americans are more difficult because the politics of ideas in education has shifted from concerns with equity to concerns with choice and performance. The dominant education reforms of the 1990s—site-based management, school vouchers, charter schools, and private partnerships—are concerned with maximizing choice as a means to facilitate better educational outcomes. The interests of Latinos and Asian Americans in equity concerns, as a result, generally lose out in this politics of ideas and are unable to gain access to the policymaking agenda. When these issues do get on the agenda, they are undercut by institutions that were designed under the old biracial regime. These institutions privilege equity concerns for African Americans but not for the new emerging groups. In the end, the authors are pessimistic about education reforms that might benefit Latinos or Asian Americans.
The rich detail of the case studies (often organized in summary tables in a nicely comparable way) provides much fodder for scholars of urban education seeking other explanations for urban politics. Some of the groundwork for such efforts is established by a set of explicit comparisons to six of the other seven cities in the larger study. Differences between the cities and African American–dominated cites (Atlanta, Baltimore, Detroit, and Washington, DC) and the urban machine cities (Pittsburgh and St. Louis) illustrate just how unique multiethnic politics is. Strikingly absent from these comparisons is Houston, one of the original study cities that is also multiethnic. Houston could have provided additional relevant data; its absence from the book is perplexing.
At times the authors appear to stop their analysis too soon. The convincing argument that Latinos and Asian Americans cannot get on the agenda is undercut by the simple assertion that they lack rhetorical capital. Is this not a tautology? Is rhetorical capital anything other than the ability to get on the political agenda? The absence of variation on the dependent variable is especially troubling in this regard since we do not have any counterfactuals for comparison.
While the combination of ideas, institutions, and interests makes a nice explanation for these four cases, one can imagine others that are equally compelling. The most logical alternative explanation is that Latinos and Asian Americans have been unable to gain sufficient political representation (or bureaucratic representation) to force their issues onto the agenda: “The relative absence of both Latinos and Asians from the education policy arena in these multiethnic cities and also their lack of policy influence were striking” (p. 12). Political representation seems to be both a more testable hypothesis and a more parsimonious explanation.
The institutional argument is also a bit troubling. If institutions reformed in response to African American political action are the problem for Latinos and Asians, why do these institutions not benefit black students? Data in the appendix show that African American students do poorly in all four of these districts. The authors allude to Wilbur Rich's argument about racial patronage and cartels, but do not fully explore this possibility.
In the end, the authors have examined four interesting cases of urban education politics. What we still do not know is how typical those cases are. Do Latinos fare equally poorly in Corpus Christi or San Antonio? Do Asian Americans face similar problems in Seattle or San Diego? But one should not criticize authors for not writing a book that they did not intend to write. Multiethnic Moments provides a rich set of hypotheses that could be tested with larger samples and different data sets. That is a valuable contribution to scholars and well worth the reading. A second major contribution that needs to be recognized is the utility of the book for classroom usage. The cases are engaging, and the analysis is accessible. The book has the potential to be useful in upper-division undergraduate classes in urban politics, race and politics, and education policy, as well as more specialized graduate classes.
