Study by SU School of Education’s Gerald Grant contrasts educational environments in two American cities

Study by SU School of Education’s Gerald Grant contrasts educational environments in two American citiesMay 04, 2009Patrick Farrellpmfarrel@syr.edu

A new book by Gerald Grant, Hannah Hammond Professor of Education and Sociology Emeritus in Syracuse University’s School of Education, offers a compelling study of urban social policy that combines field research and historical narrative in lucid and engaging prose. The book, “Hope and Despair in the American City” (Harvard University Press, 2009), presents an ambitious portrait-sometimes disturbing, often inspiring-of two cities, Syracuse, N.Y., and Raleigh, N.C., that exemplify the nation’s greatest educational challenges, as well as a passionate exploration of the potential for school reform that exists for America’s urban schools today.

In the book, Grant argues that the Raleigh community has benefited from a policy of integration by social class that occurred when the city voluntarily merged with the surrounding suburbs in 1976 to create the Wake County Public School System. He contrasts this with developments in the Syracuse community during the same period.

Before coming to Syracuse, Grant was education editor and a writer on the national staff of The Washington Post (1961-67), a Nieman Fellow (1967-68) and a postdoctoral research fellow in the sociology department at Harvard University. Under grants from the Carnegie Foundation, he coordinated a five-year study of experimental colleges and reform movements published as “The Perpetual Dream: Reform and Experiment in the American College” (with David Riesman, University of Chicago Press, 1978), which won the Borden Award of the American Council on Education.

Grant’s “The World We Created at Hamilton High” (Harvard University Press, 1988) is a sociological history of an urban high school. His book “Teaching in America: The Slow Revolution” (Harvard University Press, 1999), with Christine Murray, won the Virginia and Warren Stone Prize.

He also has been a senior associate at the National Institute of Education, a Spencer Fellow of the National Academy of Education, and a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.

Additional information about this publication can be found at http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/GRAHOP.html?show=catalogcopy.