Schooling the Metropolis: Educational Inequality Made and Remade, Nashville, Tennessee, 1945-2000

Ansley T. Erickson

My project traces how metropolitan and school policy furthered educational inequality even as extensive desegregation ostensibly sought to challenge it. As Nashville, Tennessee, a consolidated city-county metropolitan government and school system, achieved relative statistical success at desegregation, the district also built deep inequalities into how it desegregated. Understanding the roots of this inequality in political, economic, and spatial change highlights how schools were actively involved in the construction of metropolitan inequality. Federal, state, and local policy choices shaped and maintained inequality by privileging local economic elites and white suburban communities while neglecting black urban residents. Support from the NAE/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship, will allow me to expand my treatment of one central figure – Nashville civil rights attorney Avon Williams – who exemplifies local awareness of the interrelationship between federal, state, and local policy in education, urban renewal, and real estate development. Incorporating the later decades of the 20th century brings Nashville’s transformation from a biracial to a multiracial city into the story of educational inequality, while also examining political struggles over funding education as the district’s student population shrank and became gradually more poor.

About Ansley T. Erickson

Ansley T. Erickson is a historian who studies educational inequality in the United States, focusing particularly on the interaction between schooling, urban and metropolitan space, and economic change. Currently Assistant Professor of Cultural Foundations of Education at Syracuse University, Erickson will be Assistant Professor, History and Education, at Teachers College, Columbia University, as of September, 2011. Erickson’s dissertation, "Schooling the Metropolis: Educational Inequality Made and Remade, Nashville, Tennessee, 1945-1985," reveals how private and public agendas for economic growth and spatial transformations in the city shaped educational inequality by race and class despite the district's relative success at statistical desegregation. "Schooling the Metropolis" was awarded distinction and nominated for the Bancroft Dissertation Prize. Erickson has articles forthcoming in the Journal of Urban History and Dissent, has reviewed books for the History of Education Quarterly, and is a contributor to the Encyclopedia of African American History, Joe W. Trotter, ed. Erickson has won fellowships from the Spencer Foundation, the Eisenhower Institute, and the Mrs. Giles A. Whiting Foundation, as well as several research and travel grants. As a teacher, Erickson focuses on helping students connect historical perspectives to current education policy debates. Previously, Erickson taught history and conducted ethnographic research in New York City schools and was a project manager at two national school reform organizations. She also has experience in historical documentary film and public history consulting.