ABSTRACT
The neighborhood a child lives in matters. I demonstrated in Chapter 1 that some children live in low-opportunity communities, which impact their well-being and academic achievement. In this chapter, I describe the history of racially explicit government policies that have segregated metropolitan areas and public schools. While government agencies and businesses no longer practice many (but not all) of these policies, long-term effects have not been remedied. After presenting a history of these policies, I provide two case studies to link racist government policies of the past to current challenges confronting urban public schools. I am outraged to tell this story, but no urban principal should go to work without knowledge of how explicitly racist government policies created segregated neighborhoods and unequal schools. Today’s segregation is not the product of individual preferences of homeowners or happenstance, but instead explicit and racist public policies that have intentionally segregated every metropolitan area in the USA. This ugly history began more than 100 years ago and is why zip codes and neighborhoods matter so much for children and schools today. This history implores principals to think about how their schools can work with and for communities, rather than for pursuing narrow school reform agendas. This history is the fodder for community engaged leadership.
