*Guinea Pigs in an Urban Laboratory*
In her new book, Unequal City, Carla Shedd looks at race, schools and perceptions of injustice through the eyes of young people…
EduShyster: I want to start by giving everyone a moment to order your amazing new book, Unequal City. Waiting…Waiting… OK. Here we go. You did something highly unusual in your book: you looked at how major policy changes in education and housing over the past two decades in Chicago have impacted kids. And you did that by actually interviewing kids. Where did you get such a crazy idea?
Carla Shedd: That was a big goal of mine, to really place kids at the center and think about how they understand these larger transformations in their lives. So often we have the numbers or we have snapshots of particular parts of the process and how kids are faring. But we really don’t listen to young people, and we never put their voices at the center of the conversation. How often are the people who are most impacted by these policies able to truly have a voice? In the book I argue that these young people are the city’s guinea pigs. They’re a walking experiment in an urban laboratory.
EduShyster: Talk a little about that experiment. Everyone knows about the school closings in Chicago, but as you show, the education reform experiment in the city starts much earlier and overlaps in really significant ways with the transformation of public housing.
Shedd: You have the demolition of public housing and the issuance of housing vouchers, so that you have people moving to the south suburbs or the western suburbs. All of that’s happening as Renaissance 2010 was being implemented, starting in 2004 under Arne Duncan. So you have schools closing and being consolidated at the same time that populations across the city are being resettled. It’s amazing the way that these two policies collide and dovetail with one another, and yet no one is really putting the multiplicative effect together. It’s the way these policies interact that truly shapes and reshapes the lives of the most vulnerable people. EduShyster: Can I just acknowledge that this is the first time the word *multiplicative* has appeared on this page? Reading your book, one gets the strong sense that Arne Duncan et al probably didn’t think about the policies they were implementing from the point of view of kids navigating neighborhoods.
Shedd: That was probably the most enlightening part of my research: seeing the *Guinea Pigs in an Urban Laboratory* | EduShyster:
