Tracy Steffes

This project explores the city of Chicago and its diverse suburban landscape to analyze the role of public schooling in shaping metropolitan inequality and deepening its larger social consequences in postwar America. It asks three main questions: first, what role did the state play in structuring educational opportunity and inequality over time?; second, how did schooling, particularly these spatially located educational inequalities, shape and differentiate property value, politics, and local development strategies across the metropolitan landscape?; third, how did these metropolitan-wide patterns of educational inequality reshape the politics and ideology of American education and compound racial and social inequalities in an era of growing formal equality?