America's segregated and highly unequal education system is, as they say, like the weather: Everybody talks about it, but nobody doesn't anything about it. The people of Shaker Heights Ohio have tried to do something about it. And, to their immense credit, they keep trying.
Their decades-long quest for racial equity, in the schools and the community, is the subject of "Dream Town," a book by Washington Post reporter Laura Meckler. It's exhaustive, digging deep into the city's history. And it's intimate, drawing on Meckler's status as a native of the city and an alumna of its schools.
Importantly, it's fundamentally a book about people. Meckler tells her story through the experiences of housing activists, students, parents, teachers and administrators, school board members and others.
"In trying to understand why Shaker turned out this way when so many other places did not," she writes, "the stories I found most compelling were of everyday extraordinary people who showed a commitment to their values with their actions."
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