The Children in Room E4: American Education on Trial - Hardcover

In a country long divided by race and class, Susan Eaton set out to see if separate can ever really be equal. She immersed herself for four years in one of the best all-minority schools: Simpson-Waverly Elementary,which has been declared a Blue Ribbon school by the Bush Administration. Located in Hartford, Connecticut, the poorest city in the wealthiest state in the nation, it is a glaring example of the deepening educational disparity found across the country— in cities like Detroit, Miami, Newark, Providence, St. Louis,Milwaukee, and Fresno.

In the style of a documentary filmmaker, Eaton follows Simpson-Waverly’s star student, his classmates, and their extraordinary teacher in a school that is racially isolated, overburdened, and cut off from mainstream society. She reveals the long odds against the success of even the brightest students and the way cities like Hartford have become ghetto-ized.

Meanwhile across town, Eaton follows an intrepid team of civil rights lawyers as they fight a legal battle to end the enduring segregation that beleaguers not only Simpson-Waverly but hundreds of other schools around the nation. In this groundbreaking account, Eaton goes inside the classroom and the courtroom to disclose the unsettling truths about an education system that is leaving millions of children behind.

Susan Eaton, an award-winning journalist specializing in education, is the research director at the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard, where she received her doctorate in education policy.