In the Crossfire: Marcus Foster and the Troubled History of American School Reform John P.Spencer. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012.

Abstract

In the Crossfire: Marcus Foster and the Troubled History of American School Reform John P. Spencer. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012.When Oakland Public Schools superintendent Marcus Foster was assassinated by the Symbionese Liberation Army on Election Day 1973 because they incorrectly believed he was attempting to place police officers in schools, he left a legacy of achievement and success in urban education rarely equaled before or since. As a teacher, principal, and associate superintendent in Philadelphia and as the first African American superintendent of Oakland Public Schools, Foster forged alliances among disparate community interests and raised academic achievements in two of the most polarized and challenging urban educational environments in the country. With a new biography, In the Crossfire: Marcus Foster and the Troubled History of American School Reform, John P. Spencer chronicles Foster's professional career while simultaneously using his successes and struggles as a front-line educator to comment on the last half century of American educational reform. For Spencer, the issues Marcus Foster struggled with on a daily basis as an educator-issues which incorporated sociological, pedagogical, political, and economic concerns-are the same issues which have bedeviled recent school reform efforts. Foster's achievements, therefore, illuminate both the possibilities and limitations of present-day attempts at reforming public education.Spencer begins with an examination of Foster's own schooling, first in the Philadelphia public schools and then at Cheney State College where he was certified as a teacher, one of the few professions relatively accessible to working class African Americans in the de facto segregated schools of the mid-1940s. After a year teaching in rural Maryland, Foster landed a job near his old neighborhood in South Philadelphia, returning to the urban educational environment just in time to witness the effects post World War II racial liberalism was beginning to have on urban schools. Spencer views these effects, and much of Foster's career, through the prism of the tension between early racial liberalism, with its belief that integration and high expectations for all could suffice to advance academic achievement and social mobility among the poor, and a latter view which saw the apparently intractable connection between race, poverty, and academic underachievement as symptomatic of larger sociological, political, and economic issues of inequity. At its core...this book is about the tension between stories of educational uplift and analyses of entrenched inequity (17).That much of Foster's early career centered on emphasizing the former, the connection between high expectations and high achievement, should come as no surprise Spencer suggests. Foster's often difficult path to the highest levels of his profession was a textbook example of what was possible even in challenging environments when parents and schools successfully instilled in children not only the necessity of academic achievement but also the belief that such achievement was within their abilities. …