Book Reviews 218 and Transformative Leadership for Sustainable Futures into a new book that invites educational practitioners and theorists to speculate on—and craft visions for—the future of environmental and sustainability education. This will be another volume in the Wageningen Academic Publishers series on the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development, with support from the Dutch National Program for Education for Sustainable Development. In this research project, we wish to explore what educational methods and practices might exist on the horizon, waiting for discovery and implementation. How might the collective project of imagining alternative futures help us rethink environmental and sustainability education institutionally, intellectually, and pedagogically? How might we use emerging modes of critical speculation as a means to map and (re)design the future of environmental and sustainability education today? We seek to explore how environmental educators and education policy makers can engage in imaginative mapping concerning large scale, global processes, as well as create useful, situated knowledge for dissemination within their respective socio-ecological contexts. Choosing Homes, Choosing Schools Annette Lareau and Kimberly Goyette, editors (2014). New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 328 pages. $49.95 (paperback); ISBN 978=0=87154-496-4. This edited book brings together studies of residential segregation and school choice, making the important point that processes in both areas combine to generate the inequalities that are increasingly visible among public schools in the United States. Part I deals mainly with residential patterns, beginning with a careful overview of the racial segregation literature by Maria Krysan, Kyle Crowder, and Michael Bader. Paul Jargowsky contributes an analysis of how race and class combine to produce segregated outcomes, each one operating partly independently of the other. Anna Rhodes and Stefanie DeLuca explore residential choices for disadvantaged households. Their qualitative interviews in Mobile, Alabama, provide new evidence of how constrained the choice set is for these parents. Despite their recognition of the importance of good schools and their desire to provide greater opportunities for their children, their actual housing searches are limited by instability and frequent moves. When there are options for attending a non-local school, factors other than school quality—such as how to coordinate children’s schooling with parents’ work schedules, or where there is a relative who can assist with before or after school care—are primary. Annette Lareau’s chapter in Part II provides more information about how schools are taken into account as parents decide on residential locations. Her research team interviewed parents in three suburban school districts, including both white and black households and people with a variety of class positions. She found that Book Reviews 219 choices were largely based on personal knowledge (keeping many working class families close to the neighborhoods where they had lived before) and social networks (which were more wide-ranging and informative for middle-class families). Other chapters give more emphasis as to how schools are chosen. Salvatore Saporito and Caroline Hanley probe the patterns of private school attendance, focusing on the well-known finding that whites are more likely to select a private school if they live in a more racially mixed setting. This relationship was relatively weak in 1970, when many districts operated separate schools for white and black students, but emerged clearly by 1980 and it has remained strong in subsequent decades. Shelley McDonough Kimelberg’s chapter in Part II reports on the other side of the coin: decisions of middle-class parents in Boston to remain in public schools and forego the option of moving to the suburbs. She describes how parents evaluated the risks of attending a city school, the upside potential of doing well and gaining admission to the coveted Boston Latin School, and their sense of the options if things turned out badly. Another chapter by Mary Patillo, Loree Delale-O-Connor, and Felicia Butts uses personal interviews to look into how less advantaged families approached schooling decisions. In Chicago, where charter schools are a viable alternative to public schools, they found that many parents chose the neighborhood public school by default, unaware of their options. The majority of charter school parents that they interviewed, in contrast, had actively used information sources, learned the procedures, and even...
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Open Access
Mar 3, 2024
Gijs Harm Westra 
