Five Miles Away, a World Apart: One City, Two Schools, and the Story of Educational Opportunity in Modern America

How is it that, half a century after Brown v. Board of Education, educational opportunities remain so unequal for black and white students, not to mention poor and wealthy ones? In his important new book, Five Miles Away, A World Apart, James E. Ryan answers this question by tracing the fortunes of two schools in Richmond, Virginia--one in the city and the other in the suburbs. Ryan shows how court rulings in the 1970s, limiting the scope of desegregation, laid the groundwork for the sharp disparities between urban and suburban public schools that persist to this day. The Supreme Court, in accord with the wishes of the Nixon administration, allowed the suburbs to lock nonresidents out of their school systems. City schools, whose student bodies were becoming increasingly poor and black, simply received more funding, a measure that has proven largely ineffective, while the independence (and superiority) of suburban schools remained sacrosanct. Weaving together court opinions, social science research, and compelling interviews with students, teachers, and principals, Ryan explains why all the major education reforms since the 1970s have failed to bridge the gap between urban and suburban schools and have unintentionally entrenched segregation by race and class.

About the Author :
James E. Ryan is William L. Matheson & Robert M. Morgenthau Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Virginia School of Law. He is a former clerk to Chief Justice William Rehnquist. Ever since Adam Lofbomm pressed Record on his Fisher-Price recorder back in 1984, he's been bringing worlds to life in words. Over the years, his passion for language inspired him to read broadly, write extensively, speak publicly, perform on-stage and on-camera, but when he stepped into the vocal booth for his first narration job in Seoul, Korea, back in 2006, all those many pieces just clicked into place. He realized then and there that voice acting was what he was made to do. Over the last eleven years working as a professional voice-over actor, Adam has had the great fortune to collaborate with some of the best publishers and organizations in the world. Whether or not Malcolm Gladwell was right when he said that ten-thousand hours will make you world-class at something, Adam did stop counting after he surpassed that milestone in 2016.