O'Neill Professor of American Politics wins prestigious book award
The Crucible of Desegregation: The Uncertain Search for Educational Equality, written by O’Neill Professor of American Politics R. Shep Melnick, has won the Jeffrey R. Henig Award Best Book on Education Politics and Policy Award, bestowed by the American Political Science Association’s section on Education Politics and Policy.
R. Shep Melnick (Chris Soldt)
Melnick received the award, named for the Teachers College-Columbia University professor emeritus of political science and education, at APSA’s annual conference, held in Vancouver from September 11-15.
It’s the second consecutive year that a Boston College political science faculty member captured the honor: Associate Professor Michael Hartney’s first book, How Policies Make Interest Groups: Governments, Unions, and American Education, was the 2024 winner.
Combining legal analysis with a focus on the interactions between federal judges and administrators, Melnick’s 2023 volume examines the evolution of federal school desegregation policy starting with the 1954 United States Supreme Court’s landmark decision, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, through the termination of desegregation orders in the first decades of the 21st century.
“Few topics in American K-12 education are as contentious and consequential as school desegregation,” said Ursula Hackett, chair of the APSA’s Education Politics and Policy section, and a professor at the University of London. “Drawing on a wide array of sources—from judicial decisions to agency documents, legislative histories, and local case studies—Melnick brings unmatched clarity to one of the most complex education policy stories of the last century.”
Hackett noted that the book exemplifies a vital tradition in political science: historical and institutional analysis, careful weighing of competing arguments, and deep engagement with pressing policy disputes.
“In an era when our field increasingly prizes quick answers and flashy methods, The Crucible of Desegregation reminds us of the enduring value of scholarship that is historically grounded, analytically balanced, and normatively important.”
Melnick said he was pleased and humbled by the honor.
“It’s unusual for members of the same department to win the best book award two years in a row, especially a small department such as ours,” he said.
Reviewers praised the book as impactful and balanced.
“Melnick’s even-handed approach to the school desegregation era offers insights into what went right and what went wrong on a very important set of policies,” wrote Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute and nonresident scholar at Georgetown’s McCourt School of Public Policy, in Education Next.
David L Kirp, a professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, characterized The Crucible of Desegregation as a “tour-de-force…meticulously researched, elegantly written, scrupulously fair-minded.”
According to Melnick, through Brown v. Board, the U.S.—having long emphasized education as the path to upward mobility—essentially designated school desegregation as the driver for racial equality, and over time it became the impetus for expanding the civil rights state.
“In the U.S., we have long been willing to tolerate income inequality if we think it’s based on an individual’s efforts or degree of success,” said Melnick in a November 2023 Boston College Chronicle interview. “In doing so, we’ve put enormous stress on our schools to level the playing field. We created elementary schools before European countries did, for example, and we’ve spent more on education than most other countries—but with worse results.”
One of the major obstacles facing school desegregation and other reforms, argues Melnick, is that education is a highly decentralized process that relies to a large extent on local control, and is difficult to change from the top down—especially when there are far-reaching social and economic factors that stretch well beyond the school grounds.
“If school desegregation did achieve some meaningful successes, at the same time it revealed more complicated issues to deal with in our education system than racial discrimination. For example, is it ‘discrimination’ if some kids begin school with a sound basis in reading because their parents read with them when they were little, whereas the parents of other kids couldn’t? Or if one family has the resources to hire private tutors for their kids, and another doesn’t?
“The fact is, there are severe inequalities present before kids even start school, so some will go in with advantages others lack, and desegregation by itself is not going to solve this.”