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The Schenley Experiment: A Social History of Pittsburgh’s First Public High School (Keystone Books)

Amazon.com Price:  $16.90 (as of 16/04/2019 07:11 PST- Details)

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Description

The Schenley Experiment is the story of Pittsburgh’s first public high school, a social incubator in a in large part segregated city that used to be highly—even improbably—successful all the way through its 156-year existence.

Established in 1855 as Central High School and reorganized in 1916, Schenley High School used to be a model of innovative public education and an ongoing experiment in diversity. Its graduates include Andy Warhol, actor Bill Nunn, and jazz virtuoso Earl Hines, and its prestigious academic program (and pensions) lured such teachers as future Pulitzer Prize winner Willa Cather. The subject of investment in addition to destructive neglect, the school reflects the history of the city of Pittsburgh and provides a study in both the most productive and worst of urban public education practices there and across the Rust Belt. Integrated decades before Brown v. Board of Education, Schenley succumbed to default segregation all the way through the “white flight” of the 1970s; it rose again to prominence in the late 1980s, when parents camped out in six-day-long lines to sign up their children in visionary superintendent Richard C. Wallace’s reinvigorated school. Despite the fact that the historic triangular building used to be a cornerstone of its North Oakland neighborhood and a showpiece for the city of Pittsburgh, officials closed the school in 2008, citing over $50 million in vital renovations—a controversial event that captured national attention.

Schenley alumnus Jake Oresick tells this story through interviews, historical documents, and hundreds of first-person accounts drawn from a community indelibly tied to the school. A memorable, vital work of local and educational history, his book is a case study of desegregation, magnet education, and the changing nature and legacies of The united states’s oldest public schools.

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