Review: A 'Dream Town' struggles for equity in its schools, with mixed success

"Dream Town" seems like what happens when the marketing department is allowed to come up with a book's title.

Laura Meckler's nonfiction book is not about a town. Its events take place in Shaker Heights, Ohio. But we learn almost nothing about Shaker Heights — how large it is, whether it has much culture, what businesses are there, where people like to eat. Some of that would be nice, but the misleading title is not Meckler's fault. She wrote about schools and education, which apparently aren't sexy enough words to include in a title.

Subtitled "Shaker Heights and the Quest for Racial Equity," "Dream Town" opens with a couple of chapters about the Realtors who founded the Ohio city but, after that, it's about one privileged place's worthwhile, erratic efforts to integrate its schools.

Meckler is an award-winning education reporter for the Washington Post. Like all journalists, she knows the best way to tell a story is usually through its people. Each chapter in "Dream Town" is named after someone who played a major role in the fight for equity in Shaker Heights schools — parents, administrators, teachers and students.

"Dream Town" may skimp on descriptions, but the people emerge vividly through their extraordinary actions — like those of Reuben Harris Jr., a Black man whose daughter was falling behind and about to be demoted from her advanced middle school science class.

Sure that she could do the work, Harris came to her class and sat in the front row every day for six weeks, during which he observed both his daughter's behavior and that of the male teacher, whom Harris eventually helped see was unconsciously favoring students who were, like him, white.

That Meckler found that story, and others like that, is a tribute to her gifts as a reporter. Throughout "Dream Town," it's clear that she not only made a huge commitment to Shaker Heights (she lived there while reporting and grew up there), but also that she interrogated her own biases.

Meckler, who is white and upper-class, sought out people who could help her see past them. Hers is a micro approach — she interrogates educational equity by looking at how it's been handled over decades in one specific place — but it feels like she spoke with everyone and asked them everything.

Arranging the chapters by "character" leads to some structural issues — the chapters feel almost like individual essays and Meckler sometimes introduces someone we already know, as if she forgot they were in previous chapters. But it pays off because it helps us see the human costs to the community of not achieving, or getting close to, racial equity.

Meckler ends "Dream Town" on a hopeful note, but I'll be curious to hear if that's how readers interpret it when they read that, even in a fully integrated high school, classrooms remained divided by race.

The city seems like a best-case scenario, combining philanthropists with huge grants, scholars with great ideas and parents and students with hope and commitment. Yet in "Dream Town," Shaker Heights falls short again and again.

Dream Town

By: Laura Meckler.

Publisher: Henry Holt, 386 pages, $29.99.