In Structuring Inequality: How Schooling, Housing, and Tax Policies Shaped Metropolitan Development and Education, Tracy L. Steffes brings together and builds on urban and metropolitan history, education history and policy, and American political development literatures to explore how metropolitan inequality was structured, contested, and naturalized throughout Chicagoland during the latter half of the twentieth century. Steffes offers a capacious portrait of public policy that reasserts the role of state government in literatures that often center federalism or localism. Via her analysis of public policies and legislative actions, she argues that state policies, both through action and inaction, helped shape and perpetuate spatialized racial and economic inequality throughout metropolitan Chicago.

The book unfolds chronologically, with the first section focusing on how metropolitan inequality was forged between 1945 and the mid-1960s, analyzing the role of state government and demonstrating how its policies on school district organization, governance, and funding structured a highly fragmented and inequitable landscape of public education and local governance across the city of Chicago and its suburbs. Next, Steffes explores the policy battles from the late 1950s through the 1970s in which liberal reformers pushed for school desegregation, fair housin