Many urban school systems that have long served majority low-income students of color deliberate over how to best attract and retain middle-class and professional families, who are typically White. At the same time, advocates pressure school districts to change admissions policies that exacerbate racial and socioeconomic segregation in cities across the nation. However, these deliberations approach students as the objects, rather than the subjects, of educational policy. No Magic offers a much-needed intervention in the field by centering the experiences, interactions, and perceptions of students in diverse educational settings.

While advocates and policymakers focus upon school zones and student assignment policies, students and educators must grapple with the lived realities of racially diverse learning environments. The book draws on six years of ethnographic data with kindergartners, sixth graders, and high school students in New York City. New York’s dual status as one of the most liberal cities and the one of the most segregated school systems in the nation has long preoccupied advocates, policymakers, practitioners, and researchers. I use observations of classrooms, community meetings, and public protests, together with interviews, to foreground how young people experience diversifying learning environments.

Underlying diversity debates is the question of what constitutes educational justice: not merely what we have long expected of public schools, but if and how they can be different. I argue that if we wish to address Du Bois’s observation that “other things are seldom equal,” we must examine the hidden, racialized curriculum of both educational policies and classroom interactions. No Magic demonstrates that if we want to address educational inequality, we must fundamentally rethink how we “do school.”