In 2022, Erika Kitzmiller, term assistant professor of education, published her first book, The Roots of Educational Inequality: Philadelphia's Germantown High School, 1907-2014. Since then, Kitzmiller’s book has received significant praise from other scholars in several academic publications, including the Journal of American History, the Journal of Urban Affairs, Planning Perspectives, and Teachers College Record.
Alexander Urbiel reviewed Kitzmiller’s book for the Journal of American History and referred to Kitzmiller’s work as “unique and compelling” and praised the way her “interdisciplinary approach provides a nuanced look at how inequality was built into the system and maintained.” Urbiel also argued that the book “deserves a wide audience” and “provides a model for studying other urban school systems across the twentieth century.” Reviews in the Journal of Urban Affairs and Planning Perspectives both praised the book’s main thesis and Kitzmiller’s take on “rethinking common declension narratives in the history of education.”
Back in June 2022, the Teachers College Record reviewed Kitzmiller’s research and highlighted that the book does important work, providing “multiple types of evidence to support racism, classism, and governmental neglect of the very schools that should typify American democracy.”
In The Roots of Educational Inequality, Kitzmiller examines Germantown High School over the course of the 20th century, within the context of Philadelphia’s political, economic, and racial developments, in order to show how “the convergence of class, race, and space generated a system of unequal access to educational resources and reinforced a system of racial and economic segregation” from the school’s founding onward.