The Resegregation of Suburban Schools


Book Description

"The United States today is a suburban nation that thinks of race as an urban issue, and often assumes that it has been largely solved," write the editors of this groundbreaking and passionately argued book. They show that the locus of racial and ethnic transformation is now clearly suburban and illustrate patterns of demographic change in the suburbs with a series of rich case studies. The book concludes by considering what kinds of strategies school officials and community leaders can pursue at all levels to improve opportunities for suburban low-income students and students of color, and what ways address the challenges associated with demographic change.




The Resegregation of Suburban Schools


Book Description

"The United States today is a suburban nation that thinks of race as an urban issue, and often assumes that it has been largely solved,” write the editors of this groundbreaking and passionately argued book. They show that the locus of racial and ethnic transformation is now clearly suburban and illustrate patterns of demographic change in the suburbs with a series of rich case studies. The book concludes by considering what kinds of strategies school officials and community leaders can pursue at all levels to improve opportunities for suburban low-income students and students of color, and what ways address the challenges associated with demographic change.




Creating the Suburban School Advantage


Book Description

Creating the Suburban School Advantage explains how American suburban school districts gained a competitive edge over their urban counterparts. John L. Rury provides a national overview of the process, focusing on the period between 1950 and 1980, and presents a detailed study of metropolitan Kansas City, a region representative of trends elsewhere. While big-city districts once were widely seen as superior and attracted families seeking the best educational opportunities for their children, suburban school systems grew rapidly in the post–World War II era as middle-class and more affluent families moved to those communities. As Rury relates, at the same time, economically dislocated African Americans migrated from the South to center-city neighborhoods, testing the capacity of urban institutions. As demographic trends drove this urban-suburban divide, a suburban ethos of localism contributed to the socioeconomic exclusion that became a hallmark of outlying school systems. School districts located wholly or partly within the municipal boundaries of Kansas City, Missouri, make for revealing cases that illuminate our understanding of these national patterns. As Rury demonstrates, struggles to achieve greater educational equity and desegregation in urban centers contributed to so-called white flight and what Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan considered to be a crisis of urban education in 1965. Despite the often valiant efforts made to serve inner city children and bolster urban school districts, this exodus, Rury cogently argues, created a new metropolitan educational hierarchy—a mirror image of the urban-centric model that had prevailed before World War II. The stubborn perception that suburban schools are superior, based on test scores and budgets, has persisted into the twenty-first century and instantiates today's metropolitan landscape of social, economic, and educational inequality.




Education Empire


Book Description

Despite the fact that more than one-half of the students in the United States are educated in suburban schools, relatively little is known about the development of suburban school systems. Education Empire chronicles the evolution of Virginia's Fairfax County public schools, the twelfth largest school system in the country and arguably one of the very best. The book focuses on how Fairfax has addressed a variety of challenges, beginning with explosive enrollment growth in the 1950s and continuing with desegregation, enrollment decline, economic uncertainty, demands for special programs, and intense politicization. Today, Fairfax, like many suburbs across the country, looks increasingly like an urban school system, with rising poverty, large numbers of recent immigrants, and constant pressure from an assortment of special interest groups. While many school systems facing similar developments have experienced a drop in performance, Fairfax students continue to raise their achievement. Daniel L. Duke reveals the keys to Fairfax's remarkable track record.




Stepping over the Color Line


Book Description

This important book takes the discussion of racial inequality in America beyond simplistic arguments of white racism and black victimization to a more complex conversation about the separate but unequal situation in many schools today. Amy Stuart Wells and Robert Crain investigate the St. Louis, Missouri, school desegregation plan, a unique agreement that since 1983 has given black inner-city students the right to choose to attend predominantly white suburban schools. After five years of research and hundreds of interviews with policymakers, administrators, teachers, students, and parents, Wells and Crain conclude that when school desegregation is examined from these many perspectives, more strengths than weaknesses emerge. They call for a reexamination of now-popular school choice policies across the country so that these policies may help to bring about more racial and social-class integration. Stepping over the Color Line intertwines data on student achievement and racial isolation with stories of the people who participated in the St. Louis program. The authors set these individuals within a broad historical and social context and demonstrate how important linkages between the past and present help explain why efforts to overcome racial inequality—in St. Louis and in the larger society—are so difficult. "The authors do a superb job of explaining how this innovative program came about, placing it in a broad context that takes it beyond its immediate and local implications. The book is at times heartbreaking and at times uplifting."—Richard Zweigenhaft, co-author of Blacks in the White Establishment? A Study of Race and Class in America







Challenges Facing Suburban Schools


Book Description

This coedited book describes the impact that an increasingly diverse student population has on 21st century suburban schools. It also presents what can and should be done to help K-12 school district administrators and teachers address this growing phenomenon across the nation. This eight-chapter book: provides a demographic, political, economic, and sociological overview of the changing nature of suburban schools describes the nature of student diversity in the changing suburbs and issues with student achievement identifies administrative responsibilities and program structures for working with a changing student population proposes ways to reduce the achievement gap, most notably in literacy looks at how to use “whole child” assessment protocols to provide support for such students delves into parent inequities within changing suburban districts and offers ideas for closing the parent gap. This book is written for school district administrators, teachers, legislators, policy makers, teacher educators, and educational researchers for developing programs and pathways for a segment of the student and parent population that now is living in suburban areas without traditional roots as advantaged suburbanites.




Creating the Suburban School Advantage


Book Description

Creating the Suburban School Advantage explains how American suburban school districts gained a competitive edge over their urban counterparts. John L. Rury provides a national overview of the process, focusing on the period between 1950 and 1980, and presents a detailed study of metropolitan Kansas City, a region representative of trends elsewhere. While big-city districts once were widely seen as superior and attracted families seeking the best educational opportunities for their children, suburban school systems grew rapidly in the post–World War II era as middle-class and more affluent families moved to those communities. As Rury relates, at the same time, economically dislocated African Americans migrated from the South to center-city neighborhoods, testing the capacity of urban institutions. As demographic trends drove this urban-suburban divide, a suburban ethos of localism contributed to the socioeconomic exclusion that became a hallmark of outlying school systems. School districts located wholly or partly within the municipal boundaries of Kansas City, Missouri, make for revealing cases that illuminate our understanding of these national patterns. As Rury demonstrates, struggles to achieve greater educational equity and desegregation in urban centers contributed to so-called white flight and what Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan considered to be a crisis of urban education in 1965. Despite the often valiant efforts made to serve inner city children and bolster urban school districts, this exodus, Rury cogently argues, created a new metropolitan educational hierarchy—a mirror image of the urban-centric model that had prevailed before World War II. The stubborn perception that suburban schools are superior, based on test scores and budgets, has persisted into the twenty-first century and instantiates today's metropolitan landscape of social, economic, and educational inequality.




Confronting Suburban School Resegregation in California


Book Description

The school-aged population of the United States has become more racially and ethnically diverse in recent decades, but its public schools have become significantly less integrated. In California, nearly half of the state's Latino youth attend intensely-segregated minority schools. Apart from shifts in law and educational policy at the federal level, this gradual resegregation is propelled in part by grassroots efforts led predominantly by white, middle-class residential communities that campaign to reorganize districts and establish ethnically separate neighborhood schools. Despite protests that such campaigns are not racially, culturally, or socioeconomically motivated, the outcomes of these efforts are often the increased isolation of Latino students in high-poverty schools with fewer resources, less experienced teachers, and fewer social networks that cross lines of racial, class, and ethnic difference. Confronting Suburban School Resegregation in California investigates the struggles in a central California school district, where a predominantly white residential community recently undertook a decade-long campaign to "secede" from an increasingly Latino-attended school district. Drawing on years of ethnographic research, Clayton A. Hurd explores the core issues at stake in resegregation campaigns as well as the resistance against them mobilized by the working-class Latino community. From the emotionally charged narratives of local students, parents, teachers, school administrators, and community activists emerges a compelling portrait of competing visions for equitable and quality education, shared control, and social and racial justice.




Inequality in the Promised Land


Book Description

Nestled in neighborhoods of varying degrees of affluence, suburban public schools are typically better resourced than their inner-city peers and known for their extracurricular offerings and college preparatory programs. Despite the glowing opportunities that many families associate with suburban schooling, accessing a district's resources is not always straightforward, particularly for black and poorer families. Moving beyond class- and race-based explanations, Inequality in the Promised Land focuses on the everyday interactions between parents, students, teachers, and school administrators in order to understand why resources seldom trickle down to a district's racial and economic minorities. Rolling Acres Public Schools (RAPS) is one of the many well-appointed suburban school districts across the United States that has become increasingly racially and economically diverse over the last forty years. Expanding on Charles Tilly's model of relational analysis and drawing on 100 in-depth interviews as well participant observation and archival research, R. L'Heureux Lewis-McCoy examines the pathways of resources in RAPS. He discovers that—due to structural factors, social and class positions, and past experiences—resources are not valued equally among families and, even when deemed valuable, financial factors and issues of opportunity hoarding often prevent certain RAPS families from accessing that resource. In addition to its fresh and incisive insights into educational inequality, this groundbreaking book also presents valuable policy-orientated solutions for administrators, teachers, activists, and politicians.