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.




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.







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.




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.




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.




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




Death of a Suburban Dream


Book Description

Compton, California, is often associated in the public mind with urban America's toughest problems, including economic disinvestment, gang violence, and failing public schools. Before it became synonymous with inner-city decay, however, Compton's affordability, proximity to manufacturing jobs, and location ten miles outside downtown Los Angeles made it attractive to aspiring suburbanites seeking single-family homes and quality schools. As Compton faced challenges in the twentieth century, and as the majority population shifted from white to African American and then to Latino, the battle for control over the school district became symbolic of Compton's economic, social, and political crises. Death of a Suburban Dream explores the history of Compton from its founding in the late nineteenth century to the present, taking on three critical issues—the history of race and educational equity, the relationship between schools and place, and the complicated intersection of schooling and municipal economies—as they shaped a Los Angeles suburb experiencing economic and demographic transformation. Emily E. Straus carefully traces the roots of antagonism between two historically disenfranchised populations, blacks and Latinos, as these groups resisted municipal power sharing within a context of scarcity. Using archival research and oral histories, this complex narrative reveals how increasingly racialized poverty and violence made Compton, like other inner-ring suburbs, resemble a troubled urban center. Ultimately, the book argues that Compton's school crisis is not, at heart, a crisis of education; it is a long-term crisis of development. Avoiding simplistic dichotomies between urban and suburban, Death of a Suburban Dream broadens our understanding of the dynamics connecting residents and institutions of the suburbs, as well as the changing ethnic and political landscape in metropolitan America.




The Fight for Local Control


Book Description

Throughout the twentieth century, local control of school districts was one of the most contentious issues in American politics. As state and federal regulation attempted to standardize public schools, conservatives defended local prerogative as a bulwark of democratic values. Yet their commitment to those values was shifting and selective. In The Fight for Local Control, Campbell F. Scribner demonstrates how, in the decades after World War II, suburban communities appropriated legacies of rural education to assert their political autonomy and in the process radically changed educational law. Scribner's account unfolds on the metropolitan fringe, where rapid suburbanization overlapped with the consolidation of thousands of small rural schools. Rural residents initially clashed with their new neighbors, but by the 1960s the groups had rallied to resist government oversight. What began as residual opposition to school consolidation would transform into campaigns against race-based busing, unionized teachers, tax equalization, and secular curriculum. In case after case, suburban conservatives carved out new rights for local autonomy, stifling equal educational opportunity. Yet Scribner also provides insight into why many conservatives have since abandoned localism for policies that stress school choice and federal accountability. In the 1970s, as new battles arose over unions, textbooks, and taxes, districts on the rural-suburban fringe became the first to assert individual choice in the form of school vouchers, religious exemptions, and a marketplace model of education. At the same time, they began to embrace tax limitation and standardized testing, policies that checked educational bureaucracy but bypassed local school boards. The effect, Scribner concludes, has been to reinforce inequalities between districts while weakening participatory government within them, keeping the worst aspects of local control in place while forfeiting its virtues.




Government Intervention and Suburban Sprawl


Book Description

This book shows how suburban sprawl is at least partially a consequence of government spending and regulation, and suggests anti-sprawl policies that can make government smaller and/or less intrusive. Thus, the book responds to the widely held view that automobile-dependent suburban development (also known as “suburban sprawl”) is a natural result of the free market and of affluence, and accordingly cannot be altered without massive government regulation.