Creating the Suburban School Advantage

Race, Localism, and Inequality in an American Metropolis

John L. Rury

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781501748394
• eBook ISBN: 9781501748400
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: History of Education

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.

1

SUBURBAN AND URBAN SCHOOLS

Two Sides of a National Metropolitan Coin

The 1961 publication of James Conant’s landmark book Slums and Suburbs sounded a clarion call regarding the new metropolitan social order then emerging across the country. Focusing on schools, Conant depicted urban and suburban institutions as nearly polar opposites, largely reflecting the “status and ambitions of the families being served.” Conant suggested that urban institutions represented many of the most vexing problems in American education and were associated with poverty, indiscipline, and low achievement. He warned that “we are allowing social dynamite to accumulate in our large cities.” In suburban communities, on the other hand, he described public schools as affluent, well equipped, and representing high academic standards. Few families in these comfortable settings were looking for alternatives, and their chief concerns revolved around sending their children to college. Indeed, many had moved to suburban districts to take advantage of their well-regarded schools. This was especially true for communities where the schools enjoyed a good reputation—deserved or not—for academic excellence. As Conant announced at the book’s outset, he offered “a picture of two totally different kinds of neighborhoods and the schools which serve them.”1

Conant’s account set the stage for much commentary on educational inequality in the 1960s and ’70s, but it also highlighted a situation that many Americans had not yet grasped. Prior to the 1950s the big-city school systems, and particularly the high schools, were often held up as models. Because of their size, urban districts typically possessed greater resources than their counterparts in smaller communities, especially those in rural areas. Features of modern schooling taken for granted today started in urban settings, such as age grading, uniform textbooks, specialized classes, and summer school, among many others. Historically, big-city schools offered a wider range of courses and specialized programs such as college prep and vocational training. Teachers were better paid in the cities, and as a result schools there generally got the most skilled and experienced educators. Because they often were seen as superior, big-city schools attracted gifted students, many of them from modest backgrounds. Even if some of the worst schools existed in the cities, especially in the most impoverished neighborhoods, so did the very best.2

These conditions changed rapidly, however, in the postwar era, when the distribution of wealth and status was “decentered” by the expansion of suburban communities. Much of this was driven by technological change, especially the rise of automotive transportation and construction of contemporary highway systems. But real estate practices played an important role too, along with federal mortgage policies. Politics was a factor, as suburban voters became increasingly decisive in state and federal elections.3 Schools also contributed to these changes, along with easy financial credit (for whites), extensive residential development, shopping malls, and many other features of metropolitan life. With the arrival of the 1960s, a new geo-spatial order had emerged, as suburban communities became growing sites of partisan power and status. Conant suggested that little recourse existed for such divisions in metropolitan life, and he turned out to be right. But this was just the beginning; the United States was indeed becoming a “suburban nation.”4

Why did city schools gain and then lose their exalted status as the nation’s premier educational institutions? How did suburban development unfold across the country, and what were its effects on schools in these settings? What factors influenced the ways that people in the cities and suburbs respond to change? And how did the school desegregation movement affect metropolitan inequity in education? Answers to these questions expand on the issues that Conant raised in his book. Events that shaped education in specific circumstances, after all, reflected larger historical forces that exerted influence on a national scale.

A Bygone Golden Age of Urban Education?

The city is where public schools acquired much of their contemporary form, as urban education systems came to be seen categorically as the nation’s best. But it took decades for the superiority of these institutions to become manifest. American cities expanded rapidly prior to the First World War. Large-scale immigration drove the growth, drawn by industrial development and settlement of the nation’s interior. Railways remained the prevailing transportation technology. Factories and other enterprises grew in transportation hubs, which afforded access to labor, materials, and markets for finished products. The nation’s largest cities burgeoned: Chicago’s population doubled about every decade for nearly a half century, and other cities grew almost as rapidly. These places became sites of wealth and power, along with considerable hardship and distress.5

The extraordinary pace of urban expansion placed enormous burdens on local institutions. School authorities scrambled to build new classrooms and staff them to keep abreast of population growth. The New York Times reported that some seventy-five thousand children were refused admission to the city’s public schools in 1905 because of overcrowding. School officials in other cities faced similar problems, even if on a smaller scale. In the wake of scandals over corruption and mismanagement, political conflict over control of education systems became endemic. Reformers answered by vowing to take the schools “out of politics,” creating an elaborate educational bureaucracy to ensure compliance with legal and ethical standards. The governance and administration of city school systems became centralized and routinized, resulting in Tyack’s “one best system.” A new degree of professionalism dawned in education, and many other institutional domains as well.6

Given their size and resources, the nation’s urban schools offered students an array of educational opportunities, despite occasional problems such as overcrowding. The rapid growth of high schools and postsecondary institutions became distinctive features of the largest systems. Standardized tests, often intended to measure presumed native ability, were used to assign youth to different curricular “tracks.” These included academic courses to prepare certain students for college, and less-demanding vocational classes for others. If the changing urban economy featured greater specialization and a wider division of labor, the schools were ready to respond. Reformers dubbed this “social efficiency,” which became the prescription of the day.7

Some educators objected to this new organizational ethos, suggesting that it constrained opportunity for many students. But large urban school systems offered the prospect of accomplishment for millions of youth from different backgrounds. Secondary schools in towns and smaller cities usually were modest in scope, but in bigger cities they became expansive and comprehensive. High school enrollments nationally approached half the teenage population by the 1920s, although many fewer graduated. The curricular connection to labor markets helped young women and men find jobs in the growing service sector.Thousands worked in corporate offices, department stores, catalog houses, government agencies, and similar settings. Many took classes in typing, bookkeeping, and accounting, skills in high demand. It was an exhilarating time to be young and gainfully employed in the vibrant downtown districts of major cities, and requisite training in the public schools made it possible.8

Historian Richard Hofstadter once wrote that “the United States was born in the country and has moved to the city.” He might have added that others came from abroad. According to the census, by 1920, for the first time, a majority of Americans reported living in urban areas.9 This included greater numbers of African Americans, as nearly a tenth of the South’s predominantly rural black population moved to industrial cities between 1900 and 1930, principally in the North.10 Larger American urban centers began to acquire some of the features of today’s metropolitan infrastructure, including public transportation systems and centralized government services, as well as racially segregated neighborhoods and the early stages of large-scale suburbanization. The first generations of mass-produced automobiles contributed to these changes, even if their impact was still rather limited.11

At about the same time, many city school systems began a lengthy period of stability in leadership and organizational form, marking something of an early golden age in urban education. As population growth abated in the wake of war and immigration restrictions, educators ceased worrying about constant expansion. Instead they focused on improving the quality of schooling and increasing access to secondary and higher education. Public confidence in the schools grew as bureaucratic rules and standards helped to ensure wider opportunities for advancement, and at least the appearance of fairness. Even racialized minority groups long denied equal education, especially African Americans, began making headway in spite of ongoing discrimination.12

Progress stalled somewhat in the 1930s and ’40s, however, largely owing to events far beyond the purview of local institutions. Lasting more than a decade, a period of global economic crisis and war slowed the pace of metropolitan development to a crawl. The Great Depression led to a collapse of the youth job market, boosting high school enrollment rates, and the Second World War triggered widespread migration to cities for employment. Economic calamity in the 1930s placed enormous pressure on school budgets, which saw scant relief during the war years of the ’40s.13 But the configuration of American metropolitan life changed little as a consequence. Major changes did not become evident until peace was declared, when auto and home sales surged and metropolitan highway construction resumed in earnest. A vibrant economy contributed to this, along with government policies favoring suburban development and a spike in the birthrate, the postwar “baby boom.” Resources began flowing to education once again. Millions of young families now had money to spend, and new housing beckoned far beyond aging urban neighborhoods.14

Schools were a key feature of these changes, even as urban institutions continued to be predominant for a while. As greater numbers of youth graduated from high school, approaching 50 percent by 1950, more Americans came to see education as a vehicle of social mobility and economic opportunity, even if significant racial and social class disparities continued to exist. And events bore them out. Economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz have estimated that rising high school enrollments represented a major contribution to economic growth, boosting employment in new occupations created by technological advances and the growing service sector. Public schools made these opportunities more readily available, offering better prospects to children from a variety of backgrounds, including working-class families.15

Popular support for the schools reached new heights in the decade following the war. Big-city education systems grew with the baby boom. While elementary schools continued to function mainly as neighborhood institutions, urban high schools multiplied and expanded. They also became increasingly cosmopolitan in stature. African American secondary enrollment grew rapidly, sometimes leading to clashes with bigoted whites. Critics of secondary education in the 1950s, most notably James Conant, argued that larger schools were superior. Such institutions could offer a wider range of curricular choices, including academically advanced courses, along with extracurricular activities.16 It was not until late in the decade that many rising suburban schools began to rival their big-city counterparts in these respects.

Even if the best-regarded city schools typically excluded racialized minority groups, especially African Americans, there was considerable consensus about the value of these systems and widespread support for their leaders. Centralization and bureaucracy remained the prevailing urban organizational ethos, and there was little question about who was in charge. Highly professionalized administrators ruled the roost, their expertise certified by specialized university training and credentials.17 It would not be long, however, before the social and political context of urban education changed profoundly.

Education and Social Change in the City

As suggested by Conant, the most basic factors in the development of urban school systems were demographic and economic. In the years following the Second World War, the social and financial profile of the nation’s cities shifted significantly. While the size of central cities changed relatively little, the thrust of metropolitan development was altered by movement to the metropolitan periphery. At the same time, successive waves of new residents moved to the urban core, many of them members of racial and ethnic minority groups, and large numbers living in poverty. Despite relatively stable population size, the nation’s big cities began a dramatic process of social change. The urban population remained culturally diverse, but its composition shifted, and destitution and physical decline transformed certain neighborhoods. In particular, this was a time of especially rapid growth in the nation’s racially segregated “ghetto” communities.18

Following the hiatus during the 1930s and early ’40s, large-scale metropolitan development resumed in the postwar years. Industrial employment fueled migration, notably among African Americans from the South, though suburbanization curtailed central-city growth in the 1950s. Suburban expansion increased to an unprecedented scale, becoming one of the iconic features of the era. Made possible by federally financed new highways, easy mortgage terms for white families, and a boom in home building, it became a driving force in metropolitan development. Neighborhoods in many such communities had long excluded people deemed undesirable by means of restrictive deed covenants, barring property owners from selling to certain social groups—blacks in particular. This, along with federal mortgage standards that largely excluded black families from obtaining loans, virtually guaranteed that the suburbs would remain predominantly white. Even though the US Supreme Court declared restrictive covenants unconstitutional in 1948, their influence lingered. Real estate agents continued to discourage unwanted residents, especially anyone deemed likely to lower property values.19

At the same time, a changing southern economy altered life for millions of African Americans in the countryside, stimulating migration to the cities. Mechanized cotton farming triggered some of this, obviating the need for manual labor. Many blacks also hoped to escape Jim Crow segregation, white racial hostility, and impulsive bigoted violence. Within two decades of the war’s end, about five million departed to find employment and greater freedom in the North, Midwest, and Pacific states, and millions more moved to southern cities. Most of these places had long-standing black communities, including...

Table of contents

• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Educating the Fragmented Metropolis
• 1. Suburban and Urban Schools: Two Sides of a National Metropolitan Coin
• 2. Uniting and Dividing a Heartland Metropolis: Growth and Inequity in Postwar Kansas City
• 3. Fall from Grace: The Transformation of an Urban School System
• 4. Racialized Advantage: The Missouri Suburban School Districts
• 5. Conflict in Suburbia: Localism, Race, and Education in Johnson County, Kansas
• Epilogue: An Enduring Legacy of Inequality
• Appendix: Statistical Analyses and Oral History Sources
• Notes
• Index