2

UNITING AND DIVIDING A HEARTLAND METROPOLIS

Growth and Inequity in Postwar Kansas City

In the early spring of 1956, the enterprising city manager of Kansas City, Missouri, L. P. (Perry) Cookingham, addressed the Hickman Mills Chamber of Commerce, highlighting the many advantages to be gained from becoming a part of the big city. Hickman Mills was a quiet suburban community at the time. It had a school district and something of a formal identity as a consequence but never was incorporated as a village, township, or municipality. This made it vulnerable under Missouri law to annexation by Kansas City, or any other adjoining municipality, without a vote of its residents. Cookingham wanted Hickman Mills to join the city and attempted to be persuasive, extolling the lower cost and better quality of its water supply, police and fire protection, and garbage collection, among other advantages. The presentation did not feature schools. While Cookingham may have been less than rousing, greater interest in his entreaties materialized when neighboring Grandview also began to discuss annexation.1 Becoming a part of Kansas City held considerable appeal under those circumstances.

It was another five years, however, before Kansas City settled the area’s fate, formally annexing Hickman Mills. When it finally happened, the community joined a sprawling municipality that eventually spanned more than three hundred square miles, including most or parts of several counties. Following Cookingham’s lead, the city had annexed adjacent territory to avoid being constrained by surrounding suburbs. Even though it encountered some resistance, this approach to municipal growth proved largely successful. From a legal and political standpoint, the annexation strategy managed to bind a large portion of the metropolitan region together within a single municipality. As a consequence, Kansas City remained financially viable for decades thereafter. One feature of the local landscape that did not change, however, was the geographic configuration of local school districts. It turned out that this development would have important consequences, eventually dividing the region along lines of race and socioeconomic status.2 While Cookingham was determined to unite the metropolis as much as possible, schools would become a critical point of dissension.

Changes that shaped metropolitan development and altered the history of American education were readily evident across the country by the 1960s. Kansas City provides an illuminating site for considering these issues. Straddling two states, it served and represented a vast midwestern heartland. Kansas City also had a long history of racial division and discord. Like many other American metropolises, it grew as a center of regional trade and manufacturing and experienced extensive suburban sprawl in the process.3 It also gave rise to a clear geo-spatial pattern of educational inequity.

Greater Kansas City expanded rapidly in the decades following 1940. Buoyed by a surge in wartime employment and migration, along with the first stages of the postwar baby boom, its population had increased by nearly 19 percent by 1950. In the following decade the pace increased to 27 percent, with population passing a million. Growth slowed thereafter, but by 1980 nearly a quarter million new residents had been added.4 While development occurred on both sides of the state border, much of it flowed from the urban core on the Missouri side. Kansas City, Kansas (KCK), the principal municipality on the Kansas side of the river until the 1960s, became a manufacturing center but was considerably smaller and lacked many of the social and cultural amenities available in its neighbor to the east. As a consequence, the larger and more cosmopolitan Kansas City, Missouri (KCMO) played a greater role in metropolitan development. In any case, expansion occurred at the margins of development on both sides of the border, with population pushing outward in all directions. Suburbanization quickly took hold as the region changed demographically and geographically.5 In this regard greater Kansas City remained in step with the rest of the country.

At the same time that it expanded, metropolitan Kansas City became the site of increasing inequality. This was evident in a number of dimensions, including race, wealth, and educational attainment (the highest level of schooling reached by an individual), even if they were closely linked. Each of these sources of social distinction influenced the success or failure of children in schools, and they also became clearly associated with different sectors of the metropolitan landscape. As a result, social and educational inequality acquired a specific geo-spatial form, helping to create winners and losers among the region’s many communities. This may not have been altogether new, as uneven development had long been a feature of urban life. But it achieved a new order of magnitude in the era of suburbanization, and education became a more important component of inequality than ever before.

Annexation, Expansion, and the Schools

While Kansas City may have been a typical urbanized region in demographic and economic terms, in certain respects it was anomalous, especially compared to places to the east and north. By the mid-twentieth century, suburban settlements surrounded many older cities, having successfully resisted incorporation into larger municipalities. As a consequence these suburbs constrained central city growth and often were antagonistic—if not downright hostile—to the urban core. St. Louis became a classic example, having rejected proposals to annex neighboring communities in the nineteenth century only to lose population and wealth to them decades later. Kansas City leaders recognized the significance of this.6

Soon after the Second World War, Kansas City’s municipal authorities began making plans to avoid this fate. City manager Cookingham spearheaded these efforts, which ultimately met with considerable success. With his guidance Kansas City was able to annex vast tracts of adjoining terrain rather readily, eventually more than doubling its geographic footprint. This process of territorial growth went through several phases, beginning in 1950 with some fourteen square miles just north of the Missouri River and an area of similar size to the south and east of the city seven years later. Over the next six years Kansas City added even bigger parcels, extending its municipal boundaries to include large swaths of Clay and Platte Counties and nearly all of southwest Jackson County. By 1963 the city had become one of the country’s largest municipalities in geographic terms. More importantly, as new development occurred at the edges of the older urban core, it remained within the city limits, providing vital resources for maintaining public services in the face of social and economic changes that reshaped the historic city center.7

Cookingham’s plan was brilliant in many respects, and it was executed methodically in less than a decade. In defending it, Mayor H. Roe Bartle declared “Kansas City cannot be hemmed in.” As a rationale, he volunteered that “it is the earnest desire of homeowners in the suburbs to have the best in municipal services, although some of them don’t want to pay for such.”8 But most of the affected suburbanites had little say in the process; Missouri permitted annexation of adjacent unincorporated areas with just a vote of city residents. Consequently, KCMO was able to acquire territory with relatively little resistance, apart from communities such as Gladstone or Raytown, which hurriedly incorporated themselves to avoid annexation. There was a degree of lingering resentment, to be sure, especially north of the river. But the result dramatically extended city boundaries. Map 2.1 illustrates the scope of these changes. The initial annexation was a relatively modest acquisition immediately north of the river, but larger parcels followed in subsequent years. These additions altered municipal boundaries both to the south and farther north, nearly to Platte City. The result was an expansive municipality, spanning much of three counties, with independent “island” communities located within it, largely or wholly surrounded by the city.9

MAP 2.1 Kansas City, Missouri, annexations, 1947–1963, with 1980 school district boundaries

One aspect of Kansas City’s metropolitan geography that did not change, however, was the boundaries of school districts. To enable the planned city expansion to go forward, in 1957 the Missouri legislature changed a law requiring districts in cities with more than a half million residents to have boundaries conforming to those of their municipalities. Although it did not affect St. Louis, which could not expand geographically in any case, the statute had posed a potential complication to annexation on the western side of the state. Intended to prevent fragmentation of urban school systems, it became an obstacle to municipal plans in Kansas City. By simply increasing the population requirement to seven hundred thousand, however, the legislature kept the law in place and opened a pathway to Cookingham’s territorial ambitions.10

While some observers may have seen this as problematic, others viewed it as the most expedient way to ensure “orderly expansion plans” for the city as a whole. The Kansas City Star editorialized that requiring a single enlarged city school system would “bring complete chaos,” chopping off portions of smaller districts or swallowing them whole, causing “confusion and hardship.”11 The president of the Kansas City Board of Education agreed, warning that “bond programs would be endangered.”12 As a result, the expanded city eventually came to include parts or the entirety of more than a dozen school districts, also indicated on map 2.1. The largest of these was the Kansas City Public Schools, but there also were districts to the north and south that suddenly found themselves within the city’s boundaries to one degree or another. This was an outcome that would exert a telling influence on the future of the region.13

During the 1950s, however, few observers could imagine just how the status of school systems possibly could affect metropolitan development, and keeping existing school boundaries seemed the expedient course to take. As indicated in map 2.2, school systems throughout the five-county metropolitan area were highly fragmented earlier in the decade. Most were elementary districts, often with a single school. Older children from these areas who wanted to continue their education did so at rural high schools or secondary institutions in larger districts. The Kansas City, Missouri, Public Schools (KCMPS) was the biggest system by far, with more than fifty thousand students, and only Independence on the Missouri side of the area had more than a tenth that number. The public school system of Kansas City, Kansas (KCKPS), was also fairly large, with more than ten thousand students, but most other area districts had fewer than a thousand. The region’s principal urban school systems on either side of the river were its biggest and most highly developed.14

These differences had significant educational consequences. Perhaps the most obvious concerned secondary schooling. Only a handful of high schools with more than a few hundred students existed outside the two central cities. This meant that KCMPS institutions were widely considered academically superior, along with their counterparts across the river in KCKPS. These city schools offered the widest array of curricular choices and extracurricular activities and generally attracted the most experienced and highly educated teachers. Under the circumstances, it was little wonder that KCMPS leaders failed to express interest in acquiring schools from outlying districts: they would have faced the challenge of bringing these smaller, less academically robust institutions into line with the area’s largest and most highly regarded school system.15 Little did they imagine that within a relatively short time these outlying schools would become potent challengers to their own district’s reputation.

MAP 2.2 Metropolitan Kansas City school district boundaries, 1954

As indicated on the map, school districts south of the old city limits in Jackson County were geographically larger than their exurban counterparts elsewhere in the metropolitan region. This reflected the historic movement of population away from the river in the city’s development and the success of nascent communities there in creating consolidated districts prior to the postwar era. The Hickman Mills and Raytown districts were the oldest of these, both established long before the annexation proposals of the 1950s. If all the territory of these districts had been subject to annexation by the city, merging them with the Kansas City schools might have been manageable. By the later 1950s, however, several of the Raytown schools were located within the recently incorporated village of Raytown, and a part of Hickman Mills was in Grandview, incorporated years earlier. A portion of the Grandview school district, moreover, fell into newly annexed city territory.16 All this complicated matters considerably.

Requiring schools in southern Jackson County to merge with the city school system, in that case, would have meant splitting districts and perhaps assuming bond obligations for existing facilities. It also would have reduced the tax base for the remaining suburban districts, weakening them substantially. Since school districts were independent governmental agencies, any mergers would require a vote of their boards and constituents, many of whom were unlikely to assent. Given the many obstacles facing such a change, moreover, there was little incentive for anyone to support it. As a result, there was no pertinent voice to advocate for the creation of a larger, more inclusive school district to serve the expanded version of Kansas City. This was a critical juncture in the region’s history that few recognized at the time; it would eventually be seen as a lost opportunity.17

Race, Schools, and Metropolitan Development

Race became a major factor in metropolitan development nationally during the postwar era, as it certainly did in greater Kansas City. Black communities on both sides of the river had long histories and had grown substantially earlier in the twentieth century. The larger settlement developed in KCMO, where many African Americans once lived in integrated neighborhoods, mostly near their jobs in the city’s stockyards. As black migrants arrived after 1910, however, they began to settle on the other side of town, around Paseo Avenue north of Twenty-Seventh Street. That area soon became known both for it lively music scene and the vice rackets maintained by the city’s corrupt Pendergast political machine. This was the start of the larger of two local ghettos, one on either side of the state line. Both were crowded and poor. Violent white resistance to black settlement in adjacent KCMO neighborhoods helped define clear boundaries for African Americans, signifying a new era of racialized residential segregation in the city.18

Expansion of the area’s black population slowed in the Pendergast era, but it soon resumed dramatically. Migration surged during World War II, and by 1950 the combined African American population of the metropolitan area was nearly seventy thousand. Of that number, more than fifty-five thousand lived in Kansas City, Missouri, and about thirteen thousand across the river in Kansas City, Kansas.19 But this was just a start, as migration continued through most of the following two decades, and the local black population grew rapidly. It more than doubled by 1970, to nearly 160,000, with about three-quarters living in Missouri. Growth ended soon afterward, a trend consistent with many other urbanized areas outside the South. Despite its numerical expansion, the black share the metropolitan population increased only slightly in the postwar era, from about 10 percent to 12 percent. But African Americans were a considerably larger proportion in the two Kansas City municipalities, eventually representing about a fifth in KCMO and a slightly higher share in KCK.20 They remained highly segregated in both instances, restricted largely to the two clearly identifiable ghettos in the region’s central cities.

The extent of local segregation and the growth of black settlement can be seen in maps 2.3 through 2.6. Throughout the postwar period, most of the region’s African American population remained largely restricted to these areas. As in other American cities, this resulted from a process of systematic exclusion of blacks from other parts of the region, leaving them with little recourse to settlement in the oldest, least desirable neighborhoods on both sides of the river. The larger black community started near the commercial center of KCMO and expanded to the south as it grew. The smaller community in KCKS began in the historic Quindaro district, established by abolitionists during the nineteenth century. As indicated in the maps, it expanded to the northwest as the city’s black population grew. Other pockets of black settlement appeared in KCK, but across the river the vast majority of African Americans lived in a generally contiguous area bound by Troost Avenue to the west and the Blue River valley to the east. Interstate highway construction and the river blocked northern expansion, so the principal direction to move while maintaining contact with the larger black community was southward. As indicated on the maps, by 1980 the edge of black settlement had nearly reached Raytown.21 This development would have telling consequences in years to come.

As noted above, the western boundary of KCMO African American settlement historically was a clearly visible line that ran north and south along Troost Avenue. This defined the so-called Troost Wall, representing one of the most distinctive features of racial segregation in metropolitan Kansas City. Some observers have suggested that school district attendance zones maintaining racially segregated institutions created the wall, although it seems unlikely that such a clear and continuous line of racial separation could be simply the product of education policies. There is evidence, for instance, that many African Americans viewed the neighborhoods to the west of Troost as hostile territory, with boundaries often informally enforced by the police. Susan Hilliard’s family, for instance, had moved to Kansas City from Arkansas after the war and lived just east of Troost, near the city center. After walking into a white neighborhood, she and her friends were lined up on the sidewalk by the police and told “we’re watching you.” Hilliard recalled that such experiences had a “chilling effect,” serving as a “powerful disincentive” to leave the black neighborhood. These sorts of racial boundaries were well known to black children and adults alike, as a number of former residents have reported.22

MAPS 2.3–2.6 Growth of metropolitan Kansas City’s African American population, 1950–1980 (census tract data)

Such highly racialized residential patterns did not arise spontaneously. Until the mid-1960s the local real estate board actively discouraged racially mixed neighborhoods, a further disincentive to African Americans moving to the west. Agents became highly cognizant of the informal barrier that Troost represented and feared the consequences of selling homes to African Americans in nearby Westport or other neighborhoods to the southwest. This led many to “steer” blacks in search of better homes southward on the east side of Troost, where a range of desirable and reasonable residences were available and “blockbusting” tactics could persuade whites to leave.23

The housing stock west of Troost may have posed another obstacle. Poor whites occupied much of the area north of Forty-Seventh Street, and there was relatively little turnover during the 1950s and ’60s, when the city’s black population was growing. Writing about the area, historian Peter William Moran observed that “a significant number of residents may have been financially unable to move.”24 Data from the 1970 census confirm that housing values in much of the area generally were no higher than in adjacent black neighborhoods. Consequently, these dwellings may have proved unappealing to more affluent African Americans interested in moving. Financing for such homes probably was difficult to secure, and their low cost offered little incentive to real estate agents, especially if extensive repairs were needed. While racial animosity certainly existed in the area, reflected in school bond election returns, it did not become a major problem in local schools.25 Westport High became one of the city’s most effectively integrated secondary schools during the 1970s, starting with African American students bused in to relieve crowding elsewhere. Additional black students eventually transferred to other institutions west of Troost. These developments gain-say the idea that school policy was primarily responsible for the “wall” observable on the maps, as does evidence of black residential movement west by 1980 (observable on map 2.6).

While shifting enrollments certainly could trigger neighborhood change and did so in Kansas City and elsewhere, other considerations played a role too. Lack of desirable residences may indeed have contributed to the dividing line.26 South of Forty-Seventh Street, on the other hand, there appears to have been a different story. More-affluent neighborhoods were able to discourage African American settlement with active homeowner associations and the cooperation of real estate agents, who feared antagonizing potential patrons. As the Kansas City Star reported in 1966, “no situation is known in which a Kansas City realtor has negotiated a sale to a Negro of a home in an all-white, middle class neighborhood outside of east and southeast Kansas City.”27 In the end, a variety of factors appears to have maintained the Troost Wall, including historical precedent and long-standing expectations, along with plain racial exclusion. Stanley West grew up on the east side of Troost and observed that “you know where the boundaries are and you simply don’t cross them; you just avoid it.” In this manner it remained a defining feature of the city’s racialized social landscape, one that continues to pointedly distinguish communities today.28

Under these circumstances, as the city’s black families searched for better housing, they looked to the south, in neighborhoods occupied largely by working-class whites. Natural and man-made barriers to the north and east, including the Missouri and Blue Rivers, along with Troost to the west, left one direction to move. Sociologist Kevin Fox Gotham has documented how unscrupulous real estate agents sometimes took advantage of white fears and bigotry to generate quick sales. Block-busting tactics included selling one or two homes to black families and then urging remaining whites to sell at lower terms. In many instances, however, such measures were hardly necessary. As a child, Marvin Daniels moved into a neighborhood east of Troost that was still predominantly white. Both his parents held good-paying government jobs, so their socioeconomic status was not an issue. But within a few years the area had become almost entirely black. Daniels did not recall overt efforts to frighten white homeowners, but the rate of change in his boyhood neighbors was rapid just the same.29

In the end, most whites likely departed regardless of nefarious real estate tactics, which city officials actively proscribed.30 Other real estate agents just discouraged white families from even considering homes located east of Troost, suggesting that youth there were “thieves” and that vandalism was widespread.31 For their part, African American families were seeking better residences in secure neighborhoods. Those with greater resources led the advance, while the most destitute generally remained in the ghetto’s historic core. On average, black home buyers south of the Eighteenth and Vine commercial strip reported income 20 percent higher than households to the north, and they had higher levels of education too. Susan Hilliard recalled her aunt buying a house about ten blocks south of the black commercial center that seemed like a “mansion” at the time. The lure of such improvements in living standards drew middle-class African Americans to predominantly white neighborhoods on the periphery of black residential settlement, eventually extending its boundaries.32

A survey of African American adults conducted by the Kansas City schools in 1983 found that improved housing was the biggest source of motivation for such moves, but also that most families wanted their children to attend schools with at least some other black students and black teachers. About a fifth also emphasized that it was important not to get “too far out” from predominantly black neighborhoods, for fear of discrimination, harassment, or worse. These responses, of course, meant that most were unwilling to consider buying in outlying parts of the city or the suburbs. Many judged suburban areas as being hostile to African Americans, or feared being isolated from family and friends.33

Studies at the time showed that discriminatory real estate practices also excluded African Americans from many parts of the area. A report from the Regional Health and Welfare Council in 1967 declared that “it can be unequivocally stated that the pattern of minority housing does result from discriminatory practices in the sale and leasing of housing.” These realities affected the thinking of black families. As Marvin Daniels said about the idea of open housing and moving to the suburbs, “I don’t care what the law says, you know, you don’t go out there because you’re not accepted.”34 The result was an incremental movement largely in one direction, as black families took advantage of favorable real estate values to the south, where real estate agents were willing to show them homes.35

Not all African Americans in metropolitan Kansas City lived in the area’s two central cities, of course. There were individuals and families that moved out from these areas, and smaller pockets of black settlement existed elsewhere as well. One of the oldest was located in Johnson County, on the Kansas side of the state line. It comprised just a hundred or so families, most of them in the integrated community of South Park, which eventually became part of Merriam, Kansas. Although it was too small to show up on the maps above, this community had an outsize impact on local history. Its members launched a significant school desegregation case in 1948, Webb v. School District No. 90 , which led the Kansas Supreme Court to rule that the plaintiffs’ children had been illegally required to attend a dilapidated separate facility. The decision won the parents the right for their children to attend predominantly white schools nearby.36

Somewhat larger African American communities existed in Independence and Liberty, Missouri. They also were too small to register on the maps, but their children attended segregated schools until after the US Supreme Court’s Brown decision in the mid-1950s. Both Liberty and Independence, along with other outlying Missouri districts, sent black secondary students to Kansas City prior to Brown, where they attended segregated Lincoln High, sometimes at considerable expense to their home districts.37 Modest black settlements in Excelsior Springs and Lee’s Summit existed in earlier years, but racial violence in those communities drove many away.38 Wherever they lived in greater Kansas City, blacks were sure to encounter hostility from many whites, and these experiences contributed directly to their desire to live in segregated communities, where they could enjoy a sense of security in the company of family and friends.39

The expansion of African American settlements in the larger cities on both sides of the border encountered resistance, as well as the cruelty and greed of unscrupulous white landlords and real estate professionals. Many white families were quick to leave neighborhoods at the first signs of racial change, unwilling to give integration a chance. This was a process similar to that experienced in cities elsewhere, when black communities grew significantly. In Kansas City, educational institutions became a vital component of such white flight, as school desegregation often preceded neighborhood changes, leading many white families to consider relocation.40 The result was a great deal of movement within the metropolitan area, generally proceeding from the city center to communities on the urban periphery, whether within municipal boundaries or in adjacent suburbs.

As indicated on the maps, black communities expanded outward in rather well-defined pathways. This was a familiar pattern of ethnic settlement, one that housing economist Homer Hoyt had identified in the 1930s. Hoyt theorized that groups moved in corridors, often dictated by lines of transportation, but neighborhood succession was also affected by competing desires for new housing and remaining in touch with family and friends. In the case of African Americans, this entailed moving to the periphery of black settlement, but not too far from it. In Kansas City it meant that the segregated African American residential sector of the city gradually expanded to the south and southeast.41

As the city’s black neighborhoods grew, so did the area at the urban core marked by severe poverty. This was clearly evident in 1970, at the height of black migration to the city, when poverty levels exceeded 40 percent of families in several predominantly black census tracts and more than 30 percent in five others, all located in the center city. Of the twenty-five tracts with a majority African American population, eighteen registered poverty rates above 20 percent, with an average of nearly 30 percent. And many non-poverty households did not have income levels much higher. There were a half dozen majority white or Hispanic tracts with somewhat comparable poverty rates, but their populations were generally smaller. A similar situation existed on the Kansas side of the border, where black neighborhoods also exhibited the highest degree of deprivation. This was another critically significant dimension of racial segregation, a corollary of systematic discrimination in employment and the job insecurity that contributed to substantially lower income for black families. As a result, African Americans occupied those parts of the city often labeled as “slums,” where housing was old, crowded, and often in dangerously poor repair. As noted earlier, poor whites in adjacent neighborhoods also occupied such residences, at least in the 1960s. Because they had relatively few choices with respect to housing, the most deprived families typically were relegated to the least desirable, most neglected neighborhoods. The real estate industry described these conditions as “blight,” and they were often accompanied by concentrated poverty and social disaffection.42

More affluent African Americans, of course, moved within the city in search of better residential options. Tracts to the south and east of the city center had somewhat lower levels of poverty. Even so, middle-class black families often lived in neighborhoods with poverty levels approaching a third or higher. This was triple the national average for whites, but the dual housing market offered few alternatives. And as housing dropped in value because of racial steering by the real estate industry, so-called slum conditions often followed. The city’s African American ghetto grew in this fashion, and persistent poverty with it. The concentrated disadvantage that this represented changed little during the next two decades.43

Race and poverty affected the decisions of individuals and families moving into the metropolitan area, especially those concerned with finding the best schools for their children. Real estate agents also played a crucial role in this process, especially for newcomers unfamiliar with the region. Consequently, a good deal of social and economic steering occurred as realty professionals dispensed advice about the best places to live for clients with varied backgrounds and priorities. For bigoted whites determined to avoid contact with African Americans, such guidance was surely welcome, but it probably affected less-prejudiced homebuyers too. This was white “flight” of a somewhat different kind, refusing to consider living in proximity to African Americans.44 While perhaps not quite as dramatic as families fleeing the city, it may have contributed even more to overall patterns of metropolitan segregation.

Altogether, race came to play an enormously important role in the postwar development of greater Kansas City, just as it did in many other metropolitan areas. As black and white households made crucial decisions about where to live, attend school, work, and join communities, the racial geography of the metropolitan area evolved rapidly. The maps above suggest that extreme, concentrated poverty became a critical dimension of this process as well. Distinct areas within the region were associated with racial identity and varying degrees of socioeconomic status and distress. As metropolitan Kansas City grew, personal and group standing became more clearly linked to household address. An array of social and economic characteristics contributed to this, but schools came to be one of the most significant.

Schools and the Rise of Suburbs

In greater Kansas City, as in many other settings, educational inequality came to be expressed in rather clear geo-spatial terms during the postwar era.45 While the city could grow geographically, its principal school district did not, and this meant that many different school systems eventually served the expanded municipality. This, of course, could be advantageous in some respects, but it did not mean that schools throughout the city shared a common sense of purpose or commitment to a greater municipal good. Instead, they continued to serve their immediate communities, regardless of where they were located. Outlying districts continued to function essentially as suburban school systems, despite their location within the city limits. They may have been situated within Kansas City, Missouri, but they generally functioned independently from neighborhoods and schools in the central city, if not from one another. Given the dynamics of demographic and social change at the time, this was a policy choice that quickly became associated with race, but wealth distinctions also came into play. With its rapid geographic growth, the city demonstrated how suburban sprawl could continue to be evident within a municipality, especially if critical socioeconomic differences continued to operate there as well.46

The development of informal forms of suburbanization within the central city limits, of course, did not preclude the rise of suburbs elsewhere in the region. Despite its growth by annexation, metropolitan Kansas City did experience extensive exurban suburban growth as well. Much of this occurred on the Missouri side of the state line, as older suburban communities also grew, including Independence, Liberty, Blue Springs, and Lee’s Summit. Suburbs such as Raytown and Grandview developed from unincorporated areas to the south, largely in response to Kansas City’s annexation plans. Most of these suburban communities were largely blue collar, with many residents who worked in the sprawling industrial plants of the Blue River valley and Clay County, or expanding retail and government service centers in South Kansas City. They also were overwhelmingly white.

The other major direction of suburban development was to the southwest of the central city. The region’s most renowned local developer, J. C. Nichols, established affluent residential tracts there in the early twentieth century, first in Kansas City, Missouri, and then in nearby Kansas. Nichols was dedicated to ensuring that his communities would retain property values and remain appealing to the most advantageous residents. He was a pioneer in using restrictive deed covenants and homeowners associations to exclude “undesirable” people, and these measures worked quite effectively in keeping African Americans and certain immigrant groups out of his developments. In 1923 he opened Country Club Plaza, one of the nation’s first shopping centers and a retail anchor for his housing tracts in the vicinity. Before long the Nichols communities became the most fashionable places to live in the metropolitan area, counting a large share of the region’s social and financial elite among their residents. The area embracing his developments in northeast Johnson County, Kansas, eventually gained renown for its public schools, in a district named for the area’s historic Shawnee Mission Indian settlement.47 By 1960 it was one of the fastest-growing school systems in the region, attracting families with an interest in securing the very best educational opportunities for their children, along with thousands of other affluent residents.48

As in other major metropolitan areas, suburbanization in greater Kansas City represented a large-scale process of demographic change. The entire metropolis grew significantly across the postwar period, but not at the same pace everywhere. Population increased ubiquitously during the 1950s, largely owing to the baby boom, but later changes reflected new patterns of migration. Following its campaign of annexation, for instance, the municipality of Kansas City, Missouri, experienced relatively modest growth, as did the whole of Jackson County after 1960. This is evident in table 2.1, which documents growth in the region’s four most urbanized counties. The population shifted considerably within the city’s boundaries, but most growth occurred outside its historic urban core. The same was true of Kansas City, Kansas, the principal city in Wyandotte County, which started to see a reduction in population toward the end of the period.

TABLE 2.1 Postwar population growth in metropolitan Kansas City’s four core counties

Source: “Population of Counties by Decennial Census: 1900 to 1990,” United States Census Bureau. Available at https://www.census.gov/population/cencounts/mo190090.txt, and https://www.census.gov/population/cencounts/ks190090.txt.

On the other hand, suburban communities on both sides of the border grew substantially, and the most significant expansion occurred in areas that had experienced relatively little prior development. This was particularly true north of the river in Clay County, which tripled in size between 1950 and 1980. The area of the greatest sustained postwar growth, however, was across the border in suburban Johnson County. Between 1950 and 1970 communities there added about 150,000 people, including large numbers from outside the metropolitan area. This, of course, was home to the Shawnee Mission School District. Altogether, the county’s population quadrupled during the long postwar era. No other part of greater Kansas City grew so rapidly. Along with growth in the African American population, this was perhaps the region’s most significant demographic event of the era.49

MAP 2.7 Metropolitan Kansas City school district boundaries, 1980

At the same time as these changes were under way, many school districts were consolidated, especially in outlying areas. This is when the larger suburban school systems took shape. Map 2.7 shows the area’s school districts in 1980, and comparing it to map 2.2 provides a clear sense of the magnitude of this change. North of the river, for instance, the many smaller districts that fragmented the so-called Northland had been consolidated into a few larger ones. The most significant of these, at least with respect to population size, was the North Kansas City School District, which expanded by annexation of adjacent districts, all quite willing partners. The Liberty School District also grew during these years, moving to the west and north. Both these systems offered their smaller neighbors the opportunity to send students to their sizable high schools and take advantage of the additional resources that a larger district could provide. It was an era of annexation and consolidation in school systems, and bigger was widely seen as better.50

There was little change in the eastern segments of the metropolitan area and in Jackson County, as the older school systems there were consolidated many years earlier. Several tiny districts joined to create the Center District just to the south of KCMPS, but it remained a relatively small system even after consolidation. Major changes occurred on the Kansas side of the border, however, with the formation of the Shawnee Mission School District (SMSD) in 1971. This was one of the fastest-growing systems in the region, adding four new high schools within a decade, along with a number of other facilities. Its schools also became known for a high degree of academic excellence, rivaling the very best KCMPS institutions as early as the later 1950s.51 By the 1970s, the suburban districts—whether within the city limits or not—no longer suffered in comparison with the schools of KCMPS. Instead, they had grown into formidable rivals in nearly all respects. A tide had turned, and scholastic excellence was no longer associated just with central city schools. Suburban educational ascendancy had clearly arrived.

A District in Transition

At the heart of the educational geography of greater Kansas City, of course, was the public-school district of Kansas City, Missouri. As the foregoing suggests, its reputation as the region’s premier school system changed dramatically in the postwar era. When more middle-class, mainly white families settled in the suburbs, or in suburban districts within the city, schools in these outlying areas grew and gained a better reputation. Indeed, as several suburban districts became known for educational excellence, such perceptions became a major advantage in their development. This was especially true of the Shawnee Mission schools. It was hardly a coincidence that they served communities built by Nichols and other upscale developers.52 This too was part of the changing social and educational geography of greater Kansas City. There could be little doubt that the rise of successful school districts was linked to observable advantages in community wealth and social status.

Like many other American urban areas, Kansas City experienced considerable controversy and social unrest due to school desegregation in the 1960s and ’70s. The city was the focal point of the Jenkins v. Missouri desegregation case, which resulted in nearly $2 billion in improvements to central city schools between 1985 and 1995.53 But these developments took time to unfold. Conflict over racial segregation did not occur immediately after the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision, which had focused national attention on nearby Topeka, Kansas. In fact, after voluntarily ending long-standing legal requirements for segregation in 1955, Kansas City was praised for its seemingly liberal policies regarding school integration. While overcrowded African American schools had been a significant problem prior to Brown, the movement of blacks to other institutions relieved some of difficulties that population growth had posed for segregated schools. Unfortunately, however, such positive changes were not lasting.54

Despite a seemingly promising start, desegregation in Kansas City proceeded very slowly. In 1960 all but three of the city’s nineteen secondary institutions (including junior high schools) remained majority white, and most African Americans lived in an area of several square miles near the downtown business district. The KCMPS neighborhood school policy, coupled with its board’s rejection of racial integration as a policy option, soon resulted in a return to overcrowded institutions serving black neighborhoods. The district responded with an “intact busing” policy, which shipped whole classes of black students to under-enrolled schools, where they spent their days in virtual isolation. Local civil rights organizations were understandably incensed by this and demanded that the schools be integrated to end overcrowding and improve education for African American students. As in Chicago and elsewhere, a coalition of groups presented demands to the school board and organized resistance to its policies. Called the Citizens Coordinating Committee (CCC), it became the focal point of activism regarding the schools. While the CCC did not manage to organize large-scale demonstrations, pickets started to appear at the school headquarters in September 1964. When the group threatened legal action to challenge the intact busing policy, the district agreed to a plan that would send black students and teachers to schools throughout the city on an integrated basis. While the board viewed this as a temporary solution to overcrowding, it satisfied most black community demands, at least for a time.55

As the city’s African American population spread southward, white flight began modestly, and the school system remained majority white through the 1960s. Perhaps because of the busing program adopted in 1964, a sense of urgency regarding race and education was relatively slow to develop.56 Conflict over desegregation eventually flared toward the end of the decade, however, triggered partly by district decisions to build new schools in black neighborhoods, thereby sustaining racially segregated education. In the meantime, white flight accelerated as the African American population continued to grow. The CCC and other civil rights organizations maintained pressure on the board to end school segregation, but it was not until the later 1970s that the district adopted a clear system-wide desegregation plan, under orders from federal authorities. This entailed busing large numbers of African American students to schools across the city, but the effect was not the same as it had been in the ’60s. Many fewer white students remained, making meaningful integration impossible to achieve throughout the system. By the end of the decade a historic transformation of the city’s public schools was largely complete.57

Southwest High, located near the historic Sunset Hills residential district built by J. C. Nichols, was among the last Kansas City schools to be integrated. It was widely regarded as one of the area’s leading secondary schools academically, but the arrival of African American students was seen as endangering its status. Area white families began sending their children to nearby private schools or moved elsewhere.58 In many respects these changes signaled the end of an era; henceforth the city’s schools generally would be judged inferior to their suburban counterparts.

Kansas City thus offers an instructive example of education as a factor related to metropolitan development, in many respects quite similar to other urban settings at the time. It may have differed from places where controversy and conflict over desegregation occurred earlier or on a larger scale, but the broad trajectory of events was similar. In the end, some parts of the metropolitan region acquired reputations for excellent schools, others just the opposite. Most districts, of course, were somewhere in the middle of these extremes. As demonstrated below, however, these differences were also associated with other conditions that affected children’s academic success, including wealth, poverty, and the educational levels of proximate adults. As many commentators have noted, these were particularly critical factors in shaping educational outcomes.59

Mapping Educational Change

As suggested earlier, social and economic inequality shaped the geography of metropolitan areas, especially with respect to education. Considering the spatial ordering of educational opportunity within a given region, however, requires data that can be identified geographically. Fortuitously, the US Census has provided such information in tract reports, representing relatively small geographic units in both cities and suburbs.60 Reliable information about household income and wealth became available for most tracts in 1960, making that year a good baseline for an analysis of geo-spatial inequality. In Kansas City it also preceded major local controversy over desegregation and large-scale white flight. Twenty years later, the 1980 census offered similar census tract data, offering a useful point of comparison. That year also followed the city’s first comprehensive school integration plan and more than a decade of declining white enrollment in KCMPS. These two points in time thus provide an opportunity to use statistical analysis in considering changes that occurred between key moments in the historical development of metropolitan Kansas City’s urban and suburban schools. Comparing different patterns of spatial differentiation can help identify demographic and socioeconomic correlates of major events in local history: the advent of conflict over schooling and suburban residential development.

For purposes of comparison across decades, it is helpful to divide metropolitan Kansas City census tracts into distinctive groups, roughly corresponding to certain school district boundaries and other identifiable neighborhoods. The geo-spatial structure of demographic and socioeconomic change, after all, is most meaningful in light of the municipal and district boundaries discussed earlier. The discussion to follow will thus focus on five clusters of census tracts as a sampling of important geo-spatial entities. These include the Kansas City Missouri Public Schools (KCMPS), the Country Club district developed by J. C. Nichols (a residential and commercial zone, including Sunset Hills along Ward Parkway, located within KCMPS), the Shawnee Mission School District (SMSD), the Raytown School District, and the North Kansas City School District. Other tracts in Jackson County, Missouri, represent a convenient comparison group. Collectively, these areas can offer a telling profile of the variation in social, economic, and educational conditions evident throughout the metropolitan region. Tables 2.2 and 2.3 provide descriptive statistics for each of them, for 1960 and 1980 respectively.61

Both the years selected for this comparison reveal unmistakable educational differences. This is apparent in map 2.8, which illustrates broad variation in adult attainment levels. While districts and communities are not demarcated, the shading of the map indicates the percentages of residents who were college graduates in 1980. The heaviest concentrations are located in eastern Johnson County and the several southwest Kansas City tracts adjacent to the state line, the latter located within the Country Club district. As a group they represent neighborhoods planned or inspired by J. C. Nichols. These attainment benchmarks represent a level of social and cultural status at this point in time, a degree of formal education achieved by a subset of the larger population. As many other studies have noted, college education was (and is) a key parental attribute in predicting the educational success of students.62

TABLE 2.2 Descriptive statistics, 1960: five geo-spatial areas (weighted averages of census tract data)

Note: Standard deviations in parentheses

TABLE 2.3 Descriptive statistics, 1980: five geo-spatial areas (weighted averages of tract data)

Note: Standard deviations in parentheses

This map also reveals a great deal of inequality across the metropolitan region. With respect to adult educational attainment, the Country Club district of Kansas City exhibited the highest levels, along with adjacent suburban Johnson County, which also featured the region’s highest levels of per capita wealth and income. The segment with the lowest level of adult attainment was the remainder of central Kansas City, which largely represented KCMPS. Suburban Jackson County, outside the city limits, was between these extremes. Such differences were emblematic of a historical process of social and economic differentiation that transformed the metropolitan landscape during the postwar years. Indeed, as suggested in comparing tables 2.2 and 2.3, important geo-spatial distinctions grew more dramatic with time.

Additional information from the census underscores this point. It is clear that most of the area’s black and low-income population lived within the KCMPS district as early as 1960, even though at the time the district was still widely viewed as effective and in some respects excellent. Not surprisingly, home values were lower there on average, as was overall adult attainment. The principal exception to this, of course, was the Sunset Hills area on the city’s southwest side, which featured very high home values, few black or poor residents, and a high level of adult education. The suburban communities included in these tables exhibited a good deal of variation as well. The SMSD area of Johnson County, Kansas, was wealthier and better educated than the Missouri suburbs of Raytown in Jackson County and North Kansas City (a part of Kansas City, Missouri, but not KCMPS). Raytown was somewhat similar to SMSD in home values, but it was a much smaller community. In general, few African Americans lived in suburban areas, although the SMSD area had more of them than either of the Missouri suburban districts.

MAP 2.8 Geo-spatial distribution of adults (age twenty-five and older) with college degrees (bachelor’s or more) in 1980 (census tract data)

Two decades later things had changed in many respects, but stayed more or less the same in others. By 1980 the city’s black population had roughly doubled. Overall levels of attainment had gone up, but the Missouri suburbs of Raytown and North Kansas City changed little. Attainment had increased considerably in Kansas City, partly due to rising black graduation rates, while the Sunset Hills area and Shawnee Mission retained the highest levels in the region. Home ownership had also grown, and SMSD commanded the highest property values, with Raytown close behind. With desegregation then under way in Kansas City, extending to the celebrated Sunset Hills area, Johnson County was a logical destination for affluent whites in search of good schools that were unlikely to be racially integrated. Many of those wanting to remain in Missouri headed south to Raytown or other Jackson County suburbs, but overall levels of adult education remained lower there.63

These patterns are evident in the levels of adult education evident in map 2.8. It is clear that a substantially greater concentration of college-educated adults lived in the geographically adjacent areas of Southwest Kansas City and Johnson County. Several tracts recorded levels of more than 60 percent, more than double that of most tracts on the Missouri side of the border. Altogether, more than a third of the adult population of SMSD were college graduates, a level considerably greater than for the rest of the metropolitan region. This, no doubt, was a major factor in the high performance and strong academic reputation of schools in the area. Indeed, a statistical analysis in the book’s appendix reveals that the numbers of college-educated residents in this quadrant of the metropolitan region were significantly higher than local income levels would suggest. In other words, people with collegiate backgrounds flocked to these neighborhoods, including a disproportionate number of younger adults likely thinking of schools for their children. In this respect, the perceived excellence of local educational institutions was a significant factor in the area’s growth. If adult education was among the most important determinants of school success, it is little wonder that students in SMSD did so well. They lived in a large community defined to a great degree by concentrated educational advantage.64

The map points to other features of the region as well. To the north and east, within the boundaries of KCMPS, it is possible to see the “wall” represented by Troost Avenue, a vertical line that separated the less-educated black population to the east from practically all white neighborhoods to the west. Not surprisingly, attainment levels were visibly depressed in neighborhoods marked by racial segregation and extreme poverty. This represented yet another dimension of disadvantage for children living in these settings, reflecting the long history of educational discrimination that African Americans suffered in the South and elsewhere.65

Across the border in Kansas, the picture was quite different. The area of high attainment extended south and west into the newly established city of Overland Park, which was rapidly becoming a center for corporate headquarters and telecommunications. A few tracts of somewhat lower attainment appeared in the northern section of SMSD, as older housing stock there attracted less-affluent buyers from Wyandotte County and elsewhere. The newly reconstituted Blue Valley School District served children in the southern part of the county and would eventually emerge as the area’s premier educational system. Children in this part of the metro area undoubtedly benefited from the accumulation of highly educated adults there too, despite changes in certain tracts in the north and west. On the other hand, little such advancement occurred in Kansas City. At the same time that college-educated adults were clustering in SMSD and other suburban settings, relatively few were evident in the urban core area of KCMPS. Altogether, in that case, the 1980 map of adult educational attainment vividly illustrates a widening socioeconomic divide that fractured the region.

The low adult attainment levels in KCMPS were emblematic of major changes in the district during these years: middle-class white flight, growing poverty, and a declining tax base to support local public schools. Perhaps even more telling, however, was the absence of parents and other adults who had experienced success in the education system. This meant that children in much of the city lacked a vital resource in the quest for an education equivalent to that offered in suburban districts. Given these circumstances, it is no surprise that schools in these parts of KCMPS came to be seen as failing.66 These conditions also account for much of the frustration and anger that African Americans expressed during the 1960s and ’70s. They were well aware of the inequalities that existed across the region. Even within the boundaries of KCMPS, the wealth of the Country Club district and the excellence of its public schools—particularly Southwest High—were persistent reminders that urban education did not have to be inferior. But an intractable school board dismissed calls for integration, keeping most black students in segregated schools serving impoverished neighborhoods. In two decades the condition of African American neighborhoods east of Troost Avenue changed relatively little, and children living there suffered the consequences. To a large degree, they contended with multiple dimensions of concentrated disadvantage.67

Altogether, these patterns point to widening inequality in educational aspects of social status across the metro area. If there was a distinctive sector of concerted advantage in the region, it was located in the southwestern quadrant of greater Kansas City. The rest of KCMPS and suburban Jackson County featured fewer social and cultural resources of this sort despite relatively isolated pockets of college-educated residents. In the central city, KCMPS had clearly fallen behind with respect to the resources represented on the 1980 attainment map. The Missouri suburbs were doing better, including North Kansas City, Raytown, and other areas, but still lagged the college education profile of the Nichols neighborhoods. Like many large American metropolitan regions, greater Kansas City was fragmented by race and social class, but it was also sharply divided by the adult educational resources available to children. It is little wonder, then, that schools with the best academic reputations were in Kansas and Southwest Kansas City; it was the result of a process of social and economic differentiation that unfolded over several decades.

Correlates of Educational Inequality

It is clear that considerable unevenness existed in the distribution of highly educated adults across metropolitan Kansas City; but what did that mean for the educational experiences of students? There are many potential dimensions to such a question, but among the most basic is attainment, the levels of schooling reached by individuals. This measure permits estimation of how long students remained in school and an assessment of their chances of graduating. Variation on this count was clearly evident in the experiences of seventeen-year-old youth at this time in US history. Prior research has demonstrated that such a statistical analysis of attainment can offer considerable insight into how geo-spatial patterns of inequality influenced the school experiences of youth.68 But first it is necessary locate an appropriate body of such evidence.

Fortunately, a ready source of relevant information existed for this study. Using US Census data from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS), it was possible to identify a sample of seventeen-year-old youth from across greater Kansas City. These data feature a range of demographic, educational, and household characteristics to consider in connection with attainment. With the geographic codes provided by IPUMS, three broad geo-spatial groupings were identifiable in the sample: the city of Kansas City, Missouri (including areas served by “suburban” school districts), suburban communities in Jackson and Clay Counties, and suburban Johnson County. Using logistical regression techniques, it is possible to conduct a comparison of the experiences of youth living in these areas, while considering a wide range of additional issues that affected their lives.

Again, the focal point of this analysis is individual student educational attainment, which considers the progress that each youth in the sample has made toward high school graduation. To do this, the analysis asks whether the youth was still in school and had reached at least eleventh grade, the junior (or penultimate) year of school. This benchmark is required, because the census recorded household characteristics for youth residing at home, permitting consideration of family background factors that most certainly affected attainment. Sixteen was the legally permissible age for dropping out in both Kansas and Missouri, and the census was taken in April, toward the end of the academic year. Most students who were still in school at seventeen and were at least juniors were quite likely to graduate, as relatively few dropped out or pursued General Equivalency Diplomas (GED) or other alternatives. Consequently, this represents a broad indicator of success in school, or attainment of a fixed standard of accomplishment. Using it to compare the success of students in different parts of the metropolitan area permits examination of other factors that may have shaped their school experiences.69

To identify such influences, the IPUMS sample offers a range of social and demographic characteristics to consider. These include factors that have been widely used in studies of educational attainment and status attainment research, such as race, gender, economic status, home ownership, family structure, and parental education. The book’s appendix provides definitions for these variables, along with detailed tabular presentation of regression results. This analysis highlights their interaction with the geo-spatial factors specified above. The point, after all, is to explore how the uneven distribution of various resources affected the educational experiences of youth at this time.

Within the limitations posed by the IPUMS data, it is possible to identify general patterns of attainment that reflect the larger profile of geo-spatial inequality across the region. Overall, the IPUMS data indicate that seventeen-year-olds in Johnson County were 70 percent more likely to have reached at least their junior year in high school than their Missouri counterparts, whether in Kansas City or the suburbs. There appears to have been relatively little difference in the likelihood of success between Kansas City students and those in suburban Jackson and Clay Counties, probably because of the expansive Kansas City sample. Missouri residents in the sample thus were alike in highlighting the success of students in Johnson County, who exhibited the highest attainment levels in the region. This, of course, is a pattern broadly similar to that observed in the earlier discussion of adult attainment levels.

Figure 2.1 represents the results of the logistical regression analysis, graphically depicting the findings in terms of both positive and negative effects in the likelihood of school success. Factors with lines extending horizontally to the right of the zero dividing line were associated with a greater likelihood of school success; those with lines extending to the left were linked to lower odds of such accomplishment. Living in a home owned by the family, for instance, more than doubled the likelihood of school success for youth in the sample, while living in a household below the poverty level lowered the odds of attainment by more than 30 percent. These are robust effects, and controlling for them helped to give the African American variable a positive association with school success. Part of the Johnson County advantage in attainment was attributable to the area’s high level of home ownership: 93 percent of student there lived in family-owned homes, compared to 75 percent in Kansas City and 78 percent in the Missouri suburbs (calculated from IPUMS data). The effect of being female also was enhanced by controlling for these factors, with girls exhibiting a nearly 17 percent attainment advantage over boys.

FIGURE 2.1 Results of a logistic regression analysis, using individual-level data from IPUMS. Lines to the right of the 0 axis are factors associated with greater (positive) odds of school success; lines to the left are those associated with lower (negative) odds of success. Numbers on the bottom line represent coefficient values. See the appendix for a step-wise analysis of these variables and their definitions.

The most important factors in the analysis, however, were categorical variables for living in a single-parent, female-headed household and having at least one parent with a college degree. These too represented robust effects: living in a single-parent family represented a 45 percent reduction in the likelihood of school success, and having a college-educated parent increased the odds of attainment by more than a multiple of 3 (300 percent). The latter variable, of course, was the focal point in discussing various school districts earlier. In the logistic regression results it exhibited the strongest relationship to student educational attainment, controlling for a wide range of additional variables. Its inclusion dropped the Johnson County variable substantially, reducing the advantage of its resident students over their Missouri suburban counterparts to less than a 14 percent greater likelihood of school success. The family structure variable had very little effect on Johnson County residents, although its inclusion did make the black categorical variable both positive and significant. Holding all these factors constant, African American youth were more likely than whites to succeed in school.

The results of this analysis highlight the importance of a variety of factors as correlates of individual success in school. Poverty, living in a single-parent household, and lacking a college-educated parent were conditions more frequently experienced by black youth, and they were associated with substantially lower attainment. Poverty and lack of traditional family structure were certainly correlated within certain inner-city neighborhoods, and high levels of unemployment contributed to both. Impoverished women headed most single-parent households in these settings, and they frequently struggled to provide basic necessities for their families. In 1980, single women parented about a quarter of Kansas City black families. For the most part, they lacked the economic, social, and cultural resources to help their children excel academically. The extent of joblessness in high-poverty neighborhoods, especially for men, also limited the positive role models for children and youth. These conditions of concentrated disadvantage directly impacted the likelihood of success in school. Even if less than a third of KCMO’s black households experienced this degree of deprivation in 1980, and a slightly larger number represented the rising black middle class, a substantial portion of the KCMPS student population struggled as a consequence.70 And the system’s schools were ill equipped to help them succeed.

On the other hand, the positive association of other factors with the Johnson County variable illuminates the manner in which concentrated advantage contributed to higher levels of educational success. In comparison with other suburbs, it was the power of parental collegiate education that distinguished Johnson County youth most clearly. Within the IPUMS sample, fully 40 percent of youth had at least one parent with a college degree, as opposed to 12 percent in Kansas City (including those in “suburban” districts) and 9 percent in suburban Missouri. In other words, students in Johnson County were more than three times more likely than their peers elsewhere in metro Kansas City to have a college-educated parent, and this turned out to be a major advantage with respect to school. These students also had access to many other positive influences in their communities, adults who often were in a position to assist them in achieving their goals, academic or otherwise. The fact that they lived in such an affluent area doubtless was an advantage too. Their families did not struggle to make ends meet, but rather often were able to deploy resources directly to support their social and academic advancement.71 In short, these circumstances were the mirror opposite of conditions facing many impoverished children in the inner city. It is little wonder that so many more youth succeeded in the Johnson County schools.

In the end, this discussion also points to the significance of geo-spatial differences in wealth, family structure, and adult education, key advantages for students in one corner of the region and, conversely, a disadvantage for others. Johnson County, Kansas, was clearly the locus of great benefits for children and youth, as represented in a combination of conditions. Students who lived there were 70 percent more likely to experience advancement in public secondary schools than their counterparts in the region, and much of this was associated with the area’s high levels of home ownership and adult education. Its schools also may have been somewhat better, as Johnson County students were 13 percent more likely to succeed academically even after these factors were controlled, and perhaps students benefited there from highly motivated peers as well, or community norms that emphasized success in school. But much of the observable variation in attainment appears to have been linked to key family background factors, a finding consistent with decades of research. The fact that families with these resources were clustered together in this fashion clearly represented a high degree of concentrated advantage, a feature of metropolitan development that has been discussed a good deal recently but was plainly evident four decades ago.72

Conditions were quite different just a short distance away. Poverty, single-parent families, lower parental education, and living in rental property (non–home ownership) clearly were associated with lower likelihood of attainment in other parts of the region, especially Kansas City, Missouri. When these household characteristics—correlates of concentrated poverty—were held constant, African American attainment was actually higher than that of whites. For youth in the aspiring black middle class, this suggests that the odds of succeeding in school were very good indeed. But in much of the inner city, an accumulation of conditions forcefully impacted the lives of other young people in a negative fashion. Factors included in the analysis point to the significance of concentrated poverty as a fact of life for many black students, a form of pervasive disadvantage that foreshortened their opportunities for attainment.73 This was a stark contrast to their peers in Johnson County, whose families’ stocks of physical (property) and cultural (education) capital undoubtedly contributed a great deal to their accomplishments. These were significant suburban advantages indeed.

Perry Cookingham worked assiduously to forestall the damaging impact of suburbanization in greater Kansas City, but in the end it does not appear that he succeeded. Like other major US metropolitan regions, rapid growth occurred there during this period, marked by extensive development on the urban periphery. Despite efforts to unify many outlying areas within the municipal boundaries of Kansas City, Missouri, suburban development spilled over to Johnson County, Kansas, and to eastern Jackson County. This process of suburbanization was abetted by racial transition in the center city, resulting is classic patterns of white flight and social-economic inequality. These lines of development mirrored perceptions of area education systems, as suburban districts—both within and outside the city limits—grew in size and outward signs of excellence. Conflicts over desegregation and equity in the central city contributed to these changes, as they did in other metropolitan settings. In all these respects Kansas City reflected national trends, even if certain aspects of its experience were unique.

Schools apparently were a blind spot for Cookingham, and in this respect Kansas City represents an intriguing case of metropolitan development. Given the patterns of educational inequality described above, there can be little doubt that critical geo-spatial disparities came to mark the distribution of these social and cultural resources in the region as well. Race and poverty were critical dimensions of this, along with wealth and other aspects of social status. With respect to education, however, overall attainment levels were an unusually salient element of such differentiation. In particular, adults with college-level education gathered in a distinctive zone of concentrated advantage that was noted for its wealth and style, attributes that apparently proved attractive to (mainly white) parents seeking the very best educational opportunities for their children. Meanwhile, children and youth growing up in the region’s poorest neighborhoods, where adult attainment was least evident, endured conditions of concentrated disadvantage that made school success far less likely. These were extremes of metropolitan inequality that emerged relatively quickly during the postwar era.

By 1980 there were clear winners and losers with respect to the degree of school success that children and youth experienced. If some areas in metro Kansas City were seen as good or desirable in this respect, SMSD and the Country Club district were surely at the top of the list. A major part of this status was the proximate accumulation of educational resources, chief among them the attainment levels of the adult population. The absence of such assets in other areas of the region contributed to the high degree of local inequality evident in educational opportunity.

This analysis has demonstrated that this sort of geo-spatial differentiation in education accompanied the emergence of race and segregation as major issues in Kansas City. In particular, African Americans recognized the educational impact of segregation and concentrated poverty, demanding integrated schooling as a means to greater equity in outcomes. By and large, however, they did not succeed in altering the dynamics of socioeconomic differentiation that gave shape to geo-spatial inequality. The cultural and educational attributes of the former J. C. Nichols developments, along with their highly regarded schools, appear to have proven quite attractive to families of a certain economic and social standing. And this more than anything else appears to have accounted for the academic success of its youth. Meanwhile, the departure of middle-class whites from much of KCMPS signaled the rapid decline of crucial assets in that part of the region, and outside of the black community few leaders publicly acknowledged the magnitude of the problem. Local residents live with the legacy of those developments today.

In recent years considerable attention has been given to widening social and economic inequality in the United States, and particularly to the geo-spatial partitioning of various status groups. The evidence herein suggests that this process was evident some fifty years ago and has been an integral aspect of metropolitan development at least since the postwar period. Suburbanization has long been recognized as contributing to social and economic differentiation; but this analysis has demonstrated that educational attainment was also a community characteristic that came to distinguish certain parts of metropolitan regions.

The American tradition of independent school districts certainly made it easier to identify metropolitan zones with different educational attributes. And the history of educational partitioning in Kansas City, Missouri, demonstrates how educational systems could create boundaries that demarcated social and cultural distinctions, even within municipal boundaries. As sociologist Pierre Bourdieu noted, cultural forms of capital such as educational credentials often operate as a telling indicator of dissimilarity, and such differences can become a vital resource in the quest for status distinction.74 The Kansas City experience demonstrates how these social and cultural forces have operated in recent American history.