Epilogue
AN ENDURING LEGACY OF INEQUALITY
In the fall of 2016 newly appointed Kansas City, Missouri, Public Schools superintendent Mark Bedell presided at a celebratory event staged to announce that, for the first time in nearly three decades, the district had scored high enough on the state’s evaluation metrics to be eligible for full accreditation. State officials were a bit less sanguine, however, stating that another year’s worth of data would be necessary to determine if the district’s gains represented sustainable progress. Even so, it was a hopeful moment for a school system that had long struggled with enrollment losses, dismal test scores, and staff turnover.1 In most important respects, KCMPS never recovered from the crisis of the later 1970s, when white flight escalated and the Jenkins v. Missouri desegregation case took center stage.
When Bedell arrived in Kansas City, KCMPS schools enrolled about fifteen thousand students, fewer than half the number in 1980, and charter schools served some ten thousand additional children and youth in the district.2 Suburban districts had grown, especially those farther from the city; Johnson County schools alone enrolled more than one hundred thousand students. School systems north of the river and in eastern Jackson County also had gotten bigger. Some of this was due to continued population movement out of the central city, a long-standing national trend, but it also represented a sustained lack of confidence in the city schools. They remained failed institutions in the eyes of many across the region.3
KCMPS’s loss of provisional accreditation in 2011 became national news, but it also triggered alarm through the metropolitan area.4 Under Missouri law, families living within the district’s boundaries could send their children to adjacent systems, with the cost borne by KCMPS. Local commentators labeled the anticipated budgetary impact on city schools as “crippling,” and suburban districts balked at the prospect of poor minority students arriving on their doorsteps. Area school boards and superintendents urged state officials “to reward Kansas City for its recent progress and give it provisional accreditation.” Suburban school leaders were deeply ambivalent about accepting children from the inner city, despite the prospect of gaining additional funds for new students and an opportunity to serve a more diverse population.5 Several districts subsequently mounted legal challenges to the state’s transfer rules.6 In this respect little had changed since the Spainhower controversies of the later 1960s, even if the rhetoric was far less inflammatory. Status distinctions between suburban and urban schools remained largely intact, and many suburbanites wanted to keep it that way.
Kansas City was not unusual in this regard. Across the state in metropolitan St. Louis, white suburban residents protested at the prospect of African American students transferring to their institutions when the struggling Normandy school district also lost its accreditation. In a scene reminiscent of Raytown more than forty years earlier, a raucous crowd in a school gym cheered when one parent declared herself “concerned about my children’s education and safety,” evoking stereotypes of black students as low achieving and violence prone. As in Kansas City, suburban districts resisted the idea of accommodating African American students seeking a better education. Eventually, students who had found placements in adjacent districts were required to return to Normandy when its schools regained provisional accreditation.7
Elsewhere, predominantly white and affluent areas within racially diverse school districts have attempted to split away by forming their own school systems. This has occurred chiefly in the South, where many districts are organized on a county-wide basis, but it represented a localizing impulse similar to that observed in Kansas City. In most of these cases, whites sought to create boundaries that would exclude poor and minority students from gaining access to their schools.8 These instances offer compelling evidence that potent forms of localism continue to function nearly a half century after the controversies described in this book.
National statistics on the distribution of population within metropolitan areas indicate that suburbanization has continued to be a defining force in the spatial organization of institutions and opportunity. While 40 percent of metropolitan residents lived in central cities in 1980, and they held 50 percent of all metropolitan jobs, by 1990 those numbers had fallen to 37 percent and 45 percent respectively. The latter figure was especially significant, as it marked the first time that most metropolitan employment was found in the suburbs. These distributions have proved persistent, as the suburbs continue to count most of the nation’s metropolitan residents and jobs today. Following a relatively brief shift in growth to central cities after the recession of 2008, in recent years suburbanization has resumed, especially at the outer extremities of larger metropolitan areas.9 In this respect, the postwar era’s dramatic changes in the geo-spatial organization of metropolitan life continue to be manifest. For better or worse, the United States has become a largely suburban nation.
These developments inevitably affected schools, as a suburban education advantage remains evident in most metropolitan areas, especially larger ones. Much of it, moreover, was linked to deteriorating conditions in the cities. The closing years of the twentieth century witnessed a deepening crisis of urban education. A 1996 report from the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) found that “urban children were more than twice as likely to be living in poverty than those in suburban locations (30 percent compared with 13 percent in 1990).” It added that “urban students were more likely to be exposed to safety and health risks that place their health and well-being in jeopardy, and were less likely to have access to regular medical care,” while also being more likely to engage in such risky behaviors as unmarried teen pregnancy.10 As poverty became more pervasive in the cities, other social problems mounted.
City schools often struggled in the wake of these challenges, especially in hyper-segregated African American communities such as Kansas City’s. Urban institutions generally reported the lowest achievement levels and highest dropout rates in the country.11 The NCES report indicated that standardized test scores in high-poverty schools were 20 percent lower on average than those in more affluent institutions, in both urban and suburban settings. Perhaps even more disturbing, less than three-quarters of urban high school students graduated on time, compared to 84 percent of suburban students, which also reflected differences between high- and low-poverty institutions. High-poverty urban high schools reported the lowest graduation rates; only about two-thirds of their students finished in four years. Most of these schools, furthermore, were predominantly or wholly African American, typically in settings of extreme deprivation.12
Sociologist William Julius Wilson has argued that most of this inequality was due to growing “concentrated poverty,” when the number of households below the federal poverty line approached 40 percent. Wilson and other social scientists attributed this to the profound impact of unemployment in these neighborhoods. This was a problem during the 1960s and ’70s, but it grew worse in many respects with time. The ongoing flight of industrial jobs led to massive job losses, aggravating racial segregation, deprivation, and delinquency. The neighborhoods most directly affected were principally African American, as housing and employment discrimination made it difficult for blacks to follow jobs to the suburbs. Debilitating poverty also inhibited movement out of ghetto neighborhoods. As work disappeared, conventional social norms often shifted, family structures fractured, and troublesome behavior mounted. In particular, the sale and use of illicit drugs became more widespread, especially following the onset of the so-called crack epidemic of the 1980s. Rising arrests and harassment by police did not help matters and in many instances aggravated them. And these were events that affected young people disproportionally.13 It is little wonder that urban graduation rates stagnated and achievement levels lagged national norms.
In the wake of these developments city residents continued to depart for surrounding suburban communities, including African Americans with the means to do so. As in earlier years, they wanted newer houses, more property, and other amenities of suburban life, but schools continued to be an attraction too. This resulted in a higher degree of socioeconomic variety in the suburbs, with certain areas becoming predominantly black. Demographer William Frey has identified many “melting pot suburbs,” although relatively few had large African American populations.14 Much of this change appeared in western states, where a growing Latino population contributed to diversified suburbs. Substantial numbers of Asian Americans lived in these areas too. There was greater black suburbanization in the South, but considerably less elsewhere. In older metropolitan areas of the Northeast and Midwest, suburbs remained predominantly white, with isolated pockets of racial and ethnic diversity.15
While suburban schools generally benefited from comparisons to urban institutions, relatively few earned reputations for consistently high levels of achievement. Some districts, typically white and affluent, had long been known for academic excellence, such as Shawnee Mission in greater Kansas City. Writing in the 1990s, economists Peter Mieszkowski and Edwin Mills observed that “once high-quality school districts became established, they became magnets for further suburbanization and attracted other households that placed a high value on education, furthering their quality and reputation.”16 In other words, ostensibly excellent suburban schools typically attracted the types of families whose children assured their continued success. In this fashion, localized centers of educational distinction continued to dot the metropolitan landscape, contributing to the aura of suburban superiority, even if a limited number of districts enjoyed such prominence. At the same time, of course, the allure of academic reputations added to internecine suburban rivalry, occasionally fueling a lively status competition.17
As metropolitan population expanded, considerable variation appeared in school characteristics and outcomes, especially in so-called inner suburbs. While few suburban institutions experienced the problems of urban ghettos, new pockets of poverty did pose challenges to the suburban image. Certain communities experienced conditions similar to inner-city neighborhoods, such as Compton in California, Ford Heights in Illinois, or Paterson in New Jersey, to name a few. Most were predominantly African American and were located close to central cities, or in so-called satellite cities at some distance. As the suburbs became more variegated, these places defied conventional stereotypes about the schools, but they also represented exceptions to the rule.18 The majority of suburban schools have remained predominantly white and middle class. This was especially true in outlying communities, as most minority families leaving the central cities found homes where costs were lower and housing more readily accessible. While most African Americans who made such moves did experience a better standard of living than those who remained in central cities, their children often encountered problems in suburban schools. This was especially true in predominantly white institutions, where problems related to academic tracking and racially disproportionate discipline came into play. Thus, although more poor and minority families left the cities following the 1980s, many continued to experience discrimination and exclusion. And general perceptions of suburban advantage remained secure.19
The tendency to favor suburban schools continued to be robust in the twenty-first century, despite a renewed interest in urban living among younger, well-educated whites. Spurred by the “Great Recession,” city growth surpassed suburban areas nationally for a time after 2010, leading James E. Ryan, Richard Florida, and other observers to declare a potential revitalization of the larger cities. But this shift in urban fortunes did not endure, and by 2017 momentum had swung back to the suburbs.20
It appears that many young urban residents longed to own a home and enjoy the comforts of suburban life, and city schools also may have been an important factor in their thinking. Most did not have children when moving to the cities, but when offspring did enter the picture, these families often relocated to different school districts. Sociologist Ann Owens has demonstrated that improved educational opportunities became a decisive factor in many such decisions.21 Urban school systems offered special schools and magnet programs to retain students, but the opportunities that these institutional options represented were limited in number. In the end, city schools continued to find it difficult to compete with suburban institutions on a large scale.22
The movement of young, successful professionals into the cities may not have restored the former glory of urban school systems, but it occasionally did create pockets of affluence within them. It thus became more commonplace to find particular neighborhoods with better-performing schools and other amenities. This, along with the deepening poverty and related problems in highly segregated black communities, resulted in widening inequality within the cities, too. Rising arrest rates for black males, along with a corresponding increase in female-headed households, made inner-city deprivation even worse.23 As Richard Florida has recently documented, indices of dissimilarity along lines of income and wealth have increased in the nation’s major cities during the past decade.24 Similar trends have been evident in the suburbs as well, with communities farthest from central cities exhibiting greater affluence than many inner-ring suburbs. The result has been rising metropolitan geo-spatial inequality, including inequity between cities and their surrounding suburbs.25
In the wake of these changes, distinctions between urban and suburban schools continued to be readily evident. Examining test data from 2004, sociologist John Logan and his collaborators found substantial differences between urban and suburban institutions, most of which were associated with poverty, parental education, and other socioeconomic factors. And variation between schools was substantial indeed. Some 60 percent of urban schools were classified as “high poverty, with more than 55 percent of their students eligible for free or reduced lunch subsidies (FRL), compared to 26 percent of suburban schools.” On the other hand, just 17 percent of urban schools were judged low poverty, with less than 25 percent FRL eligible, compared to 42 percent of suburban districts. These differences contributed to a clear suburban advantage in achievement results, both in math and reading, largely due to geo-spatial sorting of students by income and parental education. Race was a factor too, although highly correlated with poverty.26
In a different line of inquiry, researchers at Johns Hopkins University reported that the number of high schools with “the lowest level of success in promoting freshmen to senior status on time” had increased by 75 percent in the decade following 1993. Labeling these institutions “dropout factories,” the authors declared that “graduating is at best a 50/50 proposition” for their students. Not surprisingly, most such schools were found in larger cities, serving predominantly poor neighborhoods and a principally black or Latinx clientele.27 Once again, this designation highlighted the problems facing urban institutions, reinforcing the impression of suburban educational advantages that most Americans continued to harbor.
To summarize, little has occurred in the past four decades to change prevailing public attitudes about the status of metropolitan educational institutions. This is testimony to the enduring images that still distinguish urban and suburban communities after the dramatic shifts of the postwar era. Big cities may have represented the height of wealth and cultural sophistication during the 1950s, but they were eclipsed by suburbs in the decades to follow. Suburban ascendancy was well established by 1980, abetted to no small degree by the readily apparent superiority of schools and other local institutions. These impressions were amplified by conflicts over school desegregation and housing, and found widespread expression in the popular media. Events in the intervening years have continued to reinforce such associations more or less continually up to the present. Developments in greater Kansas City, in that case, represented a much more widespread and sustained pattern of metropolitan growth and social change. The advent of a profoundly deep and debilitating urban poverty, affecting African Americans in particular, and the growth of affluent and largely white suburban communities marked a change in metropolitan life that has proved enduring.
Continuity and Change in Metropolitan Kansas City
If suburban advantages in schooling and many other facets of life continued to be evident nationally, they certainly remained palpable in Kansas City. School district boundaries became crucial markers of social status and racial exclusion in the 1960s and ’70s and continued to be salient decades later. At the same time, growing numbers of African Americans and members of other minority groups found their way across these lines, especially in districts to the south of the city center. In this respect, Kansas City came to exhibit a pattern of change emblematic of the era. Putatively inner-ring suburbs, most within municipal Kansas City, Missouri, witnessed a racial transition as African American families began arriving in greater numbers. Some of these areas eventually became predominantly black, as many whites moved out—or ceased to move in—and property values declined. Since most such changes took place within the city, it may be apposite to say that formerly “suburban” districts “became urban.”28
Black population movement continued after 1980, and within several decades African American settlement extended nearly to the city’s southern border. As indicated on map E.1, in the years following 2013 black households were located throughout the metropolitan area but remained clustered on the city’s south side. This meant that school districts that previously had excluded blacks began to serve a rapidly diversifying clientele. Hickman Mills was predominantly African American by that time, and Raytown—once an epicenter of racial exclusion—served a sizable black population. The movement of more affluent blacks to the east of Raytown, into Independence, Lee’s Summit, and Blue Springs, is a hopeful sign of improved racial tolerance and integration. Indeed, by 2017 the region’s segregation index had dropped 15 percent since 2000, among the largest such shifts in the country.29 Even so, most of the region’s African American residents remained grouped in census tracts where they represented a clear majority, and there has been mounting evidence of racial tensions in the suburbs. The black population in central city neighborhoods declined somewhat, shifting to the south and east. Like other metropolitan areas, Kansas City had acquired a sizable black middle class, along with somewhat lower levels of residential segregation, but concentrated poverty continued to be evident as well.30
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2013–2017 American Community Survey.
MAP E.1 Metropolitan Kansas City African American population, 2013–2017 census tract averages (American Community Survey)
Meanwhile, most of Johnson County and North Kansas City remained predominantly white. The dynamics of racial integration, constrained by barriers such as the river or the state line, continued to reflect concerns that influenced earlier generations of blacks in assessing the metropolitan landscape. They did not see these parts of greater Kansas City as welcoming, Johnson County in particular. Despite the efforts of Donald Sewing and other middle-class African Americans decades earlier, that affluent and highly educated corner of the region continued to evade meaningful racial integration. While its black population grew to 4 percent by 2010, it was the lowest level of the area’s principal counties. The absence of African Americans was especially evident in the older J. C. Nichols communities of Prairie Village and Mission Hills, long known as fashionable enclaves with a somewhat liberal social orientation. The fact that so few blacks lived in these neighborhoods almost certainly was not an accident.
The same was undoubtedly true of communities north of the river, many of which were considerably more affordable than stylish Johnson County. The black population of Clay County in 2010 was just 5 percent, despite its proximity to the city center. The presence of so few black families in the Northland also suggested they were not generally welcomed there, likely reflecting the reluctance of real estate agents to show them homes. And within the urban core, the legendary Troost Wall was still clearly evident in 2010. While blacks had moved into census tracts west of Troost to the north of Forty-Seventh Street and south of Seventy-Fifth, prosperous neighborhoods around the Country Club Plaza and Brook-side continued to count relatively few of them. This too was not a coincidence; neighborhood associations likely remained vigilant there too, keeping real estate agents in line regarding sales to those deemed undesirable.31
The geo-spatial distribution of poverty adds another dimension to these matters. As indicated in map E.2, the greatest concentration of household deprivation affecting children remained in the city’s oldest African American neighborhoods to the east of Troost, extending directly to the south of the city center. Census tracts extending into the Raytown and Hickman Mills school districts exhibited somewhat lower numbers of poor households, but still well above the national average. This included areas of black settlement and portions of the south “suburban” districts that resisted African American settlement in the 1960s and ’70s. Lower poverty rates represented evidence of the black middle class, which had moved out of older black neighborhoods to the south and east. One of the highest concentrations of poverty households existed in the southwest corner of Jackson County, where more than 60 percent of the families in one census tract reported income below the federal poverty threshold. Interestingly, a significant number of whites lived in these neighborhoods as well, representing about a quarter of the population. In these parts of the region, it seems, concentrated poverty did not affect only African American children.32
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2013–2017 American Community Survey.
MAP E.2 Metropolitan Kansas City, children below the poverty level, 2013–2017 census tract averages (American Community Survey)
Most of the area’s child poverty, however, remained squarely within the Kansas City, Missouri, School District, and another large concentration existed across the river in Kansas City, Kansas. The region’s two central cities counted the clear majority of its poor families, and in this respect Kansas City was similar to other major metropolitan areas. The historic black commercial center at Eighteenth and Vine Streets had been reduced to a few museums and restaurants and little other activity, despite considerable public investment to sustain its cultural heritage. Many middle-class African Americans departed, and poverty rates remained stubbornly high. These were telltale signs of the continued association between race and concentrated deprivation. In many adjacent neighborhoods poverty levels ranged between 25 and 40 percent, and large numbers of students in local public schools lived in these areas.33
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2013–2017 American Community Survey.
MAP E.3 Metropolitan location of college-educated adults (age twenty-five or older), 2013–2017 census tract averages (American Community Survey)
High poverty rates also existed for children in other racial and ethnic groups, most of whom also lived in one of the region’s central cities. This was readily evident, for example, in the growing Hispanic community located in the southeast quadrant of Kansas City, Kansas.34 But deprivation for African Americans was clearly more severe than for whites and most other minority groups, abetted by much higher levels of residential segregation, and this continued to be readily evident in the twenty-first century.35 More than a quarter of the households in these neighborhoods were headed by single parents, most of them women. As the analysis of school success in chapter 2 suggested, these were circumstances with significant implications for educational inequality. It can aptly be described as concentrated disadvantage.36
Yet another dimension of educational advantage or disadvantage in the past, of course, was the geo-spatial distribution of adult educational levels, particularly those with a bachelor’s degree or higher. Map E.3 displays the location of greater Kansas City’s college-educated adults in 2010, and the distribution is remarkably similar to that observed in chapter 2. The greatest numbers of such individuals remained in Johnson County, especially in the J. C. Nichols communities along its eastern edge, extending south into Leawood and the Blue Valley School District. Decades after the postwar era, this segment of the metropolitan area remained the premier local site of concentrated advantage, with low rates of poverty and very high levels of adult education. Outlying suburbs to the east and north on the Missouri side of the region also had acquired telling numbers of well-educated adults, but not to the same degree. On the other hand, most of KCMPS, along with much of Independence and other portions of Jackson County, exhibited many fewer adults with this level of attainment. These circumstances compounded the effects of poverty and other disadvantages faced by children and youth in these communities.
Poverty and Test Scores
In the era of school accountability, only in its infancy during the 1970s, standardized tests scores have become a common means of comparing school districts and making judgments about their status. This is no less true in Kansas City than other metropolitan areas, although the state line makes comparison of schools in Missouri and Kansas somewhat difficult, since each uses a unique assessment system.37 Families seeking “good” schools, in that case, often rely on other indicators, including college readiness exams. In the Midwest most high school students interested in college take the ACT, including 75 percent of seniors in Kansas and 74 percent in Missouri.38 In multistate metropolitan areas, assessments such as this offer a convenient means of judging the academic standing of local education systems, even if they provide an incomplete picture of student achievement.
Using tests such as the ACT to compare schools or districts is tricky, as the number of students taking them can vary. Also, factors such as parental education, poverty, and family structure affect achievement a great deal, so test scores are not always a good reflection of what schools contribute to student learning. Even so, parents interested in preparing their children for college often look for institutions with high scores, creating an expedient map of the metropolitan education marketplace Media outlets understand this and occasionally publish composite ACT scores to compare districts or schools. In 2013 the Kansas City Star did just that, listing test results for most of the area’s public high schools.39
As presented in the Star article, the ACT scores also offer a revealing point of contrast between urban and suburban schools. Since institutions were grouped by district, these differences were hard to miss. Table E.1 provides test results for area districts, listed by state, with the percentage of families living below the federal poverty line in each one. These are composite ACT scores derived from averaging school-level results for 2012 and 2013. While not a complete list, it represents the range of such indicators throughout the region, along with district poverty levels in 2012. The correlation between district poverty levels and ACT scores was –.95, indicating that higher levels of deprivation were strongly associated with lower district-wide test performance.
Examining these data, it is immediately evident that the lowest composite scores in both states were found in the central cities. Most institutions in these settings served large numbers of poor and minority students, including many who had experienced severe hardship. Their levels of poverty were the highest in the region, approaching 40 percent of all families. Magnet schools in these districts performed much better than these averages, but they enrolled relatively small numbers of students. Lincoln High was one such institution in KCMPS, serving a predominantly black population of high-achieving youth; Sumner High in KCK was another.40
At the other end of the geo-spatial spectrum were districts serving affluent and highly educated constituents, located in the well-heeled communities of Johnson County, Kansas, or in more remote districts in the Missouri suburbs. Districts to the south—Center, Raytown, Grandview, and Hickman Mills—had seen mounting poverty since 1980 and exhibited generally lower scores. The same was true of Turner, a small Wyandotte County district adjacent to Kansas City, Kansas. In Johnson County, the venerable Shawnee Mission schools still made a good showing, even if their Blue Valley neighbors had the highest scores in the region. Olathe and De Soto to the west did well too, reflecting their relatively low numbers of families in poverty. It was telling, however, that Blue Valley had the lowest poverty levels of all. By and large, the highest-performing districts in both states had poverty rates under 10 percent, far below the national average at the time.
TABLE E.1 Composite ACT scores and families in poverty for Kansas and Missouri districts in Greater Kansas City, 2012 and 2013
Sources: Kansas City Star, August 23, 2013; US Census, Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates, Ages 5 to 17 in Families in Poverty, https://www.census.gov/data-tools/demo/saipe/saipe.html?s_appName=saipe&map_yearSelector=2012&map_geoSelector=aa_c&menu=grid_proxy&s_measures=5_17_fam_snc&s_district=2010140,2005490,2918540&s_state=20,29&s_year=2012.
As the test scores and poverty levels suggest, crucial distinctions between urban and suburban schools continued to be evident in the twenty-first century. Since these are mainly scores for high school seniors, they represent the cumulative results of education in these systems for many students. Suburban districts with large numbers of poor and minority students also had lower test scores, such as Center, Turner, and Hickman Mills.
Raytown had become an integrated school system with middling poverty levels, and its test scores were just slightly below the state average. The older suburban districts of Independence and North Kansas City were just a bit higher. It was affluent and highly educated Johnson County, Kansas, on the other hand, that exhibited the most significant suburban advantage. Schools in Park Hill, Liberty, Lee’s Summit, and Blue Springs, at a somewhat farther remove from the urban core, also did well. As a rule, in that case, it was the outlying districts that showed the highest levels of ACT performance, those with the greatest wealth, parental education, and other attributes to support their students.
As these data from greater Kansas City indicate, the metropolitan educational hierarchy that was forged during the postwar era remained largely intact nearly a half century after the desegregation controversies of the 1970s. The geo-spatial distribution of academic achievement that John Logan and his associates identified nationally was clearly evident across the region. The area’s black population remained highly segregated within both of its central city municipalities, and poverty was concentrated in many of the same neighborhoods.
This was highlighted in the fall of 2017, when KCMPS once again failed to reach basic accreditation standards established by the state of Missouri, dashing the optimism that Superintendent Bedell expressed a year earlier.41 As the Kansas City Star noted, the district’s major difficulties included its poor attendance record and the many students switching schools each year, problems endemic to high-poverty neighborhoods.42 On the other hand, concentrated wealth had accumulated in other sectors of the metropolis, especially in Johnson County and certain locations in Jackson, Platte, and Clay Counties in Missouri. By and large, these areas lay well outside the central cities, providing resources for community schools that continue to exclude most poor and African American children. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the experiences of growing up in these widely disparate urban and suburban settings held very little in common. And that could hardly bode well for the future.
These are the contemporary dimensions of social and educational inequality manifest in geographic terms, and they reflect national trends.43 They are quite stark, and also have proved to be enduring. But these patterns were neither inevitable nor entirely predictable at the start of the postwar era. How did this happen?
Creating and Maintaining the Suburban Advantage
In 1983 James Hazlett, former superintendent of the KCMPS, speculated about factors that prevented African American families from moving to the suburbs, dispersing themselves across the metropolitan landscape in the same manner as whites. He acknowledged that they were concerned about questions of safety and wanted to feel welcome in a new neighborhood. But he also suggested that suburban districts could have signaled a willingness to serve African American students by hiring black teachers, which they generally did not do. At the same time, Hazlett asserted that there was little evidence of outlying districts actively excluding African Americans while he served as superintendent. Despite this, he readily affirmed that the continued segregation of black families in the area’s central cities was the principal challenge facing education, along with attendant problems of poverty and social instability. When he assumed the district’s helm in 1955, things had been quite different.44
Metropolitan Kansas City experienced a wrenching process of social change between 1950 and 1980. As the local population grew, whites and blacks arrived on different pathways to the metropolis. African Americans, of course, mainly settled in the central cities on either side of the border, but principally in Kansas City, Missouri. Whites steered clear of those places, mostly heading for surrounding “suburban” communities, many within the city’s municipal boundaries. These were choices dictated by a variety of factors, but racial prejudice and status aspirations—including ambitions for children—clearly played major roles. Many families who lived in Kansas City to start left for the suburbs to find newer homes and better schools, among other things; but racial animus also often was a decisive element in such decisions. The result was a racially divided metropolis with impoverished African Americans, along with more affluent blacks, crowded into a relatively small sector of a sprawling metropolitan landscape. The ensuing concentrations of deprivation eventually had a dire effect on city schools, creating the crisis of urban education that has continued more or less unabated to the present.45
This is how the current configuration of Kansas City’s metropolitan social geography got started in earnest, but how did it continue or become accentuated? If African Americans had settled in the urban core, after all, what prevented them—or their children—from moving to suburbs for better homes and schools just as whites did? The answer, as indicated earlier, is that firm and unambiguous boundaries were drawn to prevent them from doing so. This also was done elsewhere in the country, of course, often with the formation of sovereign suburban communities that opposed urban expansion. But in Kansas City it was school district lines, and not necessarily municipal borders, that separated many white “suburbs” from an increasingly black city. These boundaries proved decisive, at least for a time. While they occasionally coincided with barriers such as the river or a state or county line, the district borders often held greater salience. In the absence of politically distinctive suburban municipal entities, the region’s public-school systems gave shape to local identities.
The sociopolitical foundation of these developments, of course, was informed by the belief system described herein as localism, and not just in Kansas City. Postwar suburban development embodied a widespread conviction that immediate community interests were far more important than larger metropolitan or regional concerns. As Amos Hawley and Basil Zimmer found in 1966, these views were especially prevalent in high-status communities, where residents felt that local resources should be mainly devoted to proximate institutions. This was expressed in a wide range of governmental domains, from water and sanitation districts to fire and police services, but public education clearly became one of the most important. It apparently held true irrespective of racial animus, although bigoted beliefs and sentiments certainly contributed a great deal to it.46
The American tradition of locally governed school districts, which long predated suburbanization, suited the rise of localism in metropolitan life like a well-fitted glove. This became doubly significant as suburbanites began to see schools as local assets, contributing directly to a community’s attractiveness and property values. The logic of these historical developments dictated that communities and their school districts should ever seek to improve their own status, regardless of the effect on others. And if affluence—or whiteness—was a desirable quality, residents and education leaders often became determined to sustain it. This naturally meant that they gave correspondingly little regard to ideas of shared regional interests or metropolitan harmony, especially if it incurred a cost. In this context, racial integration became anathema.47
Localism of this sort eventually helped to differentiate greater Kansas City communities according to perceptions of prominence and appeal. As a consequence, the region’s educational landscape became clearly defined by the 1970s. The high number of affluent and college-educated adults that settled in Johnson County, Kansas, was a key element of this, effectively creating a higher-education sector of the metropolis. James Hazlett observed in 1983 that “the state line was a symbol” of “two things” that existed to its west: “a superior school system” and “the most active real estate development,” which combined to produce “magnetic appeal” for prospective home buyers.48 The fact that so many of that area’s new homeowners were highly educated meant that its schools probably were destined to perform very well.
As indicated in chapter 5, area real estate agents actively steered families interested in superior schools and housing in that direction. The result was a classic case of the dynamics that Mieszkowski and Mills described, as reputedly excellent schools attracted the types of families that could sustain the academic advantages of local institutions. It started with the rise of the Shawnee Mission District in the later 1950s and has continued since, as indicated by local ACT scores today. Given this, there can be little doubt that school systems there contributed directly to the growth of those suburban developments. This was reflected in housing advertisements featuring local schools and the extent to which college-educated adults flocked to that corner of the region. It also reflected localism at work. Purchasing a home in such a setting meant joining the local district’s constituency and gaining access to everything it could offer, an opportunity denied to those who could not live there. Once settled, of course, newcomers to the area had an interest in maintaining its exceptional reputation and deterring threats to its status, and by extension their own.49
The academic standing of schools was one aspect of the educational landscape, but race was another. Widely interpreted by whites as a threat to local aspirations, black families were actively discouraged from moving into most suburbs. And when they did—as the experience of Donald Sewing and others demonstrated—they were almost never greeted with open arms. As a consequence, African Americans had little choice in where they could decide to live and the schools their children could attend. White families, on the other hand, enjoyed many options with respect to both housing and schools, depending on their income and sociocultural preferences. And when they settled into a community of their choice, they often benefited from the many amenities of suburban life, including newer housing stock, orderly neighborhoods, and convenient services, along with well-regarded schools. Insofar as whites denied African Americans and other members of ethnic or racial minority groups access to such benefits, along with poor people in general, the erection of boundaries represented a virulent form of localism, which can be described as opportunity hoarding.50
As described in chapter 4, Raytown in the 1960s and ’70s offered a clear example of this. In this respect it was quite similar to communities elsewhere, such as Cicero, Illinois; Parma, Ohio; or Warren, Michigan. These too were inner suburbs in large metropolitan areas, largely blue-collar communities that also developed reputations for racial animosity and exclusion. In many such places, actively discouraging African Americans from settling and enrolling their children in local schools helped to sustained whiteness as a point of community identity. With respect to Raytown, testimony about the community’s reputation for antiblack hostility clearly reflected this. The effectiveness of such attitudes and actions meant that the advantages afforded by its well-regarded institutions were reserved for the community’s overwhelmingly white residents. And given the centrality of the local schools to the community’s life, it is clear that the schools were a key component of suburban development in South Kansas City. This contributed to the high degree of mobilization against the possibility of integrated schooling, a telling instance of defending boundaries to dominate a vital resource. In this case it was made possible by an ongoing campaign of confrontation and harassment directed against blacks. Its effect was evident in the very small number of African American students registered in district schools prior to the 1980s, despite the proximity of predominantly black neighborhoods.51
Not all suburban communities were able to maintain boundaries so effectively, of course. As also seen in chapter 4, residents of Hickman Mills were less successful in barring black families in search of better neighborhoods and schools. Unlike whites in Raytown, they lacked the cohesion and political power to accomplish effective exclusion. Bigoted whites there were unable to erect effective obstacles to African Americans interested in relocating to the suburbs. While generally the same size and demographically similar to Raytown, Hickman Mills did not exhibit the same degree of consensus and mobilization around the local schools and racist ideas about who should attend them. Educational institutions were somewhat less significant in the area’s development. As a consequence, opportunity hoarding was much less viable, and the area eventually became integrated, before finally becoming predominantly African American decades later. Hickman Mills thus became an attractive destination for black families interested in better housing and schools for their children, at least until the effects of racial segregation and concentrated poverty eventually became evident there too.52
Another point of comparison, of course, is the Shawnee Mission School District (SMSD), located just a few miles west in Johnson County. It became the leading school system in the region, at least with respect to academic performance. But it also experienced problems in unifying the many communities it embraced. This was partly because of perceived and real differences in wealth and other dimensions of status, but also because the logic of localism fostered a vigorous skepticism of large organizations. Despite attempts to resist consolidation of the district or to break away from it, however, dissatisfied residents did not succeed in forming a new system that could have excluded their less-affluent neighbors. Had they accomplished this, it might have been described as a form of opportunity hoarding. Since they did not, however, it seems more appropriate to label their efforts a somewhat more benign species of localism, a stated or implied preference for the preservation and control of their own institutions.
Contrasting these quite different districts at the time offers an important insight about the dynamics of social change. Boundary construction required a high level of agreement about social distinctions and degrees of exclusion to prove effective. It turned out to be far more difficult to gain a consensus about the significance of social distinctions between groups of whites than it did to reach agreement on the bigoted exclusion of African Americans. Attitudes and behavior associated with systemic racism, or the “white racial frame,” proved crucial to the viability of clear and durable boundary creation in Kansas City.53 And a sense of imminent threat may have helped as well, as the case of Raytown suggested. SMSD was shielded from the prospect of black settlement by geographic distance and the state line, and sustained opportunity hoarding proved quite difficult to accomplish there. Johnson County whites did exclude blacks interested in living there, but with less fanfare and little officially sanctioned or publicly acknowledged antipathy. This made the Raytown experience all the more telling.
Localism of the sort seen in Johnson County may very well represent a precursor to opportunity hoarding but was hardly its equivalent. The crucial distinction, of course, was the ability to erect and maintain barriers to exclude certain parties from the benefits of access to the resources in question. Residents of SMSD living in such well-heeled communities as Mission Hills, Prairie Village, and Fairway, among others, were unable to do this. The widely acclaimed success of SMSD undoubtedly militated against such separatist sentiments. After all, Johnson County as a whole, and SMSD in particular, gained a national reputation for academic excellence that benefited everyone, and local norms abetting this undoubtedly represented a potent form of social capital in support of schooling. Even if they disliked bureaucratic organizations, the district’s wealthiest families were still able to send their children to highly regarded local institutions. Localism may still have been a dominant perspective, but the dangers to neighborhood status and institutions were not considered dire enough to warrant mobilization of the social and political resources necessary to block the district’s consolidation, even though attempts were made. It was in this respect that race possibly played a role there. As long as African Americans were not seen as posing an immediate and substantial hazard, residents of Johnson County could appear to hold liberal views on questions of race and other social issues, while high property standards, taxes, and real estate professionals helped to keep less-educated whites at a distance. That was enough to sustain the area’s educational advantages well into the future.54
The more obvious hoarding community, Raytown, exhibited a high degree of consensus and cohesion around the idea of excluding African Americans, who were framed as direct threats to the status and repute of area schools and—consequently—the community itself, including property values. It benefited from the use of local governmental power, in the form of police, to make blacks feel unwelcome, and this was reinforced by real estate agents and apparently even local school personnel. Many Raytown residents, furthermore, responded to the possibility of African American encroachment because of personal perceptions of the Kansas City schools, and the movement of black settlement to the south, in their direction. Their active endorsement of exclusionary policies—and implicit support for signals such as the district’s decision not to play Central High in basketball—gave substance to popular impressions that Raytown was openly hostile to African Americans.
Whites in other communities may not have felt the need to undertake such measures because of natural barriers to African American migration, or the state line. Racially motivated exclusion, and even opportunity hoarding, in these settings may have been somewhat easier to accomplish, without the degree of community mobilization seen in Raytown. This was likely the case in North Kansas City, where the Missouri River represented a formidable impediment in the minds of African Americans and whites alike. The response of North Kansas City residents to the Spainhower Commission and other desegregation proposals, however, left little doubt about their own antipathy to blacks. But they probably did not feel an imminent threat of African American settlement to the same degree as residents of Raytown, and consequently were collectively less vociferous in their racial animus.
The North Kansas City School District (NKCSD) was somewhat different in other respects too. As described in chapter 4, it grew by means of annexation, but as it became larger the district did not experience the sort of conflict that made the formation of SMSD so difficult. It appears that the socioeconomic and institutional dynamics of the two settings were quite different, and that may have been decisive in their respective experiences. The area north of the river on the Missouri side of the border lacked a comprehensive rural high school district to serve its scattered elementary schools, and this made joining NKCSD an attractive option for smaller districts. The area also did not have the significant differences in wealth and status that characterized northeast Johnson County, even if it did include both affluent and blue-collar communities. This made the process of creating a large, centralized, and somewhat bureaucratic school district a good deal less contentious than it was for SMSD.
Such differences, of course, underscore the points made by Zimmer and Hawley, who argued that it was the most affluent and well-educated suburbanites who were especially adamant in their opposition to school district reorganization. Johnson County clearly had accumulated a critical mass of such residents, who became quite effective in making their opinions known to school leaders and the larger public. While controversy did surface occasionally in NKCSD, especially regarding school closures, it did not reach the scale evident across the border to the southwest. As a consequence, the robust renditions of localism voiced by residents of SMSD did not become a major factor in the expansion of NKCSD, nor in its subsequent development.
As indicated in chapters 3 and 4, a number of proposals offered the opportunity to devise metropolitan solutions to the problem of social and educational inequality in greater Kansas City. While educators in the urban core typically were receptive to these ideas, suburbanites immediately rejected them, often vehemently. In districts outside the city center, these proposals represented a direct threat to everything that localism had seemed to promise, including the power to exclude groups and individuals judged undesirable. This was clearly seen in suburban responses to the Spainhower Commission recommendations, as well as the 1977 Civil Rights Commission proposal and the Jenkins v. Missouri desegregation case.55 The mere suggestion that local districts could have been consolidated with KCMPS was enough to induce panic and anger.56 Raytown may have represented something of an extreme in this respect, but whites throughout the region undoubtedly agreed. And so did school district leaders on both sides of the border. Their public refusals to entertain the possibility of greater integration of schools throughout the region represented clear evidence of their complicity in the creation and maintenance of metropolitan educational inequity.57 In that regard Hazlett was wrong. His suburban colleagues contributed directly to the racial and socioeconomic segregation that became so endemic in the latter half of the twentieth century. They too were beneficiaries of the boundaries that district lines represented and were determined to defend them.
In the years since then, greater Kansas City’s suburban school districts remained vigilant in their maintenance of barriers to entry.58 Not all of them have been successful, as the geographical expansion of the area’s poor and black population suggests. But most outlying districts have remained predominantly white and affluent, sustaining advantages they have enjoyed for nearly a half century. Altogether, this set of circumstances reflects the high degree of inequality that continues to characterize American life, and the inequitable educational opportunities it represents are an ongoing threat to the nation’s democratic heritage.
Prospects for Change?
This is principally a history book, but it is important to devote at least some attention to potential answers for the contemporary questions it has broached. If the problem today is a long-standing pattern of concentrated poverty in the center of American metropolitan areas and the accumulation of wealth at the peripheries, solutions would seem to necessitate the movement of people and resources to mitigate the negative effects of such arrangements. Despite recent declines in racial segregation evident in greater Kansas City, large numbers of African Americans remain trapped in high-poverty neighborhoods, where local schools struggle to serve their children. And most other metropolitan areas have not experienced the same degree of improvement in racial isolation. As sociologist Douglas Massey, along with many other observers, has pointed out, the geographic distribution of affluence and deprivation is a key element of the widening inequality that characterizes American life at present.59 Insofar as they affect educational opportunities, these spatial dimensions of inequity threaten to perpetuate this problem well into the future. But given the long-standing national myths regarding individual freedom to choose where to live, and by extension whom to live with, along with investment in local communities, it is an open question as to how such changes can be effected.60 Fortunately, there are a number of potential answers to consider.
Before turning to possible solutions, however, it is important to briefly discuss educational reform policies that have not addressed these problems. One important example is the movement for greater school accountability, culminating in the No Child Left Behind legislation at the federal level in 2001. Local, state, and federal policy initiatives that have made use of standardized test scores to identify “failing” schools, or to subject them to sanctions, may have contributed substantially to increased interdistrict inequality rather than ameliorated it.61 While such data can be useful in identifying patterns of inequality, as suggested by the discussion of ACT scores above, to be helpful they must be linked to reforms that address the underlying problem. Similarly, offering students alternative schooling options without considering underlying conditions of concentrated urban disadvantage and suburban advantage is unlikely to resolve the question of metropolitan educational inequality. Until “choice” extends to high-status districts outside central city limits, opportunities for impoverished children in the cities and segregated suburbs undoubtedly will remain limited.62
Fortunately, there are a number of other policy options to consider. One that dates to the era discussed in the book is good old unfashionable school desegregation. This has long been considered impractical, if not impossible, partly because most large urban core districts are predominantly minority, making significant desegregation within them difficult to achieve. Another reason is deeply rooted suburban hostility to the very suggestion of desegregation. The Milliken v. Bradley Supreme Court decision in 1974 effectively ruled out the possibility of making suburban districts a party to metropolitan-wide desegregation plans, ensuring continued exclusion and thus suburban advantages in schooling for decades to follow.63 Nevertheless, certain districts have achieved a good deal of success in desegregating across the urban-suburban divide, at least for a while. As Genevieve Siegel-Hawley has shown, there have been notable cases where this has occurred, mainly in the South with county-wide districts, but progress has slowed in recent years, and there is little evidence of it recurring.64
Elsewhere, a small number of interdistrict transfer programs between cities and suburbs have offered interesting models to consider, mostly outside the South.65 Beginning during the desegregation era, often in conjunction with legal settlements of federal lawsuits, these examples of limited urban-suburban cooperation have pointed to the possibilities that cross-district enrollment plans can offer. In Kansas City most suburban districts rejected the idea of a voluntary transfer option that would have permitted students from KCMPS to attend their schools, closing the door on the possibility of a similar program in the region.66 Elsewhere, programs such as Chapter 220 in Milwaukee, the Indianapolis Suburban Township Desegregation Plan, and the Voluntary Interdistrict Transfer Plan in St. Louis have provided opportunities for thousands of urban students to attend affluent suburban school systems, opening pathways to higher education and professional success that may not have been available to them otherwise.67 These programs provide a degree of racial and socioeconomic integration to the host institutions as well.
On the other hand, relatively few students nationally have benefited from these programs, which mainly are holdovers from the desegregation era. While thousands of black children have attended outlying schools, relatively few white suburban students take the opportunity to enroll in center city institutions. Even with the development of well-regarded magnet programs, urban education systems historically have held little appeal for suburbanites, a testimony to the real and imaginary barriers that continue to fracture metropolitan landscapes across the country. And suburban resistance to the enrollment of even small numbers of city students has become a problem as well.68
Given this, the prospect of large-scale movement of poor and minority students from central city to suburban school systems seems an unlikely scenario, at least in the immediate future. As two scholars recently noted in a systematic review of transfer programs, “The student assignment plans in place today, then, are much weaker than desegregation plans of the 1960s and 1970s that substantially integrated many schools.”69 The painful conflicts associated with the 1960s and ’70s have left a legacy of ill will in many respects. As recent events in St. Louis have demonstrated, suburban resistance to the very suggestion of large-scale integration of students perceived to be “urban” in character can produce a vehement response. While limited cross-district integration plans may be positive examples, they probably do not represent a pathway to large-scale socioeconomic integration of metropolitan schools, at least presently.
The same is likely true of other forms of interdistrict cooperation that have been discussed lately. The sharing of information and certain resources is one thing, after all, but mixing student bodies is another. While it is promising when school systems work together on common problems, it is necessary to build bridges between central city and outlying suburban districts to make a significant difference. Other forms of interdistrict collaboration typically deal with cost-sharing arrangements and are a far cry from establishing equitable school experiences for most students, especially considering the extremes that often exist in rather close geographic proximity.70 After all, the dictates of localism as a general proposition, and community control of schools in particular, hold that local interests must always take precedence over shared regional concerns or the problems of other districts. Despite a few promising examples of interdistrict cooperation, it seems likely that much time will be necessary to realize significant changes in existing patterns of educational inequality in most large metropolitan areas.
Despite the limitations noted above, some observers have recently touted school choice plans as an answer to metropolitan school inequities. Michigan has been something of a leader in this respect, and metropolitan Detroit has become a kind of laboratory for determining how offering families greater choice in where to send their children to school will affect things. As it now stands, students from the city can attend certain suburban districts, but transportation is not provided. This means that most poor families are effectively excluded, as the distance to cooperating school systems is often considerable, and area public transportation systems are not well developed, especially outside the city.71 Providing an affordable and reliable means of conveyance is absolutely necessary in sprawling, fragmented metropolitan areas such as Detroit or Kansas City if “school choice” plans are to become a viable solution to geo-spatial inequality in education or other aspects of life for local children. And suburban school districts would have to agree to participate, or be compelled to, which could be politically difficult for legislators to even contemplate. Short of measures creating improved transportation and widespread suburban participation, school choice plans typically work to make educational inequities even more pronounced.
While institutional solutions inevitably run into difficult questions of localism and control of educational resources, perhaps the most promising avenue of change is simply moving families. The national model for doing this is Moving to Opportunity (MTO), which began as an experiment in Chicago during the 1980s and became a federally sponsored program in a limited number of other cities in years to follow. MTO offered families living in inner-city neighborhoods with concentrated poverty the means to relocate to a low-poverty area, often in a nearby suburban community. While there has been debate about its effects, the most recent studies find that MTO has had a very positive impact on the lives of younger children who make such moves, resulting in better school experiences, less problematic behavior, and more positive outcomes later in life. These are very important developments and have been verified in longitudinal studies conducted with careful controls. MTO thus offers a promising policy option for addressing the problem of concentrated poverty, and its problematic educational effects, in many central city neighborhoods.72
To date, relatively few families have benefited from this sort of relocation program, however. Whether MTO represents a large-scale solution to concentrated urban poverty thus remains an open question. There are other policy options for addressing these issues, of course. Sociologist Matthew Desmond has recently pointed out the crisis of evictions in many poor urban neighborhoods, arguing that housing vouchers would provide greater stability for families living there.73 But the question then becomes the viability of proposals to make such housing options available in suburban areas. Historically, as seen in Hickman Mills and other suburban communities, local opposition to low- or even mixed-income housing can be quite fierce in suburbs, especially those with high property values and highly regarded schools. More recently, efforts to link affordable suburban housing to school desegregation in the South have proved difficult to sustain, despite initial progress.74 Thus, while this is a critically important issue to address, it is unlikely to resolve the problem of racial segregation and concentrated poverty that continues to plague the nation’s largest cities.
The same is true of calls to devote greater resources to city schools. This would undoubtedly help these institutions a great deal and prove beneficial to many students, and should be undertaken for those reasons alone. But such efforts are unlikely to resolve the crisis of extreme poverty in many neighborhoods, at least in the foreseeable future. Schools have little power to address these issues and should not be held accountable for them.75 To fundamentally change these conditions, people must move away from ghettos and other areas of concentrated poverty, and eventually it must be large numbers of them.
In the end, there does not appear to be a ready or convenient policy “fix” to resolve the long-standing problem of metropolitan inequality that this book has described. All the efforts described above can help to mitigate its effects, helping a number of fortunate families and children to escape its worst effects. But as long as local prerogatives take precedence over metropolitan—or even state and national—concerns, the existing geo-spatial organization of resources and status of metropolitan life is unlikely to change significantly. Localism dictates that school districts are neither required nor expected to consider the plight of impoverished minority students in setting their policy priorities. It is noteworthy that the successful urban-suburban school integration plans described by Siegel-Hawley and other scholars have occurred when district boundaries were eliminated. A recent study by Jennifer Ayscue and Gary Orfield indicates that states with the greatest fragmentation of districts have higher levels of educational inequality, largely between rather than within school systems. As long as separate districts define a fragmented metropolitan landscape, boundaries can be utilized for purposes of exclusion and hoarding opportunity.76
Given these realities, and the long-standing American system of local district control of important decision-making authority, the likelihood of significant change in the short term appears dim. The current situation did not develop overnight, even if it did unfold rather quickly in historical terms, and it will not be easily altered. The promising programmatic approaches to overcoming the urban-suburban divide are too modest in scale to produce major change in the foreseeable future. Gradual shifts in residential segregation of the sort that William Frey and other demographers have documented may eventually make integrated schooling more possible, but it will probably take a long time. Efforts at more rapid change will likely require a social and political movement of momentous proportion to realize meaningful progress.77
In the end it may require a major shift in public attitudes about education to change the geo-spatial dynamics of educational inequality that emerged so decisively in the long postwar era. As David Labaree has noted, many Americans today view schooling as a source of social status, or “mobility” in his terms, a classic positional good in sociological parlance. Given this, it is little wonder that they seek to hoard educational opportunities, or exclude others deemed likely to threaten their aspirations. If schools have become crucial instruments of status acquisition or maintenance, after all, defense of geo-spatial boundaries to restrict access makes considerable sense. On the other hand, the restriction of opportunity that inevitably follows from such viewpoints and behavior, and the fragmented approach to school organization that logically also follows from it, can hardly be described as conducive to democracy, or even a region’s collective welfare. Opportunity hoarding, after all, contributes directly to inequality, which undermines the possibility of effective democratic forms of association and realizing everyone’s productive potential equitably.
As Labaree suggests, Americans must come to view education as a social good in order for a democracy to succeed, and equality of opportunity will be necessary to realize that goal.78 In the case of metropolitan education, this could mean a fundamental change in the way school districts are organized, a move that likely would meet fierce resistance from many suburbanites. But until that is done, the dynamics of metropolitan educational inequality are unlikely to change in essential ways. Interdistrict transfer programs and MTO certainly can help, and if sustained for an appreciable length of time they can produce incremental advances. Short of a more fundamental shift in localist attitudes, however, the basic structure of metropolitan inequality in education—and in many other spheres of life—is unlikely to change. Hopefully, this book and other studies can play a role in stimulating conversation about this situation, which has created the most significant and persistent problems of educational inequality in the contemporary United States. Then it is up to citizens and leaders in the political system to begin making changes that can restore the egalitarian promise of the nation’s schools and its democratic heritage.