1

SUBURBAN AND URBAN SCHOOLS

Two Sides of a National Metropolitan Coin

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

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

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

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

A Bygone Golden Age of Urban Education?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Education and Social Change in the City

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

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

At the same time, a changing southern economy altered life for millions of African Americans in the countryside, stimulating migration to the cities. Mechanized cotton farming triggered some of this, obviating the need for manual labor. Many blacks also hoped to escape Jim Crow segregation, white racial hostility, and impulsive bigoted violence. Within two decades of the war’s end, about five million departed to find employment and greater freedom in the North, Midwest, and Pacific states, and millions more moved to southern cities. Most of these places had long-standing black communities, including a modest middle class of teachers, attorneys, doctors, and business owners of various sorts. Migrants, on the other hand, typically were impoverished and poorly educated. Barred from most suburbs and white urban neighborhoods, these blacks were compelled by racial discrimination to take up residence in crowded inner-city ghetto communities, typically in older housing stock. In the new metropolitan geography of the postwar era, poverty became concentrated near the urban core.20

These developments had profound implications for life in many communities, a transformation that eventually came to capture national attention. Economist Leah Platt Boustan has estimated that the typical black community in northern cities in 1940 represented just 4 percent of the local population; by 1970 that average had quadrupled to 16 percent, and it was considerably higher in many larger cities. Prior to World War II, nearly half of the African American urban population did not live in segregated neighborhoods, but by 1970 the vast majority did.21 This rapid influx and high degree of segregation had telling consequences. Poverty became endemic in many neighborhoods, and residents were routinely exploited by landlords and brutalized by police. An emerging African American middle class, abetted by rising graduation rates and liberalizing employment policies, also became subject to greater segregation in highly racialized housing markets. Living conditions deteriorated in the wake of deprivation and crowding, and public services—including schools—often declined perceptibly in perceived quality.22 These developments led to growing frustration and anger, eventually helping to ignite the “social dynamite” that Conant had warned about.

Beginning in the mid-1960s, violent riots or uprisings erupted in protest of such conditions, resulting in property damage in the millions of dollars and the loss of many lives. The first major disturbance occurred in Harlem in 1964, triggered by a police shooting, and was followed by an even larger riot in Los Angeles in 1965. Major outbursts also occurred in Detroit and Newark in the summer of 1967 and in scores of cities across the country (including Kansas City) following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. The Kerner Commission, appointed by President Lyndon Johnson in 1967 to investigate these events, concluded that hyper-aggressive police practices had triggered most of them. The commission also found that riots also reflected the dissatisfaction many blacks felt about the poverty and discrimination they endured on a daily basis. But to many whites these were unsettling episodes representing one more reason to abandon the nation’s larger cities, or to avoid them altogether.23

Black migration to urban areas continued through much of the 1960s, and so did suburban development. Expansive ghetto communities grew in major cities, and as suburbanization accelerated it became associated with the term “white flight.” Boustan has calculated that about a quarter of white departures from core cities in this period could be directly attributed to the arrival of African American migrants, and that changes were most clearly evident in the largest metropolitan areas. Housing values typically dropped in central city neighborhoods as a consequence of these events, making suburban communities appear to be a much better investment. White flight, in that case, represented more than just households on the move; it also signaled a shift in wealth to the metropolitan periphery.24

There were other reasons for moving away from the urban core, of course. Many families left in search of bigger yards, more closet space, and attached garages, but there can be little doubt that most also were influenced by the increasingly racialized metropolitan landscape. Despite greater segregation, the growth of urban African American communities, along with civil rights activism, posed the possibility of integrated housing and institutions, raising the anxiety of bigoted whites to new levels. Passage of federal civil rights legislation in the mid-1960s manifestly added to these apprehensions, which quickly became evident in cities across the country.25

Such sentiments contributed to an escalation of explicitly racist responses to African Americans in certain neighborhoods or communities. In particular, less-affluent—often blue-collar—white suburbs, especially those located close to central cities, frequently exhibited overt hostility toward blacks. Cicero, Illinois, adjacent to Chicago, became a well-known example of this, as did White Plains in New York, Parma, Ohio, and Warren, Michigan. White ethnic enclaves within the cities often responded in a similar fashion, exemplified by the Bridgeport neighborhood in Chicago, home to Mayor Richard J. Daley and his family. Growing intolerance regarding race was evident in the success of bigoted Alabama governor George Wallace in the 1968 Democratic presidential primaries in Michigan, Ohio, and other parts of the metropolitan Midwest.26

Whites in more affluent suburban and urban communities may have shared such views but generally had fewer opportunities to voice them, or did so in a less dramatic fashion. In any case, African Americans became acutely aware of racial animosity directed at them, regardless of how it was expressed. This was a powerful incentive to avoid such hostile places and remain in familiar settings, even when moving was financially possible. The number of African Americans in poverty fell dramatically between 1960 and 1968, dropping from more than half to about a third. Those in the highest-paying job categories more than doubled between 1958 and 1973, and those in the lowest categories fell by a third. But segregation did not change appreciably.27

White racism remained a palpable barrier to the movement of blacks to certain neighborhoods irrespective of their education or income, limiting their housing choices to a relatively narrow range of options. Sociologist Karl Taeuber calculated in 1964 that 86 percent of African Americans in cities would have to move to less-segregated neighborhoods to achieve complete integration, a figure generally consistent across the country. This reflected a historically unprecedented level of isolation for a significant minority group, and it changed little in the years to follow.28

The era of relative stability and confidence in urban schooling, interrupted somewhat by the Great Depression and the war, did not last long. Urban school systems soon became highly segregated because of racialized housing markets and policies that assigned black and white students to separate buildings. Extremely high levels of residential segregation contributed to mounting population densities as black migrants crowded into ghetto neighborhoods. It also led to glaring disparities within city school districts. African American students crowded into schools routinely filled far beyond capacity, often leading to half-day shifts for many of them. High rates of staff turnover also meant that students typically were assigned the least experienced teachers.29 Such circumstances were hardly conducive to academic success.

Despite these problems, many African American students succeeded in urban schools. Black high school graduation rates increased steadily, even in the biggest cities, testimony to these students’ determination and resilience. But that did not mean they were happy about the condition of their schools.30 Some districts used trailers or other temporary structures to accommodate the influx of students, rather than sending them to less crowded, predominantly white schools. These conditions adversely affected the quality of education for black children and youth, which naturally made many African Americans very angry, including the students.31

It was not long before large-scale protests erupted over the clearly unequal educational resources available to black and white students. Some three hundred thousand students boycotted school in Chicago in October 1963, joined by educators, parents, and other community members. Many participated in mass marches to the school board, led by the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations, a grassroots coalition of parents, educators, and community groups. Similar demonstrations occurred in other cities, including New York, Cincinnati, and Boston. Black community groups and civil rights organizations such as the NAACP and the Urban League helped make inequitable public education a national issue. In some cases protests were led by students demanding changes in their schools, such as the dramatic 1966 walkout at Detroit’s Northern High School. Eventually these sorts of actions forced district boards to respond. Most offered only token integration measures, however, fearing that whites would abandon the schools if meaningful desegregation occurred.32 As it turned out, that is what happened anyway.

As middle-and working-class whites left urban neighborhoods, followed by many businesses, the tax base of city governments and school systems began to decline. The proportion of census tracts that were uniformly white in northern cities fell from 67 percent in 1940 to 40 percent in 1970, and the drop was even more dramatic in some of the largest places.33 Property values in African American neighborhoods were low and appreciated little in the face of racialized dual housing markets. Moreover, most of the newcomers to the cities were very poor and lacked the ability to support higher taxes for schools and other institutions. As a result, local revenues often failed to meet the rising costs of urban schools, and many big-city districts began to face dire budget shortfalls. In 1973 education scholars Raymond Hummel and John Nagle observed that “most urban school systems find it increasingly difficult to raise sufficient financial resources to meet the dramatically increased social and educational demands placed upon them.”34 The problem often became especially acute just as local student populations became predominantly African American or Hispanic. These developments, along with an apparent drop in urban graduation rates and achievement scores, were eventually labeled a “crisis” in urban education.35

City schools thus posed a dilemma that drew much attention, both from policy analysts and the political establishment. A study of fiscal disparities in the nation’s thirty-seven largest metropolitan areas in 1964 found that suburban schools spent about 27 percent more per student on average than their urban counterparts, despite the fact that the city districts levied taxes at a higher rate. The difference was especially striking in light of higher costs in the cities.36 With declining sources of local support, schools serving poor children in the cities required help from external sources just to maintain services. Passage of the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) in 1965, along with increased state aid in some cases, made additional resources available by the end of the decade. Title 1 of ESEA stipulated that schools with a certain percentage of low-income or poor students would receive additional funds to support programs for them, usually in grants administered by the states. Some states also provided aid for districts with lower tax capacity, but such criteria often excluded big-city systems. These sources of financial assistance were helpful but generally failed to compensate for the loss of local tax capacity and the rising costs of urban education. Closing the spending gap with the most affluent suburbs was simply not possible.37

Added to this, Title 1 funds eventually went to a very large number of schools, including many outside the cities. As one study of the program declared, “It slathered money over more than nine in every ten districts.”38 While this may have established a firm political base for such support, it placed big-city schools at a competitive disadvantage, especially considering the needs of their less affluent clientele. In 1967 all of the nation’s thirty-seven largest urban districts featured pupil-teacher ratios greater than their state average. Reflecting these tendencies, per-pupil expenditures in the cities continued to lag their suburban counterparts. This often meant fewer resources for such perceptible features of the schools as building maintenance, summer programs, and staff salaries.39

Money was hardly the only problem facing urban schools, however. The loss of students prepared to excel academically probably was even more significant. The federally funded Equality of Educational Opportunity report, written by sociologist James Coleman in 1966, highlighted the importance of family background as a determinant of educational achievement. It was the nation’s first large-scale study of these questions, and it clearly demonstrated that higher levels of parental education and social status were associated with accomplishment in school. Coleman’s research also suggested that attending schools with well-prepared peers could be a positive influence on achievement.40

These findings were borne out in subsequent research and eventually began to inform public thinking about education. Cautioning readers to not place too much emphasis on school finances in assessing districts, the authors of The New York Times Guide to Suburban Schools emphasized this point. “What makes more difference in educational achievement than anything else,” they wrote, “is the family background of the students. This is as true in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut as it is in Texas, Ohio or Colorado.” As a consequence, levels of community affluence became associated with higher-performing schools. White flight deprived urban schools of many students with backgrounds conducive to achievement, a critically important resource for institutional success.41

The process of suburbanization thus created two different kinds of problems for city schools. The first was the matter of segregation, or racial and socioeconomic isolation, resulting largely from impoverished black families settling in ghetto neighborhoods while more affluent whites departed. The other was financial: the declining tax base that suburbanization triggered. Consequently, at the same time that urban schools had larger numbers of relatively destitute children to teach, educators had to look farther afield to acquire the necessary resources. Signs of this had become clearly evident by the time that Conant published Slums and Suburbs. In the words of one contemporary observer, “the ‘educational balance’ between the large cities and their suburbs that existed in 1957 had vanished by 1962.”42

It did not take long for these issues to animate the politics of education. Urban school leaders too often were slow to respond to changing conditions, compounding their districts’ problems. Even though board members and administrators were supposed to be impartial and nonpartisan, many habitually enforced policies that maintained racial and ethnic inequity. Historians have documented this in Chicago, Milwaukee, Boston, Detroit, and Newark, among other places.43 In the South, school leaders actively opposed desegregation, and even when they tried to improve schooling for blacks, true equality of education was almost never achieved in segregated systems. In response to these conditions, activists organized hundreds of demonstrations against school inequity in cities across the country, building on the protests of the early ’60s. Directed by African American leaders and involving tens of thousands of community members and students, these events galvanized opposition to city school boards and administrators.44

Local politics often became polarized by these disputes, as recalcitrant, prejudiced white defenders of neighborhood schools resisted busing for desegregation or changing attendance zones. Confrontations burst into the open in Chicago, New York, San Francisco, and scores of other cities before coming to a head in dramatic white protests in Boston during the mid-1970s.45 These developments helped to make schooling a national political issue, a focal point of widespread conflict and anger.

Even if school leaders wanted to support plans to address these problems, large urban districts often proved resistant to reforms. Their bureaucratic organization made it difficult to react promptly to changes in the cities. Long-standing rules and regulations, established to prevent corruption and fraud, frequently were used to undermine demands for improvement, especially for children in impoverished neighborhoods. In his study of the New York City Board of Education in 1968, David Rogers found that resistance from various offices in the system often stymied reform efforts, slowing implementation of plans and leading to the withholding of information and resources. Similar dynamics existed in other large urban systems.46

For their part, school boards routinely sidestepped reform proposals in response to constituencies that favored existing arrangements and upholding segregation. Organizational norms such as the neighborhood school provided convenient excuses for recalcitrant administrators and board members, and also hampered the efforts of well-intentioned activists. Consequently, meaningful reform was painfully slow to achieve, and this led to even greater frustration for poorly served urban constituencies.47

A National Pattern of Metropolitan Development

While urban districts struggled with growing problems, the suburbs were flourishing. The geographic organization of educational inequality had shifted from a pattern of urban dominance in 1940 to one of suburban advantage two decades later. Public attention to these questions focused on the Northeast and Midwest, where many of the largest cities had been manufacturing centers and experienced rapid change. 48 Vast postwar suburban developments, such as the Levittown communities outside New York and Philadelphia, captured the public imagination by appearing to make home ownership and a middle-class lifestyle widely available. Other such ventures followed suit, and a bustling hinterland of new communities quickly grew up around major American cities.49

Suburban developments varied a good deal, of course, ranging from exclusive enclaves to more commonplace subdivisions, depending on location and the types of homes and amenities that builders offered. While suburban school expenditures often exceeded urban levels, there was a great deal of disparity in that regard too. In some districts, cost-conscious suburbanites pushed back against school taxes, as in Long Island’s “lower-middle-class” Levittown in the early 1960s. But in more affluent suburbs, residents often enthusiastically supported tax increases for the schools, viewing them as a source of distinction and an investment in the community, especially for augmenting property values. As a result, certain suburban school districts became more highly regarded than others, and this—along with local taxes—could be an important factor in where families decided to purchase homes.50

With connection to the urban core made easier by a burst of freeway construction during the 1950s and ’60s, suburban growth was partly inspired by the prospect of educational advantage. The postwar-era baby boom, two decades of rapid demographic growth starting in 1945, drove a dramatic educational expansion. It also spurred suburban growth, as families often looked for higher-status communities to settle in, whether they moved from central cities or suburban areas elsewhere.51 Young parents in particular wanted a safe and comfortable home for their growing families, and good schools to assure their children’s future prospects. In surveys suburbanites overwhelmingly claimed that they had moved to improve the lives of their offspring.52 Before long there was a lively marketplace of school districts for families to consider when shopping for a suburban home. When the New York Times published its 340-page Guide to Suburban Public Schools in 1976, it was responding to persistent demand for information that could clarify such decisions.53

Public attention may have focused on developments in the Northeast, but suburban growth occurred in all parts of the country. Long-standing regional differences in schooling began to change as a result. In particular, the South experienced significant suburban development following the war, and school systems there began to exhibit marked improvement. This occurred in both older and newer southern cities, although more in the former. Metropolitan Atlanta grew to encompass more than eight counties, and Charlotte, Birmingham, Houston, and other larger cities experienced similar if somewhat more modest degrees of suburbanization.54

Some municipalities avoided extensive suburbanization by annexing adjacent territory; Jacksonville, Florida, became the nation’s largest city geographically in this manner. This was accomplished most readily in the West and parts of the South, as newer municipalities (including Kansas City) grew by annexation, forestalling fragmented metropolitan growth on the scale seen in the Northeast and upper Midwest. Eventually, however, even such prototypically western cities as Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Seattle spawned substantial suburban sprawl, exhibiting many of the same characteristics of disjointed growth that had become apparent elsewhere.55

As a corollary of these developments, the emergence of the suburbs as settings of educational advantage became a sign of the times, at least for many whites. As regional differences started to fade, differences within metropolitan settings became more commonplace.56 A 1965 study of southern suburbanization found its effects to be quite similar to what was happening in the rest of the country, noting that “the exchange between the southern central cities and their suburbs raises the socioeconomic level of the suburban population while it diminishes the socioeconomic level of the city.”57 As a consequence, suburban schools in all parts of the country came to be judged as better than their urban counterparts, making local geo-spatial distinctions more salient than historic regional differences.58

This form of metropolitan differentiation may have become unmistakable in the postwar era, but it also was not altogether new. As metropolitan areas expanded during most of the twentieth century, suburban communities often led the way. Historian Kenneth Jackson has noted that urban growth was focused on the outer edges of American cities from at least the 1920s onward. This process contributed to regional convergence in social and economic terms, but also to new patterns of socioeconomic differentiation within metropolitan areas. While shared features of regional development became a widely acknowledged phenomenon, metropolitan growth continued to exhibit common patterns throughout the postwar era. In particular, suburbs became associated with clear distinctions in social status almost everywhere, a broadly acknowledged feature of American culture.59

Although the timing and parameters of this process differed from one setting to the next, there could be little doubt about the pervasiveness of metropolitan society. Suburban communities went from a little more than a third of the metropolitan population to nearly two-thirds between 1940 and 1980. It was the suburbs, moreover, that added most new jobs, particularly in the manufacturing sector, a trend spurred by the development of a national highway infrastructure and the replacement of rail by trucks as a principal mode of transportation.60

These developments were particularly noteworthy in the South. In these states, the development of metropolitan areas was accomplished with a massive shift from the region’s traditional agricultural economy to one dominated increasingly by manufacturing. Early forms of industrial development there had occurred in smaller towns and cities. By 1980, however, a majority of southern factory workers lived in metropolitan areas, which had become the focal point for economic growth. With this development, the region had come to look quite similar to much of the rest of the country, both with regard to local economic development and its geo-spatial organization. At the same time, of course, the metropolitan population grew in other regions as well. By the 1970s it was possible to clearly identify a national experience of metropolitan development, driven largely by sprawling growth at the edges of urbanized areas.61

The Social Impact of Metropolitan Differentiation

Historians and social scientists have devoted considerable attention to patterns of inequality within metropolitan areas. Much of this research has focused on differences between central city residents and their counterparts living in surrounding suburbs. Nevertheless, relatively little attention has been given to systematic differences in the educational characteristics of children living in different metropolitan settings. Despite widespread interest in educational inequality between urban and suburban communities, this historical aspect of the spatial organization of schooling has remained under-studied.62

Using national data, figures 1.1 through 1.4 reveal some of the indicators of the process of metropolitan segmentation between central city and suburban settings, focusing on high-school-age youth and their families. The first one exhibits a growing divide in adult education levels that distinguished urban and suburban households. Though there was little difference in the rates at which parents—particularly fathers—in urban and suburban communities had graduated from high school in 1940, forty years later suburban parents were nearly 50 percent more likely to have graduated than their central city counterparts. Some of this undoubtedly was due to historically low levels of adult educational attainment in African American communities, resulting from decades of unequal schooling, especially in the South. Given the importance of parental education to school success, long documented in research on attainment and achievement, such differences were hardly inconsequential.63 This growing divide was a telling sign of suburban educational advantage that emerged decisively in a relatively short time.

The second chart concerns changing racial segregation and concentration in metropolitan areas. African Americans were about 80 percent more likely than whites to live in a central city in 1940 but more than four times (400 percent) more likely in 1980. Changing urban levels of adult education thus partly reflect the disadvantage of African Americans as their numbers grew in the cities. Figure 1.3 points to a related trend, the rising proportion of households without a male parental figure. Poverty and joblessness contributed to this condition, undermining the stability of marriages. The absence of a male parental figure also reduced the likelihood of school success, as these families often lacked the resources to enhance and sustain academic achievement.64 While urban youth were slightly more likely to experience this condition in 1940, by the end of the period their odds of it were some 85 percent greater than for their suburban peers.

FIGURES 1.1–1.4 Patterns of metropolitan divergence on selected racial and socioeconomic dimensions, 1940–1980. Data include all seventeen-year-olds from IPUMS US census samples for whom metropolitan location is known. Charts created by Argun Saatcioglu.

Finally, figure 1.4 concerns basic differences in affluence. Home ownership—a critical reflection of wealth and status—occurred at a greater rate in the suburbs than in the central city in 1940, but the gap later widens slightly in absolute terms. Of course, acquiring a home was widely seen as the raison d’être of moving to suburban communities, so this is hardly surprising. But it also reflected the greater stability and access to resources that suburban households enjoyed, including well-regarded schools. Suburban home values often were higher than those in the city as a consequence.65 Poverty rates (not shown) followed a somewhat different trajectory, as the percentage of urban youth in households below the poverty level rose slightly between 1960 and 1980 (from 20 to 23 percent), while the suburban rate fell by nearly a third, from about 15 percent to less than 10 percent. Altogether, growing distinctions between residents of urban (central city) and suburban communities characterized postwar patterns of metropolitan development. This appears to have run contrary to national trends toward greater economic and social integration. All four of these indicators signaled rising metropolitan inequality.66

In a number of ways, moreover, these changes reflected broad historical trends. As noted earlier, education levels converged across the country, as did manufacturing employment. But much of this change occurred on the fringes of metropolitan areas, and decidedly not in central cities. Relatively high suburban adult education was hardly a surprise, as these communities generally enjoyed higher income, and by the 1970s many had become centers of white-collar employment.67 At the same time, a majority of the nation’s factory workers also came to reside in the suburbs, according to census data. This was a major shift from 1940, when nearly two out of three lived in the cities. It reflected a well-documented tendency for new economic development to occur on the metropolitan fringe, especially as suburban communities invested in industrial parks, office complexes, and shopping centers to enhance local tax bases.68 In short, many of the social and economic changes cited as emblematic of the time helped deepen metropolitan segmentation along an urban/suburban divide.

These trends offer a sketch of the shifting contours of geo-spatial inequality. Yet descriptive statistics provide only general indicators of these changes. More rigorous analyses make it possible to examine the effects of metropolitan segmentation on educational attainment. A study of metropolitan high school students across this period offers precisely this sort of analysis. Drawing on a national sample of seventeen-year-olds, it estimated the likelihood of their graduating from high school. In 1940, students in central city schools were 50 percent more likely to do this than their suburban counterparts in the same metropolitan areas, controlling for a host of socioeconomic factors and regional characteristics. Forty years later, the circumstances were reversed. Even though the suburban population had grown enormously and national education levels had risen substantially, youth in these settings were nearly 20 percent more likely to succeed in school than their central city counterparts. In the earlier period it was the big-city students that held the upper hand; by the end of the postwar era they were clearly behind.69 In addition to the various facets of life represented in figures 1.1–1.4 above, suburban youth gained a distinct advantage in educational accomplishment, independent of their racial and social-class profile. This is not to say that children in these communities did not have problems; growing up is always a challenge.70 While it had been a plus to live in the city prior to the war, however, four decades later there was clearly a substantial benefit to calling the suburbs home.

A New Suburban Localism

Whatever their advantages with respect to schooling and other factors, suburban communities usually were relatively small in size and stature. They generally resisted consolidation, moreover, into larger administrative or governmental entities. By and large, affluent suburbanites did not want their tax dollars to be spent on goods and services that did not benefit their communities more or less directly. They were not interested in supporting others in this manner.71

While consolidation of service agencies and governmental authority had been the prevailing ethos earlier, support for decentralization and local control gained momentum following the war. The change was gradual and affected city residents as well as suburbanites, but by the 1960s the fragmentation of public services and administrative responsibility was widely viewed as a major challenge to suburban development. “Metropolitan problems since the turn of the century have been attributed to jurisdictional fragmentation,” wrote a political scientist in 1974, but “voters in most areas have not been convinced of the need for comprehensive reorganization of the local government system.”72 Urban planners and other social scientists argued that the patchwork of small communities that constituted most suburban zones was inefficient and inequitable. Critics of suburban localism called for the creation of larger organizational units for key service agencies, including schools, to assist in creating more rational systems of metropolitan governance.73 The basic idea was that the communities in each metropolitan region were inescapably bound together as an organic whole, and that their fates were largely shared. But many suburbanites disagreed emphatically and clung stubbornly to a preference for local control. Resistance to consolidation routinely stymied efforts at reform, and schooling was among the most volatile issues wrapped up in such disputes.74

Affluent suburbanites exhibited a potent form of localism that extended to many dimensions of governmental authority and local institutions.75 As a result, suburban areas often became a complex patchwork of different administrative units, including counties, townships, and villages, school districts, water and sewer districts, transportation agencies, library services, park districts, and other entities that frequently overlapped and functioned independently of one another. In 1972 there were more than sixteen thousand such governmental units in the nation’s 264 metropolitan areas, excluding school districts. In the largest 33 of these metropolitan areas there were more than six thousand governmental units. At the same time, there were more than five thousand separate school districts across all such areas.76 If centralization was a theme in the history of the nation’s larger cities, especially concerning public education, fragmentation became a major issue in the suburbs that surrounded them.

This problem emerged as a point of concern for policy makers and planners interested in improving the efficiency of local government. Some advocated the development of metropolitan or regional forms of governance to better coordinate services and share costs, along with addressing the inequality then becoming evident. Social scientists debated these questions avidly, spawning occasional efforts to consolidate or combine various dimensions of governmental authority.77 It was a point of particular interest regarding schools, as suburban districts rarely reached the size of urban systems, raising questions about their efficiency and capacity. In 1968 sociologists Basil Zimmer and Amos Hawley published a large-scale study, funded by the US Department of Education, that shed considerable light on metropolitan attitudes about education. The goal was to identify factors that stood in the way of reforming district organization, but the research revealed much more. The very fact that such a question was posed, of course, was itself revealing in many respects. Suburban schooling was a problem, and federal authorities devoted resources to addressing it.78

Zimmer and Hawley were well-known urban sociologists, and they were interested in how people viewed communities and governmental systems in metropolitan settings. Their 1968 study focused on schooling in particular. At the center of the project was a survey of nearly three thousand households, conducted in six northern metropolitan areas: Buffalo, New York; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Rochester, New York; Dayton, Ohio; Saginaw, Michigan; and Rockford, Illinois.79 The survey was designed to address sources of resistance to metropolitan consolidation in schools. A widely voiced complaint about metropolitan development concerned inefficiencies in the many small jurisdictions that crisscrossed suburban areas, often with little evident rationale or order. Two other scholars summarized the critique succinctly: “Fragmentation, the critics claim, increases the cost of obtaining coordination among units of government, while overlapping, the same critics claim, results in the creation of an unnecessary duplication of administrative apparatus.” Counting themselves among such critics, Zimmer and Hawley found the existing metropolitan order puzzling. They postulated that escalating expense and managerial logic would surely lead to more coherent patterns of institutional development.80

By and large, however, their study identified unequivocal lines of suburban resistance to the very idea of consolidating schools across metropolitan areas. In fact, schools provoked greater resistance to change than any other issue in their survey. While the authors steered clear of the question of race, they focused on other factors that proved quite telling. It turned out that the size of metropolitan areas was clearly linked to distinctive suburban attitudes, and to city viewpoints as well. Residents of smaller metro areas did not consider suburban schools quite so superior, especially where urban schools were not judged to be problematic. Perceptions of suburban educational advantage were most pronounced in the larger metropolitan areas, and among certain groups in particular. In addition, it was the highly educated suburbanites, along with locally elected officials, who were most plainly opposed to any changes in the schools.81

The latter points represent Zimmer and Hawley’s principal finding of relevance to suburban schooling: many suburbanites were steadfast in their resistance to changes in school governance. Furthermore, social class mattered, at least defined in terms of employment, income, and education level. Suburban residents with professional and management jobs, higher income levels, and with college degrees were most likely to believe their schools superior, and were decidedly opposed to changes in the schools’ organization. Respondents in these categories also were the most willing to pay higher taxes to support local schools and were most reluctant to accept federal or state money to help them. As James E. Ryan has suggested, suburbanites in such circumstances could be prone to viewing such costs as the equivalent of membership dues.82 These tendencies were strongest in the larger metropolitan areas. On the other hand, working-class respondents, with lower levels of education, were considerably less likely to see the advantages of suburban schools, and less tolerant of higher taxes. Interestingly, college-educated big-city residents supported urban schools, although social class differences in these settings were quite modest.83

Given the fragmentation of suburban communities and attendant variation in wealth and income, there can be little question about the status of the various communities where respondents to Zimmer and Hawley’s survey lived. Many of the most privileged respondents undoubtedly resided in districts with high property valuations, with schools widely seen as superior. As Zimmer and Hawley reported, “In the suburban zones of both the large and medium sized areas, the college trained are distinct from all others in the low proportion who would support change.” It was this group, after all, that collectively was in perhaps the best position to enjoy the small scale and manifold comforts of suburban life. Their commitment to maintaining these features of localism appears to have been a critical element in suburban development and helps account for the persistent patterns of educational inequality then becoming evident.84

School Busing, White Flight, and Changing Cities

The historic Brown v. Board of Education decision by the US Supreme Court outlawing racial segregation of public schools made education a hot-button political question nationally. In the decades to follow, civil rights organizations actively pushed local and state authorities to comply with the spirit of the decision. Representing the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Thurgood Marshall tried more than thirty desegregation cases in this era, and many others were launched by other civil rights advocates and organizations.85

Support for integrated education and greater opportunity came from the public too. Survey data in the mid-1960s showed that a majority of Americans were in favor of school integration, and their numbers were increasing. Reflecting this sentiment, President Johnson declared in a 1965 commencement address at Howard University that “the task is to give 20 million Negroes the same chance as every other American to learn and grow, to work and share in society, to develop their abilities—physical, mental and spiritual, and to pursue their individual happiness.” Somewhat later, the research of James Coleman and other social scientists demonstrated the positive effects of racial integration on African American school success, helping to sustain support for desegregation among much of the educated public. But there was stubborn resistance as well, especially among those who felt threatened by imminent changes in schools serving their children. The result was a long and highly contentious debate that failed to accomplish much until the 1970s. Since blacks had moved to cities in all parts of the country, urban schools became a focal point of these struggles.86

Desegregation eventually realized its greatest success in southern states, where the federal courts finally forced districts to formally end segregated schooling in the later 1960s and the ’70s. As a consequence, most black students there attended integrated schools by 1975. Simply redrawing school attendance zones accomplished some of this, but much of it was achieved with busing. Many southern school systems were organized on a countywide basis, helping to accomplish desegregation more easily than in other parts of the country. Such districts often included both urban and suburban neighborhoods. This made white flight more difficult, although it certainly did occur. Urban-suburban distinctions became a point of interest in desegregation cases in connection with these questions.87

With the success of integration in the South, institutions in the North and Midwest became the nation’s most racially segregated schools, and the sharpest distinctions eventually were drawn between urban and suburban districts. Unlike many of their southern counterparts, urban education systems in these settings often conformed to municipal boundaries and thus did not include suburban neighborhoods. School segregation often resulted from dual housing markets that defined racially distinct neighborhoods. This became known as de facto school segregation, even if it often was triggered by government policies and the real estate industry; and it became the predominant form of racial educational exclusion during the 1960s. Of course, city districts could alter attendance zones or bus children to achieve racial balance in the schools, and sometimes they did. This is what demonstrators often demanded in Chicago, Milwaukee, and other cities. In the early 1960s many such protests were less concerned with achieving racial integration than reducing overcrowding and gaining access to better facilities for black students.88

Before long, however, things changed. In the 1970s allegedly de facto segregation became a sore point for civil rights organizations, as it seemed to suggest that dual housing markets were somehow a natural or inevitable development that schools could not address. This led to a series of lawsuits seeking to establish racial parity in urban schools, focused on district policies that abetted segregation. As a consequence, scores of northern city school districts were forced by courts to adopt desegregation plans, often because these districts had helped to sustain segregation by linking schools to racially identifiable neighborhoods and failed to facilitate integration. A crucial case was Keyes v. School District No. 1 in Denver, Colorado, where the US Supreme Court ruled in 1973 that districts could be held culpable for abetting segregation linked to dual housing markets. This led to a wave of desegregation plans that called for busing students from one school to another, typically black children to predominantly white institutions. Most such efforts experienced limited success, however, even if some students benefited from them initially. White flight often stymied desegregation at particular schools, as many white families withdrew their children to avoid integration. Public opposition to busing eventually became widespread, making it a major political issue.89

One answer to metropolitan inequity, of course, was to extend busing programs to suburban districts, many of which had grown enormously in the post-war years. The 1974 desegregation case Milliken v. Bradley proposed to do this in metropolitan Detroit. But the Supreme Court ruled in a 5–4 decision that the suburban districts could not be held accountable for segregation in city schools, thus drawing a line at the municipal boundaries with respect to desegregation. Widely decried as a departure from the historic principles of Brown two decades earlier, Milliken represented a watershed in the movement to integrate metropolitan schools. Urban districts were on their own if they wished to find a solution to racially segregated education. Many did receive financial assistance under the Milliken v. Bradley (known as Milliken II) decision in 1977, which directed states to assist with the costs of mitigating the damaging effects of segregation. But such aid rarely compensated for the loss of academically well-prepared students. Suburbanites, on the other hand, remained secure in their own districts, sheltered from the supposed threat of racial integration.90

A number of developments further aggravated these problems in the ’70s. First, government-enforced desegregation plans and middle-class fears about crime and deteriorating urban neighborhoods contributed to ongoing suburbanization in many parts of the country. District efforts to stem these losses with enhanced services and specialized “magnet schools” aimed at attracting middle-class students produced mixed results, although many such institutions did demonstrate that high achievement was possible in urban settings. But the general trend of declining enrollments continued in many urban districts. Second, while black migration from the South slowed, new immigrant groups started to appear in major American cities in large numbers, facilitated by the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965. Like previous newcomers, many members of these groups were poor and unskilled, and they too experienced cultural and linguistic exclusion.91

The largest groups of immigrants were those who spoke Spanish, most of whom came from Mexico, Central America, or the Caribbean (Puerto Rico in particular). These groups had been important minorities in US cities during earlier times, but their numbers grew dramatically in the latter 1960s and 1970s. By 1980 nearly a fifth of New York’s population was Spanish speaking, and Chicago counted more than four hundred thousand residents of Hispanic heritage. Even larger numbers settled in Los Angeles, Houston, and other cities in California and the Southwest. This posed yet a new challenge to the urban schools, one of educating a diverse population of recent immigrants while dealing with longstanding problems of racial segregation and poverty.92

In addition to these changes, the economic base of major cities continued to shift as well. In the 1960s, manufacturing employment began to decline substantially, a process often described as “deindustrialization,” and it accelerated in the 1970s and into the 1980s. These changes occurred primarily in cities and were linked to industrial competition from abroad and changing manufacturing technology. As suggested earlier, this period also witnessed a sharp rise in suburban manufacturing capacity. Consequently, unemployment in inner-city communities increased significantly. As sociologist William Julius Wilson has noted, the movement of industry out of American cities resulted in large-scale social dislocation. These developments also contributed to the significant decline in tax revenue in many cities.93

The resulting loss of employment brought a host of other problems, many with dire implications for education. The number of female-headed households in US cities increased rapidly, as marriages became difficult to sustain in the wake of rising joblessness. Illegal drug sales, violent crime, and teen pregnancy also increased following these developments. And as the popular media amply documented, these were questions that had a direct bearing on children and youth.94

The period covered in this book extends only to 1980, but problems facing the cities continued to mount well after that. By 1990 more than half of all black children in large US cities were born in poverty, most of them in female-headed families. With the virtual collapse of urban industrial employment, African American communities that traditionally relied on the factory or other types of manual labor found themselves in a deepening crisis. These developments had a palpable impact on urban schooling, which continued to contend with segregation, white flight, and fiscal difficulty.

In his study of high-poverty neighborhoods in Chicago at the time, William Julius Wilson reported criticisms about the schools that echoed those of thirty years earlier, “ranging from over-crowded conditions to unqualified and uncaring teachers.” He quoted one mother complaining that “they don’t have the proper books that the children need to study from. That’s what holds them back a lot.” Given the resources of the United States as a nation, it was telling that such problems continued to plague public institutions, regardless of their immediate circumstances.95

While suburbanization changed the economic and demographic profile of the city, problems once restricted to only the poorest areas eventually became far more ubiquitous. Because of unemployment, crime, racial discrimination, and a host of other factors operating in combination, the challenges facing city schools today are arguably worse than those in the past. On the other hand, most of the very best schools still exist in suburban school districts. While the suburbs have become somewhat more diverse, African Americans remain largely excluded from most prosperous communities. Leah Boustan reports that even affluent blacks have been reluctant to relocate to these suburban settings, partly because they fear white hostility, a long-standing concern. Still, many African Americans have benefited from moving to suburban communities too.96

Largely African American suburbs have appeared with the growth of the black middle class, but they rarely exhibit the level of affluence found in many predominantly white communities. Some black suburban neighborhoods today experience many of the same problems as in the inner city, including low property valuation, increased poverty, and low-achieving schools. And while suburban settings now account for a large segment of the African American population, many are inner-ring communities contiguous to central cities. Meanwhile, large numbers of African Americans, most of them very poor, continue to live on the urban side of these boundaries. In this respect, the racial ghetto simply has shifted outward to straddle municipal lines. While many African Americans technically have moved into suburbs, their socioeconomic status may not have improved substantially. As a result, patterns of racialized inequality that appeared more than a half century ago continue to be clearly evident, even if the geo-spatial ordering of particular districts and communities has evolved somewhat.97

The urban-suburban divide that emerged during the postwar era has proven to be quite enduring. The foregoing has demonstrated how the decline of urban school systems was directly tied to the rise of their suburban counterparts. In this respect it is possible to say that they are two sides of the same metropolitan coin on a national scale. There are two systems of public education in many metropolitan areas today: one for the disadvantaged and disenfranchised in the cities and certain inner-ring suburbs, and the other for those who can afford to live in other suburbs or send their children to a “good” school.98 In the latter half of the twentieth century, schools were buffeted by the tides of metropolitan change, particularly the settlement of white, middle-class families beyond the city limits, or at least in districts outside the urban core. Those who remained in the inner cities have been disproportionately disadvantaged, both economically and in educational terms. With larger numbers of impoverished minority students in their classrooms, urban schools have acquired a persistent reputation for low academic achievement. These problems are a matter of context; the troubles of the big cities have become the problems of their schools.99

Other factors that affected urban education in the postwar era and beyond, such as curricular reform and organizational change (as in specialty magnet schools), have been less important than social context. Once the proud sentinels of academic standards and vehicles of opportunity for generations of students, urban schools eventually came to represent the biggest problems in American education. Hobbled by the concentrated poverty, these institutions have struggled to address the needs of their students. With only modest federal and additional state support directed their way, performance levels in urban schools have continued to lag behind those in suburban school districts. Teachers often prefer school systems with better working conditions and more highly motivated students. And gross inequities in American education continued to sharpen as the twentieth century came to an end.100

To answer the questions posed at the outset of the chapter, it is clear that city schools have changed as a result of a historic transformation of urban life. Suburban districts, some of them sites of concentrated affluence, have clearly benefited. They have also firmly resisted efforts to consolidate their resources into larger organizational entities, preferring local control over proximate institutions and related services. The metropolitan revolution extended to all parts of the country, although it took a while to reach the South. And it was there that the desegregation movement eventually realized its greatest success, largely owing to the manner in which school districts were organized in many of its cities.

Elsewhere desegregation principally affected urban schools and actually may have helped to harden suburban resistance to the idea of racial integration, especially following the Milliken decision in 1974. The best models for overcoming the metropolitan revolution’s geo-spatial inequities appeared in certain southern metropolises.101 But short of creating countywide school districts, it is difficult to see how similar changes might have been accomplished elsewhere. The result was that the postwar geo-spatial model of urban-suburban educational inequality appeared largely impervious to change in most of the country. At the end of the twentieth century this educational divide remained perhaps the greatest challenge to the egalitarian promise of American public education.

The chapters that follow examine the development of the suburban school advantage, and by extension the urban school disadvantage, in a particular metropolitan context. While all such settings have peculiar characteristics, the historical formation of particular districts and their relationships to one another can shed light on changes that also occurred elsewhere. It is possible, after all, that pathways to productive reform may become more readily evident by examining such developments in greater detail. With this in mind, it is instructive to consider greater Kansas City and its experience with public education and suburban development during the long postwar era. Resolving problems created at that time remains an imperative for the nation’s metropolitan regions and represents a continuing challenge to educators concerned with improving the lives of all children.