Introduction
EDUCATING THE FRAGMENTED METROPOLIS
The Kansas City, Kansas (KCK), and Shawnee Mission (SM) school districts share a border in northeast Kansas, within the greater Kansas City metropolitan area. While geographically contiguous, however, they are worlds away in most other respects. In 2013 the four-year graduation rate in KCK was less than 66 percent, while in SM it was more than 91 percent. The average ACT (college prep) score in Harmon High, the KCK high school closest to the border, was 15.2, about 28 percent below the national mean of 20.9. This level of performance was similar to the district as a whole. On the other hand, the average score in Shawnee Mission North, the SM institution closest to Harmon, was 22.3. This was 7 percent higher than the national standard, with more students taking the test. Other institutions in the SM district posted even better averages.1
Less than four miles separate Harmon and Shawnee Mission North, but the outcomes for their students reflect enormous differences in resources, standards of living, and a host of other factors that affect their education. A popular real estate website recently ranked KCK’s public schools second to last among the several dozen school districts in metropolitan Kansas City, and the SM schools the third best. This may seem surprising, but it is scarcely unique today. These kinds of stark distinctions have become all too familiar to many Americans, especially those concerned about the welfare of their children. But they are a relatively recent development in the nation’s history.2
Education is an essential aspect of human development, but it occurs under conditions dictated by specific circumstances of time and place. It may take a village to raise a child, after all, but not all villages are the same. In recent history some communities have marshaled vastly superior resources to devote to their children, which often turns out to make a significant difference in their lives. These assets include financial capacity and the built environment, but they also comprise social, cultural, and political status. As a consequence, such places enjoy decided advantages with respect to education, while others are often labeled underprivileged. In this respect inequality has acquired a palpable geographical dimension in American life, a fact widely recognized today.3 But just how this happened, and what—if anything—can be done about it, are still not well understood. It is the task of this book to answer these and related questions, but first it is necessary to look back a bit in time.
Inequality in education or any other facet of life is hardly new, of course. There has always been variation in the natural and social resources available in different places. But urbanization and related processes of industrialization and technological change contributed to additional sources of distinction between communities.4 These developments accelerated dramatically following World War II in the United States, a time of profound changes in metropolitan life. It was an era of suburban ascendancy, labeled a “metropolitan revolution” because of the manifold changes it brought. Families with economic, social, and cultural advantages left the cities for communities that excluded others, adding a spatial dimension to long-standing facets of inequality such as race and social class.5 Wealth and poverty still existed, but in considerably less proximity. These developments contributed to the differences described in the two high schools above.
A revolution of sorts also occurred in American education during the long postwar era, stretching roughly from 1945 through the 1970s. It entailed consolidation of resources and the deliberate creation of locally defined boundaries, representing a departure from the past. In geographic terms, America’s educational center of gravity started in the countryside, moved to the cities after the Civil War, and shifted dramatically to the suburbs during the latter half of the twentieth century.6 At the beginning of the twentieth century, most people believed city schools to be an improvement over rural institutions, but eventually suburban schools came to be seen as superior to both. There certainly were exceptions to these tendencies, but the direction of historical transformation was unmistakable. By 1980 more children attended suburban schools than either urban or rural institutions.7 This seismic shift reflected the creation of a decisive suburban educational advantage.
The legacy of these developments remains readily evident today, as the superiority of suburban schools became more or less normalized. To the extent that they think about it, most Americans likely would agree with this characterization. The suburbs, after all, represent an American dream, at least for many families. Life there is associated with affluence, comfort, and security, attributes that some communities have featured for generations. Less-prosperous suburban areas certainly exist, but they are generally considered exceptions to the rule.8
Given this, it is little wonder that suburban schools have become cultural icons. This is especially true of secondary institutions, the popular movie sites of adolescent escapades, middle-class angst, and dreams come true. City schools, on the other hand, are widely associated with far different impressions, such as academic failure, crime, and other social problems; and rural schools can be seen as stifling backwaters, frozen in the past. These have become familiar tropes, rooted in the 1950s if not earlier, and certainly are not entirely accurate.9 But today much of the public commonly believes suburban institutions to be socially and academically advantageous.10 Ask most Americans to name a superior school or district, and it is a safe bet they will point to a well-heeled suburb. The historical ascendency of this viewpoint marked a sea change in perceptions of public education.
This book seeks to identify the process by which this occurred, focusing on a particular metropolitan area but also placing it in a national context. It focuses on the three decades following 1950, the long postwar era. It was during these years that the perceived suburban advantage clearly took shape. Systematically excluding people considered to be indigent or members of racial or ethnic minority groups, especially African Americans, was integral to this process. At the same time, white suburbanites occasionally competed with one another for advantage and influence, roiling the placid settings they safeguarded so zealously. The result was a metropolitan region carved into many different locales, distinguished by gradations of wealth and status and bound by few—if any—shared interests. If there were two issues that everyone became concerned with, however, they were race and defense of local prerogatives.
Institutions and Inequality
For better or worse, people today rely on institutions for the orderly performance of everyday functions needed to maintain the social order. The legal system governs commerce and keeps the peace, churches sustain religious and ethical principles, retailers provide goods and services, families raise children, and schools educate and certify academic accomplishment. Countless other institutions perform additional tasks, and all contribute in one way or another to the quality of modern life. Schools are among the most far reaching, however, touching the lives of nearly all members of contemporary society.11 They also play a pivotal role in the allocation of social status; the credentials they award can open doors and create pathways to success, defined in many ways. But some schools are judged to be better than others, and this too can have important consequences. And as suggested above, educational institutions are intimately connected to their immediate communities, which also contributes to inequity.12
Public education in the United States is unique in its local system of governance and funding. Today it counts more than thirteen thousand independent school districts, and thousands of other local governmental units play a role in managing public education systems. As legal scholar Richard Briffault has observed, school districts are governmental organizations under the jurisdiction of states, with authority over a legally defined territory within their boundaries. Historically, tiny rural districts maintained most American schools, and they numbered more than one hundred thousand as late as 1942. Efficiency-minded legislatures reduced the number, but the principle of local control remained inviolate. The political geography of school districts differed regionally, with boundaries often corresponding to municipal and township limits in the Northeast, county lines in much of the South, and typically independent of both in the West.13 This eventually turned out to hold important implications for patterns of educational inequality.
Local control and funding of education has long been a source of differences in the resources available to schools. This variation extends to financial capacity, social status, and political influence, but also the abilities and dispositions that students bring to class. In 1968 Arthur Wise found that the wealthiest districts in Illinois spent more than two and a half times more per classroom than the poorest ones. Other states reported similar disparities. The postwar metropolitan revolution contributed to telling disparities among school districts. As more-affluent and better-educated families settled in communities attached to particular school districts, inequalities mounted. In this fashion, the geographic location of school systems exerted considerable influence on the types of learning experiences that children received.14 If the quality of education has been determined largely by instructional time and location, the latter mattered a great deal indeed.
Historians and Suburban Schooling
Despite its magnitude, the change in postwar metropolitan schooling has garnered rather modest academic consideration. Until recently historians have exhibited little interest in suburban schools, perhaps because they seemed so familiar and mundane. As in other disciplines, historical scholarship has focused on big problems in education and the settings where they were most readily evident. The result has been a rich tradition of research on city schools and the manifold challenges they have faced. Along the way, historians discovered that city schools were once seen as the very best institutions. And they amply documented the decline of these systems, sometimes in terms that overlooked their many positive qualities.15 Even so, historians have generally ignored the suburban schools that emerged at about the same time.
This turned out to have been a serious omission, as the rise of suburban schooling was clearly linked to changes in urban institutions, certainly in the public mind.16 New highway construction and popular ownership of cars facilitated the movement of families to the suburbs, along with the easy availability of mortgages and a strong preference for selling to whites. Rising birthrates during the “baby boom” led many to seek more spacious and contemporary housing, along with bigger yards and quiescent neighborhoods. The cities were hardly the only locus of change.17
Racial segregation, of course, was a critical component of this story, and historians have devoted much attention to it. Through a variety of means, African Americans were systematically barred from most suburban communities, and whites avoided black neighborhoods. This reflected a process of racialization that eventually characterized housing markets in most of the nation’s metropolitan centers. For decades prior to the postwar era, blacks were excluded by restrictive deed covenants, discriminatory zoning ordinances, unfair mortgage policies, and a host of other mechanisms. Decades of research has documented this.18 The suburbs and their schools remained predominantly white as a consequence. As time passed, the result was a widespread pattern of metropolitan racial differentiation across the country.19
Most Americans are familiar with these aspects of racialized geography, which now span several generations. They were the product of government policy and private acts of discrimination dating to at least the early twentieth century, if not earlier. And schools eventually played a big role in the process. In the postwar era, urban educational systems became focal points of white flight, a widely observed phenomenon and the object of much commentary. Sociologist Joe Feagin has suggested that these developments were widely associated with a “white racial frame” that held ethnic and racial minorities—and African Americans in particular—to be intellectually, morally, and socially inferior to white people. Another term for this belief is racism, a set of ideas with deep roots in American history and perpetuated by decades of discrimination that helped to prolong myths of minority inferiority. It often hit real estate markets with especially devastating force, when whites ceased to look for housing in areas associated with blacks or other minority groups. This usually resulted in dramatic drops in property value, making it very difficult for African Americans and other minority group members to accumulate wealth through home ownership.20 Such were the dynamics of a changing metropolitan geography, a process that frequently brought stark changes to schools.
Another side of the metropolitan revolution existed outside the central cities. Suburban schools also had a hand in attracting families to particular communities. Many were drawn to districts touting high scholastic standards or a socially appealing clientele. Such attributes were often linked to affluence, but educational institutions also became a way of comparing suburbs irrespective of wealth. These places were hardly all the same, after all, and competition for prestige could have telling consequences, not least regarding property values.21 Stability in that regard became a highly prized community attribute.
The long postwar period thus witnessed profound changes in the social organization of American metropolitan life, with predominantly affluent white suburbs ultimately surrounding increasingly poor and nonwhite central cities. Schools often became integral to these developments, both contributing to change and reflecting its consequences. The term “urban education” became associated with racial and ethnic minority groups and high-poverty neighborhoods, while suburban schools were widely presumed to be predominantly white and academically superior. Inequality acquired a distinctive spatial flavor, regarding both schooling and social status in general.22
Urban historians have documented many of these developments, at least in broad strokes, and metropolitan inequality has become a familiar feature of American life. But much remains unknown about just how this occurred, especially with respect to schools. A handful of studies have started investigating these questions, but questions remain.23 One concerns the institutional mechanisms and social practices that contributed to this process. For instance, many African Americans wanted to partake of the benefits of suburban life; how were they excluded, along with others deemed undesirable, from rapidly expanding suburban communities? Where and when were boundaries drawn, and how were they defended? Then, of course, there is the matter of education. What did schools contribute to this process, and how did they help shape new patterns of social inequality? And what were the consequences of educational changes? How did people and institutions respond? To address these and other questions about the character and impact of these events, it is necessary to examine their local manifestations in greater detail.
A Metropolitan Case Study
A fruitful approach to considering specific conditions and practices that contributed to the rise of suburban schools is to scrutinize a particular metropolitan locale. While there have been many studies of individual urban school districts and suburban communities, much less attention has been devoted to change on a metropolitan scale.24 It makes sense to do this, however, as social scientists have long hypothesized that urban and suburban communities are parts of a greater whole. Developments in one such setting almost invariably resulted in change in another.25 Urbanist Leo Schnore wrote about this more than sixty years ago, calling for more research on the “demographic and functional composition of the various parts of the metropolitan area” and identifying “other sociological units that constitute the total community.”26 From this perspective, the various parts of a metropolis can best be understood as elements of the larger entity, linked generally in functional terms.
It turns out that this sort of “ecological” approach to understanding urban development is well suited to case-study research, even if its assumptions regarding functionality do not always ring true. Methodologist Robert Stake has pointed out that a case can be productively viewed as a “bounded system,” with “working parts” that may well be somewhat illogical but affect one another just the same.27 In this instance the case is the region organized around a particular city, and the study focuses on schooling as a specific dimension of life. It asks how educational institutions developed there, and how social, political, and economic changes affected them across the region.
The setting is metropolitan Kansas City, a major midwestern hub near the geographical center of the contiguous forty-eight states. It grew to become a nationally significant center for a number of industries, ranking among the twenty largest urbanized areas of the country by 1960. Positioned as it is, Kansas City is neither North nor South, East nor West in its social and cultural orientation. It was settled both from the Northeast and the South historically. While the area featured a good deal of industrial development, it hardly qualified as a major manufacturing center or one long associated with a particular industry. Sprawled across the border between Kansas and Missouri, it grew as a gateway to the West in the nineteenth century, sitting at the juncture of the Missouri River and the eastern terminus of both the Santa Fe and Oregon trails. Kansas City became the site of meatpacking and other food-processing industries, serving an agrarian hinterland that stretched to Texas, Colorado, and the Dakotas and shipping products to the East. Eventually certain other industries took root there, drawn by the central location and transportation lines to regional and national markets.28
Kansas City also endured its share of adversities. The state line complicated the area’s development, and Kansas City, Missouri, petitioned the state legislature more than once to allow it to be annexed to Kansas. This turned out to be politically untenable, so two quite different Kansas City municipalities subsequently grew on either side of the confluence of the Missouri and Kansas Rivers. The Missouri settlement expanded faster, largely because of advantages in trade to the east and as a terminus for settlers and goods headed west. It became the area’s commercial and financial center, while Kansas City, Kansas, developed largely as a manufacturing district, specializing in agricultural byproducts such as oils, soaps, and paints. Population growth on the Missouri side of the rivers, consequently, was considerably more robust, and the principal municipality of the region developed there. In time it acquired a reputation for corrupt city politics, typified by the Pendergast machine, and a thriving jazz scene, emanating from the historic black entertainment and commercial district at Eighteenth and Vine.29
Given this history, metropolitan Kansas City is a decidedly apt setting for a study such as this. A recent publication identified it as highly representative of national demographic trends.30 Located in the nation’s farm belt, it grew to more than a million people in the postwar period. Manufacturing surged as local wartime production facilities shifted to autos, steel, and other durable goods. As a result, the region underwent a process of sprawl quite similar to other large urbanized areas. The upshot was a good deal of social and economic differentiation, with some parts of the metropolis becoming blue-collar communities and other, more affluent areas attracting higher-status residents. Geographer Richard Florida listed Kansas City as one of the country’s most economically segregated metropolitan areas in 2017, an observation that reflected its history of uneven development, the depth of poverty in certain neighborhoods, and the accumulation of wealth in others.31 And much of this was related to the question of race.
Missouri was a slave state during the antebellum era, and consequently acquired a strong southern cultural and political orientation. Much of this legacy remained intact well after the Civil War, and it continued to be evident through the twentieth century. Southern influence extended to parts of metropolitan Kansas City, especially north of the Missouri River, but elsewhere too. In these respects, the area can be considered part of a border zone, straddling the country’s historic sectional divide.32 There was a sizable black community on the Missouri side of the river, also dating from the nineteenth century, and a long history of racial segregation and inequality. African Americans migrated to Kansas City, Kansas, too, mostly after the Civil War, in search of opportunity in a state then associated with antislavery activism. They also became segregated and suffered discrimination as the city expanded. These communities grew substantially during the twentieth century but remained largely restricted to the region’s two central cities.33
In the postwar era, whites left the urban core in large numbers for a variety of reasons, many directly or indirectly associated with race and social class. This process was abetted by highway construction, discriminatory mortgage policies, and aggressive real estate sales tactics. The result was sharp declines in property values, high unemployment due to jobs leaving the cities, and deepening poverty linked to racial segregation.34 Demographer Douglas Massey and his colleagues have counted Kansas City among the nation’s “hyper segregated” metropolitan areas across much of the latter part of the twentieth century, although conditions have improved somewhat recently.35 It is thus little wonder that the area’s city schools struggled with difficult issues of racial isolation and extreme, concentrated poverty. In this regard the fate of these institutions paralleled the experiences of other urban education systems in highly segregated and unequal metropolitan areas. This adversity primarily impacted the region’s black residents; greater Kansas City did not have a sizable Hispanic population until the later 1970s.36
While segregation and poverty posed big challenges to African Americans, local black communities also boasted many accomplishments. Kansas City was famous for its black musicians, athletes, and culinary entrepreneurs.37 The Kansas City Call became a widely known black newspaper and a stalwart voice against discrimination and exploitation. National black leaders such as Marcus Garvey and A. Philip Randolph visited the city regularly and drew large audiences. Local NAACP chapters actively challenged discrimination in employment, housing, and higher education. And black community leaders also protested unequal and segregated schooling, especially leading up to and following the Brown decisions in the mid-1950s.38 While Kansas City’s African American residents faced daunting obstacles in their quest for fairness and equality, their spirit and commitment to progress remained resilient.
This study is principally about the process of suburban development, however, examined in light of the racialization of neighborhoods and institutions, especially schools. As historians have amply demonstrated, suburbanization entailed a massive movement of human and material resources out of central cities, leaving poverty and inequity in its wake.39 While Kansas City’s urban schools struggled with growing numbers of impoverished students, outlying districts grew rapidly and remained predominantly white and middle class. And much of this occurred within the municipal boundaries of Kansas City, Missouri. Given the dynamics of change at play throughout the area, there can be little doubt that schools played a significant role in the process of metropolitan change and contributed directly to metropolitan inequality. This occurred on both sides of the border. In Kansas the schools abetted the success of wealthy and fashionable suburbs, while in Missouri they often became outposts of racialized refuge from real and perceived problems of urban education. In either case they also were the source of considerable conflict and became integral to distinctions between the city and its suburbs. And their leaders became vocal opponents of change. Without the contributions of the schools, there can be little doubt that suburbanization in Kansas City would not have occurred as it did.40
Greater Kansas City expanded steadily following the war, abetted by a freeway system that became one of the most extensive in the country. The decision to build a new airport some twenty miles from downtown signaled the willingness of local leaders to abide by these developments, anticipating future sprawl. An aggressive program of annexations helped to keep much of this expansion within the municipal boundaries of Kansas City, Missouri, a response similar to that of cities in western states. But classic forms of suburbanization in surrounding communities also occurred, and this too had educational ramifications.41 In fact, school districts eventually played a decisive role in demarcating urban and suburban communities, even within the city limits.
The region was also the site of one of the nation’s most contentious and ambitious school desegregation plans, the result of a Supreme Court decision that continues to be a source of debate. In an unusual set of circumstances, the complaint was initiated by neither civil rights groups nor aggrieved parents and students. The case, Jenkins v. Missouri, began as a suit by the Kansas City, Missouri, public schools against other districts on both sides of the state line. The federal district court changed this, making the Kansas City schools a defendant and releasing the other districts, but not before attorneys on both sides of the litigation had collected a sizable cache of information about local school systems.42 Local archival depositories preserved much of this material, particularly the Western Historical Manuscripts Collection at the University of Missouri–Kansas City. This rich source of information about the development of schooling in the region is yet another reason why Kansas City is well suited to a study of this sort. While Jenkins v. Missouri is not a major focus of the book, the case generated historical evidence that turned out to be especially valuable.
Finally, there is the question of scale. While metropolitan Kansas City is large enough to rank as an important center of culture and commerce, with all the problems of larger urbanized areas, its size is well suited to a case study of this sort. Its suburban communities and school districts numbered fewer than several dozen, unlike larger metropolitan regions that counted more than a hundred. This put Kansas City in the upper half of all urbanized areas with respect to district fragmentation, but it was far from the most extreme case.43 Studies of urban districts have focused on bigger cities in the past, but these places are often unrepresentative of the norm. Greater Kansas City is more typical in this respect and thus offers a manageable scale for a study of metropolitan dynamics. It permits the use of a geo-spatial frame of reference to identify how the region was partitioned into spaces defined both by race and social class distinctions.44 This is not to say that the book will deal with all of the many local changes that occurred at this time. It is not an omnibus history of schooling in the region. Rather, its focus is major events and key turning points in the rise of suburban education systems in greater Kansas City, and the manifold changes that they wrought.45
Varieties of Localism
As suggested earlier, the metaphorical image of the city as an organism holds considerable appeal. The human ecology school of urban sociology promulgated various permutations of this perspective, influencing social scientists and historians for much of the twentieth century. Amos Hawley was a leading proponent, and his book Human Ecology became a foundational text in the field.46 This viewpoint influenced research on urban growth and change, especially regarding connections between central cities and the suburbs.
Since the ecological perspective holds that metropolitan regions function as an integrated whole, it was logical to see the development of urban and suburban schooling as closely connected. But there obviously was more to the story. It could be misleading, after all, to describe the relationship of schools in these different contexts as functional, at least in practical terms. Suburban schools flourished, while city schools suffered by comparison, at least in the eyes of most observers. In this respect it appeared that these institutions often developed in stark opposition to one another. This observation reveals one of the principal shortcomings of the human ecology perspective: it did not deal well with conflict. In particular, proponents of the integrated metropolis failed to anticipate the salience of viewpoints that favored the local over a region as a whole. It was hardly a trivial oversight.47
Conflict wracked the process of metropolitan development in the postwar era, to one degree or another. White racism, of course, was a major source of discord on a range of issues, including housing, jobs, and schooling. But it was hardly the only one. Insofar as suburban development represented a flight from the city, whether due to bigotry or other reasons, it entailed a rejection of urban life. Public discourse made big-city politics and corruption enduring themes, along with crime and grime, that fueled such viewpoints.48 Given this, suburbanites devoted considerable effort to constructing boundaries, separating themselves from the city and eventually shunning some of their immediate neighbors as well. As sprawl unfolded, the countryside surrounding cities quickly became a complex patchwork of villages, towns, and other jurisdictions. It was hardly a recipe for cooperation and goodwill.49 Despite outward appearances of peace and tranquility, suburbia also exhibited considerable status anxiety and antipathy alongside its prototypical propriety.
According to human ecology theory and urban planning doctrine, these should have been relatively minor or temporary problems. Such borders were not supposed to exert excessive influence on overall development, and eventually should have given way to shared concerns for orderly and efficient metropolitan development.50 But boundaries quickly assumed great salience in suburbia. Their creation became a recipe for even more conflict, as communities routinely resisted proposals for reform or greater equity in institutional policies and practices. For better or worse, the rise of the suburbs brought a growing emphasis on local priorities rather than a willingness to abide by larger concerns. As suggested above, suburbanites even could be indifferent or hostile to the interests of neighboring communities. The result was a fragmented polity that valued limited government and direct control of institutions, principles well suited to an ethos of exclusion.
One term that conveys the sentiment animating many suburban communities, particularly the more affluent ones, is localism. It is a word with various meanings, but in this context it represents a foreshortening of interests and concerns to exclude matters that did not directly benefit a particular community. When considering a proposed policy or public expenditure, individuals with this perspective would focus resolutely on how it could affect their immediate neighbors and themselves. Consequently, sharing resources was not high on the agenda, and neither was relinquishing control of institutions that served them.51 Tightly knit homeowners’ associations often became a forum for airing such sentiments and organizing in response to perceived threats. In fact, local developer J. C. Nichols made Kansas City a forerunner in the development of such organizations. This sort of localism appeared historically as an aversion to city politics and the large, bureaucratic, and impersonal institutions associated with big municipalities. It contributed directly to the political patchwork of the suburban landscape during the postwar era. These communities may have seemed tranquil and orderly, but they devoted continual vigilance to maintaining such appearances. Property values depended on it, but so did a way of life that many suburbanites were determined to preserve.52
Postwar suburban localism represented a sharp break from the views of the system builders who shaped and led urban institutions during the first half of the twentieth century. These men—and a few women—often were cosmopolitan in their thinking, exchanging ideas at the national level to move a shared agenda forward. In education they aimed to create “the one best system,” as historian David Tyack characterized it. But similar efforts were made in municipal reform, policing, social welfare, and other facets of urban life. Rather than fracturing the polity in terms of particular neighborhoods and districts, these leaders had sought to serve all the nation’s polyglot cities with institutions that functioned efficiently and at least somewhat equitably. There were exceptions, to be sure, especially in deliberate discrimination against African Americans and other racialized minority groups. But urban elites during this era sought to unite much of the rest of their urban constituency, exhibiting a noblesse oblige informed by an ethic of public service. To summon another of Tyack’s depictions, they were “managers of virtue,” dedicated to improving life for the greatest number of people they deemed possible.53
It is safe to say that relatively few postwar suburbanites shared such views. Many found large urban institutions inherently corrupt and inefficient. Large numbers also left the cities to escape neighborhoods undergoing racial transition, and harbored deep animosity toward blacks and other groups viewed as socially inferior. Suburbs settled principally by such residents, especially places proximate to expanding African American neighborhoods, often engaged in a particularly virulent form of localism that has been labeled “opportunity hoarding.” Sociologist Charles Tilly coined the term to describe the use of boundaries by members of a group to categorically exclude outsiders, but not necessarily to exploit them. Other scholars have used it somewhat differently, arguing that the effects of opportunity hoarding have been especially pernicious. This study employs it to describe a geo-spatial system of exclusion, typically focused on the segregation of African Americans. In this way, boundary construction by white communities severely constrained the ability of blacks to gain access to schools, jobs, housing, and other valuable collective assets. White suburbanites hoarded these opportunities for growth and advancement, reserving them for friends and families. Historically, a number of factors played a role in these developments, including white supremacy, local resources of social capital, and various forms of status anxiety.54 This was an especially spiteful variant of localism, one that required a high level of community cohesion to sustain.
Localism and opportunity hoarding are useful concepts for interpreting the behavior of suburbanites during the postwar era. The suburbs that sprang up around American cities did not remain predominantly white and middle class by coincidence. Systematic forms of exclusion clearly operated to maintain a quality of life that suburban residents deemed highly desirable, along with rising property values. This was part and parcel of the suburban experience, to one degree or another. Living in an exclusive neighborhood or subdivision, after all, was the height of suburban aspiration, especially one reserved for the most status-worthy residents. As the term implies, the demarcation of geo-social boundaries was indispensable to the affirmation and defense of social standing, along with mechanisms to exclude those deemed undeserving. Identifying these characteristics of suburban schooling is one of the principal objects of this study.
Plan of the Book
The remainder of this account is organized into five chapters and an epilogue. It begins with an overview of suburban development during the long postwar era and the implications that it held for schooling. Beyond that, it explores the development of school systems in metropolitan Kansas City in considerable detail, focusing on the social, economic, and demographic changes that transformed the area’s educational landscape. The conclusion summarizes key points from the study and brings the story up to the present. In the end, it appears that events that unfolded in the three decades following 1950 created a new metropolitan system of education, one that resulted in a clear suburban advantage, and which continues to exist today.
Chapter 1 describes the development of educational systems in the United States through much of the twentieth century, and changes in metropolitan life following the Second World War. Patterns of suburban development varied somewhat by region, a process that held important implications for the organization of schooling. In the end, however, there was considerable convergence in the general process of suburbanization. Distinctions between central city and suburban communities became commonplace, especially in larger metropolitan regions. Educational inequities generally paralleled these developments, with few exceptions. By the later 1970s it was quite clear that a new national model of suburban advantage had taken hold, one that has continued to be evident largely to the present.
Chapter 2 introduces metropolitan Kansas City as the site for a case study to examine the dynamics of suburban development and its implications for educational inequality. Following the lead of its city manager Perry Cookingham, Kansas City, Missouri, undertook an aggressive program of annexation to foreclose the negative effects of suburban development on the central city, expanding its boundaries substantially. Cookingham’s plan did not include annexation of school districts, however, and as a result the enlarged municipality contained all or parts of more than a dozen districts, a development that would have important consequences. At the same time, suburbanization resulted in population shifts across the area, with affluent and college-educated adults settling in suburban communities, especially in Johnson County, Kansas. This too would have important educational consequences, giving suburban schools on the Kansas side of the state line a particular advantage in terms of academic attainment and achievement. It also relegated the schools of Kansas City, Missouri, to a range of problems associated with concentrated poverty and declining revenues.
Chapter 3 describes changes in the postwar era to the Kansas City, Missouri, public schools, which went from being considered the very best such local institutions to perhaps the worst. In the 1950s the Kansas City high schools were widely considered to be superior to their suburban counterparts, which were much smaller and offered fewer curricular and extramural options for students. As suburban districts expanded, however, these distinctions began to fade. At the same time, the arrival of large numbers of poor African Americans, most from the rural South, contributed to racial change in the schools. Thousands of white families moved to suburban districts, especially with the advent of desegregation plans in the 1970s. Research on school transfers revealed that most such “flight” headed to the south, remaining largely within the city’s municipal boundaries. By 1980 the Kansas City school district’s population had fallen dramatically, and only a tiny minority was white, making meaningful desegregation within the system impossible. Meanwhile, neighboring districts had grown enormously, serving an almost entirely white population. A new educational order had emerged.
Chapter 4 deals with changes in the Missouri suburbs, describing their consolidation and growth across the postwar period. Particular attention is devoted to several of these districts, which served as bellwethers of change across the period. They include North Kansas City, which grew rapidly through a process of annexation, eventually more than tripling in size geographically as smaller districts agreed to join it. The other districts are Raytown and Hickman Mills to the south, both of which had been consolidated many years earlier. These districts expanded in population during the postwar era, especially Hickman Mills, which registered the fastest growth rate in the region. They offer an interesting contrast, however, in efforts aimed at excluding blacks and other groups considered undesirable. In particular, Raytown may have represented the period’s most active case of opportunity hoarding.
Chapter 5 offers an account of developments on the Kansas side of the border, focusing specifically on the rise of the Shawnee Mission School District. Johnson County became known for the high quality of its schools and attracted the greatest concentration of college-educated adults in the area. This came to represent a significant advantage with respect to the performance of local schools. The district encountered difficulties, however, in achieving consolidation, as wealthy patrons in fashionable communities rejected proposals to join with less-affluent residents in other parts of the area. An act of the legislature eventually forced creation of the district, the only one in the state to require this step. This episode reflected the effects of localism within the suburban context, where status distinctions between communities could make common interests difficult to recognize or acknowledge.
The book’s epilogue provides a summary of its principal points and larger implications. Kansas City offers a nearly archetypal case of the metropolitan revolution, with suburban sprawl transforming the region’s social, economic, and demographic landscape. At the same time the educational system changed profoundly as well, with so-called suburban districts growing rapidly and the once preeminent central city district suffering a near collapse in significance and stature. It is telling that school district boundaries, rather than municipal limits, became the lines demarking suburban versus urban residential zones. This institutional form of education became a badge of status as a consequence, a telling indication of the power that this particular dimension of metropolitan life came to represent.
Beyond this, the epilogue adds a brief account of the contemporary status of the various entities discussed in the book. It turns out that the Johnson County, Kansas, schools remain the best academically in the region, at least judging by test scores, and the Kansas City schools—on both sides of the border—continue to be considered among the most problem-ridden. Other suburban districts remain somewhere in between but are considered far better than the central city schools. Hickman Mills is the exception, and has become predominantly African American. Somewhat ironically, Raytown today is perhaps the most integrated district in the region. By and large, however, the patterns of geo-spatial inequality that emerged during the postwar years are still clearly evident. The era of suburban advantage appears to be far from over.
In closing, it should be noted that the synopsis provided above represents only highlights of each chapter; it does not begin to convey all their points. The richness and variety of Kansas City history is only touched on in the pages to follow, but hopefully the story of educational inequality in this expansive metropolis will prove compelling. More importantly, it is intended to be informative to readers interested in understanding the past with an eye to forging a better future.
Finally, a note on methodology is in order. This study makes use of a wide range of evidence and thus represents a variety of methodological traditions. Much of it, of course, draws on largely conventional historical documents, including archival records, contemporaneous journalistic accounts, and other such sources. But it also employs statistical data and oral history interviews. The book’s appendix offers a discussion of these sources of information and the methods used to analyze them. For the most part, the narrative to follow does not feature technical details of the evidence or methods employed, particularly with respect to statistical analysis. Readers interested in these aspects of the study are encouraged to examine the published articles that I have authored or coauthored that deal with these issues. They are highlighted in the acknowledgments and cited in the endnotes.