At the conclusion of World War II, urban public schools held an esteemed position. Decades of administrative centralization had made cities like New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Detroit the models of American education. Boasting professionalized teachers, comprehensive high schools, and wide-ranging curriculum, city schools were regarded as centers of modernity. That all changed in the postwar era. Federally insured mortgages and interstate highways siphoned white residents to new suburbs, draining cities of their tax receipts. At the same time, the promise of industrial jobs drew African American migrants to cities, where a range of discriminatory policies hemmed them into neighborhoods with declining housing stock and landlords who harvested exorbitant rents. Together, these two migrations—mass suburbanization and the Great Migration—produced a stark new pattern of spatial inequality, with poverty concentrated in city centers and wealth sequestered in rings of suburbs. Racial segregation increased, city schools creaked under the economic strain, and the locus of American education shifted from cities to suburbs. By 1980, argues John L. Rury in this account charting the rise of suburban schooling, “A new educational order had emerged” (p. 15).
In essence, Creating the Suburban School Advantage asks how suburban schools became more highly regarded than urban schools. In crisp and sweeping chapters, Rury explores this question through a survey of national trends along with a focused case study of Kansas City. While urban decline and suburban growth have been central themes for a generation of historians, Rury contends that scholars have overlooked the crucial role that education played in remaking the postwar metropolis. In his telling, schools were not mere containers that reflected demographic and economic trends but key shapers of those larger processes. When young, white families decamped for suburbia, for instance, they shopped among the assortment of communities by assessing the local schools in each location. Buying a suburban home meant purchasing access to a school system, and home buyers compared districts using a range of educational characteristics, from graduation rates and college enrollment levels to standardized test scores. Rury traces how, amid this fierce competition among suburbs, education became a “badge of status” (p. 16) that enhanced or detracted from the prestige of different areas. Meanwhile, deindustrialization and the rise of shopping malls undercut urban tax bases, resulting in overcrowded classrooms and austere conditions in city schools. The result, Rury shows, was a decided “suburban school advantage” in metropolitan areas across the nation.
Kansas City makes for a fascinating case study to investigate these trends. The Kansas City metropolitan area straddles two different states, allowing for comparisons between how suburbanization unfolded on either side of the border. On the Missouri side, state law permitted cities to annex bordering areas with a simple vote of city residents, and city officials embarked on an aggressive campaign of territorial expansion. Kansas City, Missouri, doubled in size during the 1950s by adding outlying tracts. But Missouri law also permitted school districts to remain intact during annexations. And so, as the city expanded, it grew to encompass more than a dozen separate school districts that were technically within the city limits but retained independent governance. Their schools were in, but not entirely of, Kansas City. For this reason, Rury argues, school district lines became the most salient boundaries dividing the region by race and class. On the Kansas side, by contrast, the state legislature ordered a consolidation of twelve districts in suburban Shawnee Mission, in spite of protestations by its residents. Even with the different legal regimes, many similarities existed. In both states, suburbanites adamantly rejected proposals for metropolitan consolidation and comprehensive desegregation, embracing a political culture of localism that prioritized resource hoarding over broader regional concerns.
Rury utilizes a range of sources, including newspaper accounts and oral history interviews, but the most important evidence is drawn from the US Census. In particular, the datasets released by the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) allowed Rury to conduct a statistical analysis of educational trends. This data registers the emergent spatial divide. For example, a national sample of seventeen-year-olds captures the dramatic changes in American education. Whereas city students in 1940 were 50 percent more likely to graduate high school than suburban students, by 1980 the pattern had reversed, with graduation rates 20 percent higher in suburbs than cities.
The IPUMS dataset reveals similar trends in Kansas City. In a regression analysis evaluating various demographic characteristics of Kansas City students, Rury found that the highest predictor of student success—measured as eleventh-grade enrollment in 1980—was if a parent had graduated college (pp. 32, 71). Building on a large body of research linking family background with academic achievement, Rury argues that scholars should regard adult educational level as its own sort of resource. This was a factor, he claims, that reinforced the urban-suburban divide. In a feedback loop of concentrated advantage, as educated adults clustered in certain suburbs, it made those places more desirable, leading even more educated adults to move there. Conversely, as college-educated adults abandoned the city, it depleted urban districts of parental resources.
While Rury thoroughly documents the city-suburban divide, his statistical methodology is often murky on questions of causality. At times, the argument suggests that demographic trends alone created resource disparities. Discussing the changing geography, Rury states, “When more middle-class, mainly white families settled in the suburbs,” those areas “grew and gained a better reputation” (p. 61). Then, twenty pages later, discussing Southeast High School in Kansas City, Missouri, he states, “It had become predominantly black, and its academic reputation began to change as well” (p. 85). Some readers might interpret these statements as implying causation: that the reputation of suburban schools improved because white people moved there, and that the reputation of an urban high school declined because its enrollment was predominantly black.
Rury is careful to emphasize that these were merely “perceptions” of educational superiority and inferiority. But the extended discussion of perceptions also diverts attention away from the public policies—mortgage redlining, public housing placement, urban renewal, highway construction, tax abatement—that created those impressions in the first place. The same issue of identifying correlations without carefully parsing the causation reappears elsewhere. In his summary of the IPUMS regression analysis, Rury identifies “lack of traditional family structure” (p. 72) as a key factor explaining racial disparities in educational attainment. Although he mentions poverty and joblessness as conditions leading to single-parent households, the emphasis on family structure points to individual behaviors as the source of inequality, rather than the systemic racism of the policy decisions that built the segregated metropolis.
These reservations aside, Creating the Suburban School Advantage makes an important contribution to the history of education. With few exceptions, accounts of postwar schooling in the United States have focused almost exclusively on the “rise and fall” of large urban systems. As Rury demonstrates in meticulous detail, the flip side of urban decline was suburban growth, and now a synthetic account connects these mutually constitutive processes. Especially in our current moment—when, under the weight of the COVID-19 fallout, cities are again sinking into budget crises, and those with the means are fleeing for greener pastures in suburbia—this book is essential to understanding the long history behind the urban-suburban divide.
