Education and the Changing Geo-Spatial Organization of Inequality: Secondary Attainment in the United States, 1940-1980

• In Event: Spatial Categories of Analysis and Educational Inequality in the Postwar Era

Abstract

Life in the United States can be quite different depending upon geographical or spatial dimensions of experience. Long standing regional differences have affected the amount and quality of education. At the same time, the spatial distribution of wealth and power has grown more perceptible in differences between central cities and suburbs. (Hayden, 2003; Jackson, 1985; Fox, 1985)

While scholars have recently devoted greater attention to spatial manifestations of inequality (Lobao, Hooks and Tickamyer, 2007), little research explores these questions with respect to schooling. In a recent analysis, Roscingo, Tomascovic-Devey and Crowley (2006) examine educational differences between children in urban, suburban and rural settings. With few exceptions, however, these and other efforts have failed to consider how such inequality has evolved over time, and just how it has interacted with other forms of inequality in education. (Dougherty, 2008).

In this paper we explore these spatial dimensions of educational development between 1940 and 1980. Utilizing data from the census in 1940, 1960 and 1980, we assess the educational experiences of 17 year-olds, including family background factors. Specifically, we use one percent IPUMS samples to analyze educational attainment in central city and suburban settings, using a multi-level analysis.

The geo-spatial organization of educational inequality shifted historically, from a pattern of regional distinctions to one of metropolitan segmentation. This observation reflects change in what sociologists have described as different levels of spatial analysis, at the sub-national and urban scales (Lobao and Hooks, 2007; Irwin, 2007). As such, it captures the declining significance of region and the development of a national suburban life style within the same temporal frame, along with a widening social divide in metropolitan settings.

These changes also appear to have been linked to race. African Americans were concentrated in educationally depressed locations in all phases of the process: the rural South at one point and central cities in another. We discuss ways that race contributed to metropolitan segmentation, and it became less important as a source of attainment inequality over time.


References

Dougherty, Jack (2008) “Bridging the Gap between Urban, Suburban and Educational History,” in Reese and Rury (eds.) Rethinking the History of American Education.

Fox, K. (1985). Metropolitan America: Urban life and urban policy in the United States, 1940-1980.

Hayden, Dolores (2003) Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000.

Irwin, Michael (2007) “Territories of Inequality: An Essay on the Measurement and Analysis of Inequality in Grounded Place Settings” in Lobao, Hooks and Tickamyer, The Sociology of Spatial Inequality.

Jackson, K. (1985). The crabgrass frontier: The suburbanization of the United States.

Lobao, Linda, Gregory Hooks and Ann R. Tickamyer, eds. (2007) The Sociology of Spatial Inequality.

Roscigno, Vincent J, Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, Martha Crowley (2006) “Education and Inequalities of Place,” Social Forces (June)

Authors

• John L. Rury, The University of Kansas

• Argun Saatcioglu, The University of Kansas