Suburban #BlackLivesMatter

• In Event: 42.038 - Black Like Me: Urban Education and State Violence in the Era of #BlackLivesMatter

Abstract

Ask someone to imagine the suburbs and they will often conjure an image of a White family with children, a single-family home with a manicured lawn, and a serene environment. Ask someone to imagine the urban and images of tall buildings, stacked residences, and bustling city streets crop up. When asked to imagine urban education, the picture becomes bleaker with decrypted schools, disinterested teachers, and Black and Brown children crowding classrooms. If asked to imagine suburban schools, a well-appointed classroom, engaged teachers, with mostly White well-behaved children come to mind. Suburban education has become regarded as the ideal and urban education as the cautionary tale. The chasm between conceptualizations of suburban and urban in the minds of most Americans is the product of history and myth, whether accurate or inaccurate, most images of the chasm affect what we think inequality looks like in contemporary urban education. This paper argues that by over focusing on education within the core of cities, educational research has neglected suburbanites who are now the majority of residents in urban areas.

To better understand the state of urban education, the changing nature of suburbia and its schools must be addressed. We know a great deal about the decay of central city school systems, but much less attention has been paid to suburban schools. The standing assumptions that undergird belief in suburban schools success are: 1) school funding – most school systems have a funding formula that mixes local and state tax revenues 2) population homogeneity – while the city often featured people across the race and class spectrums, suburbs were engineered to be largely racially and economically homogenous and 3) neighborhood schools – schools in the suburbs were filled with the children of families that lived next to one another thus creating a bond between residents as well as home and school. The above reasons for suburban school success, however, may no longer hold true. We must critically consider: 1) How have the demographics of the suburbs changed in the last 20 years? 2) In contemporary suburban schools, are all students receiving equal access to curriculum and receiving suburban spoils? And 3) How have suburban schools responded to racial, ethnic and economic diversity in suburban schools? This paper explores these questions and their answers implications for understanding urban education, suburban schooling and the state(s) of Black education.

Author

• R. L'Heureux Lewis-McCoy, City College of New York - CUNY