Schools for the Suburbs: Defining Spaces for Education in a Metropolitan District

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

Abstract

In most American metropolitan areas, municipal or school district lines divide urban from suburban areas. But the existence of city-county consolidated school systems, like those of the metropolitan south and southwest, provide opportunities to consider the relationship between city and suburban education with fewer jurisdictional dividers. Within a metropolitan district, how have education policies valued different regions of the metropolis differently, and thus contributed to metropolitan educational inequality?

This paper posits that federal educational policy evidenced a pro-suburban, anti-urban orientation in the 1950s and 1960s. Such a bias has been visible in the context of housing policy, but is notable in education as well (e.g., Jackson, 1985, Sugrue, 1998, Freund, 2007). This paper draws on published reports and unpublished government documents to explore pro-suburban discourse in two areas of federal education policy. Via published and manuscript sources from Nashville, Tennessee, it then illustrates the consequences of this pro-suburban orientation for one metropolitan school district.

In the 1950s, as baby boomers reached school age, the U.S. experienced a massive school facilities shortage, one that came to the attention of federal officials in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. While lobbying for federal school construction aid, HEW officials published school construction guidelines that described suburban environments as the appropriate sites for schools and implied incompatibility between urban areas and schooling.

Talk of school construction shifted in the late 1960s after the Green decision accelerated pressure to desegregate. Federal officials as well as urban planners, civil rights activists, educators, and local school administrators explored a new and often pro-suburban approach to desegregation: the “educational park,” said to facilitate desegregation by bringing large numbers of students together across neighborhood lines. The “educational park” recast pro-suburban ideas about appropriate spaces for schools in the form of a desegregation strategy.

In Nashville, Tennessee, both aspects of federal policy discourse helped shape school construction decisions in the 1960s and 1970s, and thus created the physical landscape on which desegregation took place. In Nashville, as in other cities, desegregation proceeded on very unequal terms, with continued closures of central-city schools and black students and communities disproportionately bearing the burdens of travel time and disruption to community institutions (Gadsden, 2010). Although a consolidated metropolitan district, ideological lines like those between favored suburban and disfavored urban areas nonetheless divided the metropolis and furthered educational inequality.

References:
Freund, D. (2007). Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Gadsden, B. (2010). “The Other Side of the Milliken Coin: The Promise and Pitfalls of Metropolitan School Desegregation.” Journal of Urban History, 36 (2), 173-196.
Hirsch, A. (2006). “Less Than Plessy: The Inner City, Suburbs, and State-Sanctioned Residential Segregation in the Age of Brown.” in Kruse and Sugrue, eds. The New Suburban History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Jackson, K. (1985). The crabgrass frontier: The suburbanization of the United States. New York: Oxford University Press.

Author

• Ansley T. Erickson, Teachers College, Columbia University