Abstract
As educational history and urban history have developed in recent decades, a significant gap has opened up between them. On one side, educational historians have focused on the rise and fall of big-city school districts. On the other side, urban historians have documented how governmental housing, tax, and transportation policies fueled the postwar decline of cities and expansion of outlying suburbs. But these two fields have failed to connect with one another. In general, educational historians have not yet connected the decline of urban schools with the growth of the suburbs, and the broader political and economic shifts in the metropolitan context. Likewise, urban historians have rarely discussed what role schools played in the transformation of cities and suburbs. This chapter seeks to bridge the historiographical gap between urban, suburban, and educational history by demonstrating how these works can inform one another. It highlights major books that have served as the foundations in each field over the past few decades, as well as the rising body of new scholarship that attempts to span the distance between them.
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Notes
Ellwood P. Cubberley, Public Education in the United States: A Study and Interpretation of American Educational History; Revised and Enlarged Edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1919/1947), 164–65;
Bernard Bailyn, Education in the Forming of American Society; Needs and Opportunities for Study (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960), 9.
Marvin Lazerson, Origins of the Urban School: Public Education in Massachusetts, 1870–1915 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971);
Michael Katz, Class, Bureaucracy, and Schools: The Illusion of Educational Change in America, rev. ed. (1971; repr., New York: Praeger, 1975);
Carl F. Kaestle, The Evolution of an Urban School System: New York City, 1750–1850 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973);
Stanley Schultz, The Culture Factory: Boston Public Schools, 1789–1860 (New York: Oxford, 1973);
Diane Ravitch, The Great School Wars, New York City, 1805–1973: A History of the Public Schools as Battlefield of Social Change (New York: Basic Books, 1974).
John L. Rury, ed., Urban Education in the United States: A Historical Reader (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 2;
Ruben Donato and Marvin Lazerson, “New Directions in American Educational History: Problems and Prospects,” Educational Researcher 29 (November 2000): 5–6.
David Tyack, The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974).
Julia Wrigley, Class Politics and Public Schools: Chicago1900–1950 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1982);
William J. Reese, Power and the Promise of School Reform: Grassroots Movements During the Progressive Era (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986).
Harvey Kantor, “In Retrospect: David Tyack’s The One Best System” Reviews in American History 29 (2001): 326. Tyack’s book examined post-World War II demographic and economic changes in cities (One Best System, 276–78), but did not discuss how suburbanization altered the politics of education.
Frank Hobbs and Nicole Stoops, Demographic Trends in the 20th Century: Census 2000 Special Reports, Series Censr-4 (Washington, DC: U.S. GPO, 2002), 33.
Jean Anyon, Ghetto Schooling: A Political Economy of Urban Educational Reform (New York: Teachers College Press, 1997), chap. 4.
Harvey Kantor and Barbara Brenzel, “Urban Education and the ‘Truly Disadvantaged’: The Historical Roots of the Contemporary Crisis, 1945–1900,” Teachers College Record 94 (Summer 1992): 278–314;
Robert Lowe and Harvey Kantor, “Considerations on Writing the History of Educational Reform in the 1960s,” Educational Theory 39 (1989): 1–9.
John L. Rury and Jeffrey E. Mirel, “The Political Economy of Urban Education,” in Review of Research in Education, Volume 22, ed. Michael W. Apple (Washington, DC: AERA, 1997) 49–110.
Ira Katznelson and Margaret Weir, Schooling for All: Class, Race, and the Decline of the Democratic Ideal (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985/1988), 27, 215.
Jeffrey Mirel, The Rise and Fall of an Urban School System: Detroit, 1907–1981 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 218–21, 244–50, 294–98.
Arnold R Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–1960 (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1983), xiii.
Timothy J. Gilfoyle, “Introduction: Urban History, Arnold Hirsch, and the Second Ghetto Thesis,” Journal of Urban History 29 (March 2003): 233.
Kenneth T Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).
Kevin M. Kruse and Thomas J. Sugrue, eds. The New Suburban History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006);
Becky M. Nicolaides and Andrew Wiese, eds. The Suburb Reader (New York: Routledge, 2006).
Amanda I. Seligman, “What is the Second Ghetto?,” Journal of Urban History 29 (March 2003): 274;
Amanda I. Seligman, “The New Suburban History [Review Essay],” Journal of Planning History 3 (November 2004): 312–23.
Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race, Power, and the Struggle for the Postwar City in California (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).
Michael Flamm, “Destructive Winds”, Reviews in American History 32, no. 4 (2004): 552–57; the reference to public education in American Babylon is on page 166.
Herbert J. Gans, The Levittowners: Ways of Life and Politics in a New Suburban Community (New York: Pantheon, 1967), 31–41, 86–103.
Mirel, The Rise and Fall of an Urban School System; Thomas F. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).
Kevin Fox Gotham, Race, Real Estate, and Uneven Development: The Kansas City Experience, 1900–2000 (Albany, NY: SUNY, 2002), chap. 5.
Amanda I. Seligman, Block By Block: Neighborhoods and Public Policy on Chicago’s West Side (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), chap. 5.
Michael Clapper, “Separate and Unequal: The Constructed World of Philadelphia Area Schools After 1945” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, expected 2007).
Gerald Gamm, Urban Exodus: Why the Jews Left Boston and the Catholics Stayed (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
Rosalyn Baxandall and Elizabeth Ewen, Picture Windows: How the Suburbs Happened (New York: Basic Books, 2000).
Claudia Keenan, “P.T.A. Business: A Cultural History of How Suburban Women Supported the Public Schools, 1920–1960” (PhD diss., New York University, 2002).
Emily Straus, “The Making of the American School Crisis: Compton, California and the Death of the Suburban Dream.” (PhD diss., Brandeis University, 2006), 3.
Becky M. Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920–1965 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 156–68, 286–94.
Stephen Samuel Smith, Boom for Whom? Education, Desegregation, and Development in Charlotte (Albany, NY: SUNY, 2004).
See also Gregory S. Jacobs, Getting Around Brown: Desegregation, Development, and the Columbus Public Schools (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998).
Kevin Michael Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).
Matthew D. Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).
Jack Dougherty, “The Rise of ‘Shopping for Schools’ in Suburbia.” Paper to be presented at the History of Education Society meeting, October 2007. See the “Cities, Suburbs, and Schools” research project at Trinity College website: http://www.trincoll.edu/depts/educ/css.
David F. Labaree, The Making of an American High School: The Credentials Market and the Central High School of Philadelphia, 1838–1939 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988);
Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Knopf, 2003).
See also Kimberley Tolley, “Learning in a Consumers’ Republic,” History of Education Quarterly 46, no. 2 (2006): 274–88.
James Bryant Conant, Slums and Suburbs: A Commentary on Schools in Metropolitan Areas (New York: McGraw Hill, 1961);
Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools (New York: Crown, 1991).
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© 2008 William J. Reese and John L. Rury
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Dougherty, J. (2008). Bridging the Gap between Urban, Suburban, and Educational History. In: Reese, W.J., Rury, J.L. (eds) Rethinking the History of American Education. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230610460_10
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