Abstract
Education historian Michael Katz made a controversial declaration in 1971: “Schools are not great democratic engines.” On the contrary, Katz argued that the earliest urban school systems were designed to benefit affluent families and have served elite interest groups ever since. “Despite the existence of free, universal and compulsory schooling, most poor children become poor adults,” he wrote in Class, Bureaucracy, and Schools. “The children of the affluent by and large take the best marks and the best jobs.” 1 Katz and fellow “radical revisionist” historians of the 1970s challenged conventional wisdom that public schools were inherently meritocratic institutions. They questioned the promise of public education as a class equalizer and mechanism for expanding social mobility. Other scholars criticized their work as a “radical attack” on a foundational institution of American democracy. 2 In more recent decades, however, the revisionist skepticism of public schooling has gone mainstream. Historians are no longer deemed “radicals” for suggesting that public schools reinforce inequalities of race or class in American cities.
The authors reviewed in this essay continue the revisionist tradition. They challenge persistent myths that equal access to public education can narrow income gaps. They remain critical of the motivations of white parents, reformers, and urban officials who consolidate school power to serve their own interests. Some of these authors question the liberal promises of more recent public school reforms like choice-based charter schools. Others revisit earlier eras of urban schooling to demonstrate how public schools have long disadvantaged Black and immigrant students while privileging white children. Together, the authors reviewed here offer urban historians new insights on the relationship between equity and urban education. They suggest that disparities in urban schools are compounded by historical forces outside the classroom and that school reform alone cannot fix problems of urban inequality.
Since the radical revisionists, scholars of American education have focused almost exclusively on city schools to study educational inequality. John L. Rury contributes to this historiography by shifting attention to the suburbs. In Creating the Suburban School Advantage, Rury examines the rise of suburban schooling in Kansas City, Missouri, between World War II and 1980. Rury adds to a growing body of scholarship on urban reform in Kansas City. 3 He argues that Kansas City provides a useful case study of public schooling because the metropolitan demographics and pattern of residential segregation mirrored national trends. His local lens also highlights interesting regional distinctions of border-south cities that experienced profound suburban sprawl in the postwar decades. Over five chronological chapters, Rury explores how parental resistance to school integration pushed white Kansas City families out of the city center as Black migrant families moved in. Their flight from the city created a bifurcated school system characterized by well-funded institutions in new suburban districts and neglected neighborhood schools serving a majority-Black student body in the urban core. He argues white parents embraced a politics of “localism” during the 1960s to reject large city-wide school governance and maintain control over new suburban public schools. “Once ensconced in the suburbs,” Rury writes, “wealthy patrons of public education became devotees of home rule and the virtues of neighborhood institutions” (p. 135).
Suburban school districts are neglected subjects in the literature on urban education. Rury offers an important contribution by arguing that suburbs and cities are “two sides of a national metropolitan coin” (p. 18). Urban historians have long highlighted this interconnectedness of city and suburb. Beginning in the 1980s, scholars like Kenneth Jackson and Robert Fishman emphasized the importance of suburbs in histories of urban development. They demonstrated how suburban neighborhoods reflected the cultural values of affluent white Americans who desired family-centered communities and individual control over privatized spaces on the urban periphery. 4 Rury points out early in his introduction that historians of education have been slow to also draw these connections. He convincingly shows how the two-part school system was shaped by suburban and urban actors alike, including city school officials and suburban real-estate brokers, who painted city schools as “failing” while drawing attention to state-of-the-art facilities in expanding suburban districts.
Rury contextualizes this history of suburban schooling in Kansas City within a familiar narrative of “white flight.” He argues that white families grew hostile to the demographic changes in Kansas City caused by the migration of Black families from the Jim Crow south after World War II. Their hostility grew in the face of civil rights activism for equal access to white-dominated jobs, housing, and schooling in the 1960s. Other scholars of the period assert that the physical movement of white families to the suburbs was coupled with a political and cultural realignment. As Kevin Kruse argues in White Flight (2005), suburban families espoused a new conservatism in these decades based on principles of individualism and freedom of choice. 5 Rury’s research is focused more on the demographic implications of white flight. Creating the Suburban School Advantage offers urban historians a bird’s-eye view of shifting district boundaries, demographic changes, and the spatial segregation of school resources by 1980.
J. Celeste Lay suggests that white flight lay the groundwork for the privatization of urban schooling in New Orleans. In Public Schools, Private Governance, Lay explores how New Orleans public schools shifted to an all-charter system following Hurricane Katrina. Lay challenges a popular assumption that the hurricane inspired Louisiana leaders to create one of the nation’s first all-charter school systems. Rather, Lay argues that school reformers and political interest groups in Louisiana began their movement to privatize public education in the 1990s. “The stage was set and the actors were ready long before the storm,” she argues (p. 3). Lay, a political scientist, combed through state archives to document the hundreds of education bills and resolutions introduced to the Louisiana State Legislature in the decade before Hurricane Katrina. She found that most bills focused on establishing new assessment standards for urban students and encouraged private control of public schools deemed “academically unacceptable” by the state. After the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, reformers quickly seized the opportunity to “fix” so-called “failing” public schools in New Orleans. “A year after Katrina, thirty-five of fifty-six public schools had transformed into charter schools,” Lay writes. “In 2020, all the public schools were chartered” (p. 2).
Lay’s detailed investigation of school reform in New Orleans reveals the pitfalls of choice-based school policy. The neighborhood public school defined urban education for most of the twentieth century. Beginning in the 1980s, metropolitan school officials closed many neighborhood public schools and adopted choice-based models like charter schools. These reforms, in theory, empowered parents to elect schools that fit their child’s needs regardless of neighborhood boundary. Historians of education have questioned the democratic promise of choice-based school policy in recent years, arguing that this model only reinforces existing disparities of race and class in post–white flight cities. Lay’s case study contributes to the growing body of critical scholarship on race, choice, and urban school privatization. She argues that the charter school model only served the interests of affluent white parents in New Orleans after Katrina. Black parents and community activists rejected this “individual-centered, liberal approach to democracy” (p. 8) and protested the erosion of community control over local neighborhood schools. Lay quotes a Black school board member who summarized, “When you want to kill a community, you strip away its schools” (p. 4).
Lay is critical of the reformers and board members who pioneered New Orleans’s charter system. Her interpretation is a departure from recent studies that tend to highlight the well-meaning efforts of reformers, some of whom embraced magnet and charter schools to break down racial boundaries of neighborhood schooling. 6 Public Schools, Private Governance does not read as a history of unintended consequences. Rather, Lay echoes the radical revisionists to assert that racial inequalities in New Orleans’s school system were the result of “an organized effort to engineer particular outcomes” (pp. 68-69). Lay’s analysis privileges the perspectives of local parents, teachers, and community leaders in New Orleans who fought to retain control over neighborhood public schools. She devotes less space to charter school reformers and administrators, who Lay argues were not interested in their roles as public servants. She writes, “They are not concerned with public accountability, and many view the ‘public’ with suspicion and contempt” (p. 71).
Erika M. Kitzmiller contends that racial inequalities were embedded in urban public school systems long before the rise of suburbia or choice-based schooling. In The Roots of Educational Inequality, Kitzmiller offers a century-long case study of one public high school in Philadelphia to explore how private interests governed public education since the progressive era. Germantown High School opened in 1914 to serve the city’s elite white families in a northwest neighborhood of Philadelphia. According to Kitzmiller, the school relied on private philanthropy to subsidize educational programs from its founding. Unlike Black-serving public schools near the city’s center, Germantown High School was “doubly advantaged” from a public-private partnership between affluent white parents and school officials. Germantown High School suffered from a lack of private investment after World War II. White families left the Germantown neighborhood in the 1960s and took their financial capital with them, creating new “doubly advantaged schools” in suburban neighborhoods. Germantown High School closed in 2014 along with several other minority-serving institutions struggling to survive on public funding alone.
Kitzmiller presents a provocative challenge to the dominant narrative of educational inequality in urban America. Most historians of urban education suggest that under-funded city schools were a post–World War II phenomenon. John Rury builds on this scholarship, crediting white flight for the racial disparities in Kansas City school districts in Creating the Suburban School Advantage. Rury also echoes the historiography by pointing to the progressive era as a “Golden Age” of urban education. He writes that all urban children shared equal access to modern and well-funded school resources in the early twentieth century, noting that city schools in the progressive era only suffered “occasional problems such as overcrowding” (p. 20). Kitzmiller explicitly rejects this interpretation. “While The Roots of Educational Inequality acknowledges the role of postwar residential and economic flight,” she writes, “it insists that public schools never had sufficient public resources to operate effectively” (p. 3).
The Roots of Educational Inequality challenges historians to reconsider romanticized narratives about progressive era public schools. Kitzmiller’s early chapters offer the most exciting historiographical interventions. She highlights how progressive era public schools relied on philanthropic parents to pay teacher salaries and subsidize extracurricular activities like art and athletics in affluent neighborhoods. Kitzmiller relies on local school records, yearbooks, and demographic data to analyze the role of parent groups who shaped educational opportunities in majority-white schools. Her argument is reminiscent of the radical revisionists who questioned whether public schools have ever lived up to their democratic ideals. “Our high schools are not actually broken,” Kitzmiller states, “they are operating as they were designed to” (p. 11).
Cristina Viviana Groeger dismantles another stubborn myth about educational inequality in The Education Trap. Her sweeping research of urban schools in Boston between 1880 and 1940 challenges the notion that access to advanced education or new skills creates social mobility. On the contrary, Groeger suggests that education systems in Boston created advantages only to students who entered the school system with privileges of race, class, and gender. Groeger’s analysis of progressive era schooling convincingly supports this argument. In her second and third chapters, Groeger explores how school officials introduced new trade courses for students like dressmaking for girls and mechanics for boys. Most working-class students ignored these programs and never used their shop room training to secure higher-paid positions in manufacturing. Instead, white American-born students pursued white-collar work with their public education. They studied typing, bookkeeping, and strengthened English skills to land opportunities in Boston’s expanding corporate sector. Groeger points out that jobs in offices were only available to students who were white and English-speaking. Progressive era schools in Boston, then, did not create new opportunities for most urban children. As Groeger summarizes, “Existing gender, ethnic, and racial hierarchies in the labor market were reproduced alongside and through an expanding school system” (p. 4).
Groeger weaves the history of urban education in Boston within broader patterns of political economy. The Education Trap features twenty-four graphs of U.S. census data analysis conducted by Groeger. Her detailed data sets draw the reader’s attention to shifting demographics in the local labor market, including the decline of domestic service and rise of “pink collar” office jobs for urban white women. She charts the growth of union membership in industries emphasized in vocational classes like the building and garment trades. Groeger’s quantitative analysis demonstrates how Boston school officials reflected and responded to their larger economic context between 1880 and 1940. Her attention to labor history highlights fascinating historical trends in urban schooling, such as how public schools, universities, and private business colleges provided credentials for corporate employees at the same time local leaders resisted the growing union power of blue-collar workers.
Groeger’s impressive research highlights the value of quantitative analysis in studies of cities, schools, and inequality. The other authors reviewed in this essay also rely on quantitative analysis to illuminate connections between urban enrollment, test scores, geography, and race in their respective cities. The use of spatial data is a particular strength of works by Rury and Kitzmiller. Rury includes eighteen maps in Creating the Suburban School Advantage that illustrate the development of new suburban school districts in Kansas City after World War II. Kitzmiller created over a dozen Geographic Information System (GIS) maps to visualize disparities of race and graduation rates in metropolitan Philadelphia over the course of a century. These scholars are careful to balance quantitative research with qualitative sources. Kitzmiller and Groeger relied on yearbooks, newspapers, and archival material to spotlight individual perspectives on school reform in Philadelphia and Boston, respectively. Oral histories animate the writing of Rury, Lay, and Kitzmiller, grounding the reader in local struggles to maintain control over neighborhood public schools.
Some of these authors suggest that race is the key social category mapping educational inequality in American cities. The radical revisionists largely focused on class in their critical assessments of urban education in the 1970s. In recent decades, race has replaced class as the dominant category of analysis in scholarship on equity and urban schooling. 7 Rury and Lay, in particular, build on this historiography. Both authors are sometimes attentive to nuances of class, ethnicity, and gender in their writing. But these categories are not the subject of their work. Rather, their histories highlight anti-Black racism among white parents and school reformers, including parental opposition to school desegregation mandates in Kansas City and charter board members who ignored the concerns of Black parents in New Orleans. Readers might notice the flattening effect of their narrow focus on the Black/white binary. Words like “suburban” and “charter school” read as synonyms for “white.” “City” is often synonymous for “Black.” Indeed, “inequality” stands in for “racial inequality” throughout both works.
Kitzmiller and Groeger contribute to the recent literature on educational inequality through their intersectional attention to race, gender, and class. In The Roots of Educational Inequality, Kitzmiller argues that immigrant working-class boys first threatened the elite reputation of Germantown High School when they enrolled after losing their jobs during the Great Depression. Kitzmiller offers a novel analysis of gender in her first chapter, where she argues that “gendered geographies” in Philadelphia shaped debates over an all-girl public school in 1910. School officials and white parents ultimately opposed an all-girl school located downtown because traveling through commercial areas would threaten the morality of native-born white women (p. 23). The Education Trap is the only work reviewed here that orients entire chapters (two) around the education of women and girls. Groeger analyzes short-lived efforts to educate female students for domestic service work in Boston, programs that most girls rejected in favor of traditional academic courses. She explores the class implications of their enrollment choices. Second-generation immigrant women, Groeger explains, used their academic and white-collar vocational training to feminize downtown offices and reshape the gender dynamics of Boston’s corporate economy.
Kitzmiller and Groeger demonstrate the utility of foregrounding gender to study urban school geography and curricular reform. Their writing departs from the historiography of education in which scholars often generalize the experiences of “students” with little critical interrogation of gender. Historians of urban education might consider what other social categories present barriers to educational access after reading these works. Groeger explores the history of corporate credentialing in Boston, for example, which she argues reinforced existing inequalities of race, class, and ethnicity. Debates about physical and mental ability likely shaped access to these opportunities as well. Vocational education tracked students in particular fields of physical labor; at the same time, school officials created special education programs for “subnormal” children in American cities. 8 Indeed, assumptions about ability and the body remain understudied in histories of urban education. Future studies might build on the important work of these scholars to expand our definition of “inequality” in histories of urban schooling.
Together, these authors confirm the importance of the one-city study in histories of urban education. Their focus on individual metropolitan school systems provides a deep exploration of local sources and urban geography. The reader hears from community actors in all these works, like Black teachers who lost their jobs in New Orleans and alumni who mourned the closure of Germantown High School in Philadelphia. At times, each author vacillates between suggesting the implications of their research are locally specific or broadly applicable to urban schooling in America. In The Education Trap, readers learn that Boston was unique as a center of the corporate economy with elite universities that granted professional credentials to students of privilege. But Boston reflected larger trends in the urban North, including the rise of trade education in public schools and resistance to craft union organizing. Kitzmiller’s detailed analysis of one high school in Philadelphia may lead some readers to question the broader conclusions of her work. Hurricane Katrina is a profound example of local distinction in Public Schools, Local Governance. Like all good local history case studies, however, these authors are careful to contextualize their arguments within national narratives. Each points to parallel trends in other metro areas. Each reminds the reader that local fights always unfold within broader struggles over housing, jobs, and political power.
Furthermore, these authors assert the importance of their historical research to contemporary debates about equality and urban education. Rury argues that localism remains problematic because affluent white parents can easily ignore disparities that occur outside their suburban enclaves. He writes, “Localism dictates that school districts are neither required nor expected to consider the plight of impoverished minority students in setting their policy priorities” (p. 182). Lay warns that many urban school districts could soon follow in the footsteps of post-Katrina New Orleans. She suggests her case study proves the speed at which school control can be wrestled from communities given the right political circumstances. Kitzmiller references the COVID pandemic in her conclusion to assert that private interests continue to disadvantage low-income students of color, particularly in moments of economic crisis. Affluent parents during the pandemic participated in the long history of “doubly-advantaged” schools by buying iPads for their children’s schools and funding additional staff to ease the online transition. Public schools without this private investment, meanwhile, drowned under the demands of distanced learning (p. 228).
The authors reviewed in this essay reflect a shared pessimism toward contemporary policy solutions. Like the radical revisionists, they are skeptical that school reform can solve intractable equity issues in American cities. In their conclusions, Rury and Kitzmiller suggest that social reform outside the schools is equally if not more important to democratize education. Addressing endemic poverty and providing affordable housing in good school districts are perhaps better solutions than school governance or curricular reform. Groeger presents the most salient words of caution on this point. Throughout her introduction and conclusion, Groeger highlights the danger of historians and policy writers who promote educational access as the key to social equality. Suggesting that public schools provide all the tools for success, she argues, “traps us into a narrow policy framework that can exacerbate the very problem it seeks to address” (p. 15). Access to vocational training, for one, means nothing without an empowered working class. Taken together, these works offer an important reminder that education reform alone cannot solve inequalities of race, class, and gender in our cities. Schools do not exist in vacuums.