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Suburban School Policy | Sociology 4560 | | | | Deosia Miller | 10/21/2014 | |

Abstract
A recent paper I wrote for this class led me to choose suburban school policy as my midterm paper. As I read about rising poverty, it made me think of the students in these suburbs and how they are affected by the economic shifts taking place.
I found that suburban school policy has undergone changes as the demographic of the communities schools change. I was also found that other policy was indirectly responsible for some of the problems America’s suburbs are currently facing.

Two top news stories in August – the tragedy in suburban Ferguson, Missouri, and the end of the white-student majority in U.S. public school enrollments nationwide – speak to the changing identity of our nation, our suburbs and our public schools. Most of us had never heard of Ferguson, Missouri until it experienced recent civil unrest this past August. As I became curious about the town, I found it was one of many that are experiencing a change from an all-white enclave to home for many Blacks and Hispanics.
Indeed, American suburbs are in the midst of an identity crisis. In many metro areas, the affluent and the poor, people of color and whites, the well-educated and poorly educated are “trading places” across urban-suburban boundaries. In fact, the number of Americans living below the federal poverty line is now greater in the suburbs than the cities, and fewer than 20 percent of people in the largest metropolitan areas still live in predominantly white suburbs. Part of this issue was caused by the gentrification of many city neighborhoods, which displaced low-income and working-class families that could no longer afford rapidly rising housing prices. Also in the mix were the thousands of low-income families that were forced to relocate when the high-rise public housing projects were destroyed, and many of them imagined a better way of life in suburbia. But over the last decade many low-income families have also been leaving deteriorating high-poverty neighborhoods in central cities in search of better job opportunities, neighborhoods, and schools and consequently found themselves settled in new pockets of poverty in the suburbs. The decline in concentrated poverty varied across metropolitan areas as many poor households shifted from inner-city neighborhoods to outer-ring suburban areas. And poverty rates drastically increased in some suburban tracts as low-income families resettled outside of cities.
In these processes, once all-white suburbs change as more blacks or Hispanics move in and white residents leave. In suburbs across the country, we see this 21st Century version of “white flight” leading to a declining tax base. These changing demographics reflects our nation’s K-12 public school population – now more than 50 percent “minority” –and implies that suburban public schools will be the front line of these changes moving forward.
Amy Stuart Wells and Douglas Ready report in their groundbreaking publication “Divided We Fall” their findings during research in some of America’s suburbs:
. We analyzed statistical, survey and interview data over five years. We documented mounting anxiety about the future of American suburbs and their public schools. Our conclusions apply to other suburban counties across the country, particularly those in the Northeast and Midwest, where suburbs and their school districts are smaller and more divided. Thus, in metro areas like New York and St. Louis, the main obstacles suburbs face include: * Ongoing racially and ethnically segregated housing patterns that negatively affect property values in communities becoming increasing diverse * Fragmented and divided municipalities and school districts, making it easier for patterns of racial distinction to emerge and evolve into material (tangible) and reputational (intangible) inequalities * A public school funding formula that makes each small suburban school district “tubs on their own bottoms,” heavily reliant on “local” sources of funding, namely property taxes.

This means that public school resources and reputations are spread unevenly across separate and unequal suburban school districts, even as small and autonomous suburbs face mounting pressures to sustain themselves economically. It also means that once predominantly white and middle-class communities and their public schools begin to change demographically, absent a concerted effort to stabilize the housing market and public schools, a downward fiscal and educational spiral can ensue. First, the “perception” of the school districts change, and home buyers and realtors begin talking about these communities as “less desirable” – even when tangible measures such as test scores and course offerings are the same. The major assumption is that a minority student base will result in lower standardized scores for the district.
This leads to a decline in property values, and once perceptions and the value of a community and its public schools change, a self-fulfilling prophecy unfolds, as both the tax revenues and the reputation decline. If people with the income to pay higher property taxes and the education levels and political clout to demand more of public schools leave in search of “better” communities, then the distinctions between separate and unequal public schools become greater. The cycle of separate and unequal schools and communities tends to repeat itself again and again.
Separate and most probably unequal schools is what white residents of a central California school district was lobbying for.Clayton A. Hurd investigated and reported the following: The school-aged population of the United States has become more racially and ethnically diverse in recent decades, but its public schools have become significantly less integrated. In California, nearly half of the state's Latino youth attend intensely-segregated minority schools. Apart from shifts in law and educational policy at the federal level, this gradual resegregation is propelled in part by grassroots efforts led predominantly by white, middle-class residential communities that campaign to reorganize districts and establish ethnically separate neighborhood schools. Despite protests that such campaigns are not racially, culturally, or socioeconomically motivated, the outcomes of these efforts are often the increased isolation of Latino students in high-poverty schools with fewer resources, less experienced teachers, and fewer social networks that cross lines of racial, class, and ethnic difference.
Educator and writer Evie Blad talks about the manner in which school districts have handled individual cases and offers advice. In her “Education Week” article she states; “While schools in all sorts of communities have worked for years to tackle the effects of poverty for individual students, the (Brookings) report notes that concentrated poverty requires policy makers to tackle the "'double burden' of not only their poverty, but also the disadvantages of those around them." That may mean increasing reliance on models like community schools, which offer "cradle-to-career" or "wraparound" services, such as in-school health care, parenting interventions, and community outreach to ensure that their students can grow academically”. In light of these remarkable shifts our nation’s suburbs are experiencing, there has to be major policy and attitude adjustments. For the past decade there have been changing attitudes across the globe, and we need to build on the changing racial attitudes in this country – particularly among younger generations – to promote racially and ethnically diverse schools and communities as the best places to educate the next generation of Americans. Citizens should pressure government to provide Federal and State resources to support and sustain racially diverse public schools and their students and pass educational policies that encourage schools and educators to focus more on how students in diverse schools and classrooms can best learn from each other and become multicultural voters and workers for the 21st Century.
In addition to these educational policies, if preparing the next generation to cross cultural boundaries and work in a global economy is a priority, policy makers should also support housing policies that sustain diverse communities and schools. Assuring more-equal access to suburban housing and schools is a first step toward embracing the potential of the most racially and ethnically diverse democracy in the world. A second step is assuring that, as demographics change, plenty of existing residents stay put and their resources remain to support and educate their children in diverse, public neighborhood schools.
One strategy without the other will not work, because housing policy is education policy. In both spheres, when we are divided, we fall. If we embrace the demographic destiny of this country, we can have strong local communities and schools. The time to choose the right path for suburbia and America is now.

References
Confronting Suburban School Resegregation in California,Clayton A. Hurd, University of Pennsylvania Press -Journals Division, 2007
Richard D. Wallenberg, senior fellow, The Century Foundation
Divided We Fall: The Story of Separate and Unequal Suburban Schools 60 Years after Brown v. Board of Education, Wells, Amy Stuart and Ready, Douglas, The center for understanding race and education (CURE) Columbia University Press 2014
The Resegregation of Suburban Schools A Hidden Crisis in American Education, Ed., Frankenberg, Erika and Orfield, Gary, Harvard Education Press, 2012