Reframing Suburbs: Race, Place, and Opportunity in Suburban Educational Spaces (original) (raw)
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Equity & Excellence in Education, 2020
Suburban school districts in the United States (U.S.) have experienced major demographic shifts in recent decades and vary substantially in their student populations. More than half of Asian, black, and Latinx students in large metropolitan areas attend suburban schools, and the suburbs are commonly the first destination for new U.S. immigrants. Thus, suburban schools offer the opportunity to study the confluence of race, ethnicity, class, and immigration in education. Yet most scholarship on race and education has focused on urban contexts. The articles in this symposium examine how students, parents, and educators understand, navigate, and confront racial inequities and whiteness in suburban schooling. Drawing from qualitative studies of suburban communities in the Midwestern U.S., these articles reveal the ways in which racial discourses and racialized patterns of inequality are taken up and contested by students, families, and educators in suburban schools.
2012
Woven throughout the history of the United States is a narrative of human movement. The story of this country, we argue, is a tale of the constant flow of people across geographic spaces-both voluntary and forced immigrations, migrations, and the settlements of vil lages, city neighborhoods, and suburban communities. Beginning with Native Americans' ancestors who traversed the Bering Straight, "movement" has been a central, identifying theme of this nation. 'The flow of several waves of European immigrants onto colonial shores and across the plains and the haulage of millions of Africans via the slave trade redefined the United States demographically and geopolitically, as did the mass migration of freed African Americans from the South to the North and from the farms to the cities in the 20th century. The post-World War II construction of suburbia enabled the European immigrants and their dece dents to migrate from the cities to the suburbs en masse, changing not only the character of suburbia but also the cities and ethnic enclaves they left behind. As if choreographed by the federal government, local zoning laws and real estate markets, this flow of whites to the suburbs was synchronized with the arrival of African American migrants into specific and highly contained city neighborhoods. But even the resulting racially segregated pattern of "vanilla suburbs" and "chocolate cities" that seemed fairly stable by the late 1970s across most metro areas was subject to change. Beginning in the late 1960s, new waves of immigrants, primarily from Latin Amer ica and Asia, entered the urban neighborhoods abandoned by their European immigrant predecessors. By the 1980s, growing numbers of African Americans had begun migrating to the suburbs. And, in the last decade, more Latino and Asian immigrants have chosen suburban communities as their port of entry to the United States. At the same time, whitesparticularly affluent and well-educated professionals-are migrating back into cosmopolitan and gentrified city neighborhoods, opting out of increasingly diverse suburbs. Within these patterns of movement and change, human agency-manifested in the desire or need to leave one place and seek another-has been shaped, contorted, and compro mised by social structures and powerful norms that create, maintain, and legitimize deepseated inequalities in our society. This intersection between migration patterns and their spatial outcomes-for example, the dispersal of people across separate and often unequal places according to variables such as race/ethnicity, class, and social status-is central to 125
This report is a clarion call for those paying attention to the changing racial and ethnic demographics of this country and its suburbs in particular. It is the in-depth story of one suburban county and its public schools as the demographics of who lives in the suburbs versus the cities in the 21 st Century is shifting quickly, as the affluent and the poor, the black and the white are trading places across urban-suburban boundary lines. The same story could be told about hundreds of suburban counties across the country that are facing similar pressures and approaching similar breaking points.
Writing suburban citizenship: place-conscious education and the conundrum of suburbia
Choice Reviews Online, 2016
College of Staten Island (CUNY) obert E. Brooke and his college and high school colleagues demonstrate the innovative, place-conscious pedagogies being practiced out of the National Writing Project (NWP) sites in Nebraska in the latest edited collection, Writing Suburban Citizenship: Place-Conscious Education and the Conundrum of Suburbia. The introduction of the book, written by Brooke, makes an impassioned case that suburbs-often overlooked by academics in literacy and writing studies, as well as critiqued for encouraging a lifestyle that is segregationist, ahistorical, and unsustainable-are indeed the communities where an active citizenry desperately needs to be nurtured (13). As of the 2010 census, the opening claims, suburbs are where most American youth live and are educated, and, as the 2016 election showed us, where people vote (2). Urban dwellers, and I would include myself as a New Yorker in this distinction, often too easily dismiss suburbia through pronunciations like, "all the houses are 'made of ticky-tacky' and the roads are lined with strips of chain stores and chain restaurants." Brooke and the other contributors of the collection, however, are working against these stereotypes, making visible to readers (particularly other suburban educators) that suburban dwelling places have environmental, cultural, and historical concerns. These can and should be emphasized in the public-school curriculum in order to reveal to teachers and students meaningful connections between place, identity development, and political activity. What is so impressive about this book, like its predecessor Rural Voices: Place-Conscious Education and The Teaching of Writing, is the way it fosters a critical dialogue between high school and college teachers. The chapters serve as case studies for approaches to place-based curriculums and are written in an accessible style; the book would be useful, for example, in a course preparing and credentialing future teachers. The book well mirrors the National Writing Project's motto of "Teachers Teaching Teachers. " In today's public schools, maintaining this NWP stance is vital to authorize teachers as sound experts who can and should make decisions for the education of the nation's children instead of allowing these decisions to be made by
Resisting Amnesia: Renewing and Expanding the Study of Suburban Inequality
RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, 2023
Suburban inequality is the focus of this double issue of RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences. This introduction addresses the limited related scholarship, describes how inequality unfolds differently in suburban communities than in urban and rural communities, and draws attention to urgent issues related to stratification between and within suburban communities. We argue that inattention to the study of suburban space, methodological and disciplinary silos, and the changing nature of the suburbs have left large holes in our understanding of how inequality operates. This critical review covers areas such as measurement, forgotten suburban scholarship, demographic change, suburban poverty, social supports, race, immigration, education, politics, policing, and future directions for suburban studies. In our call for resisting amnesia, we also draw attention to forgotten suburban histories and studies of a diverse range of suburban communities.
Employing the Urban Education Typology Through a Critical Race Spatial Analysis
The Urban Review
The urban education typology put forth by Milner (Urban Educ 47(3):556-561, 2012) offered a conceptual demarcation of three different, yet interconnected types of urban school districts (i.e., urban intensive, urban emergent, and urban characteristic). Nearly one decade after Milner's seminal urban education typology, few empirical or conceptual articles have operationalized this typology across multiple school districts in one region. We enter this scholarly space to reaffirm the typology and its utility in identifying the conditions that create varying educational inequities and transformative opportunities. Through a critical race spatial analysis, we attempt to capture, crystalize, and expand Milner's typology by examining a multitude of data points and intentionally drawing on geospatial data from five linked school districts in Harris County, Texas. Our findings, as viewed through lenses of Critical Race Theory and the Chicana Feminist conceptual framework known as borderlands, accentuate two major implications; (1) while there are physical spaces of restriction inside and around schools and school districts, regularly school districts contend with identical challenges despite their urban education typology categorical classification; and (2) when employing the urban education typology, it is imperative that researchers deeply contextualize the physical, temporal, historical, social, and racialized spaces that schools and school districts exist in.
Education, mobility and the zone defense in suburban American narratives
Slums of Beverly Hills and The Breakfast Club show that the key to class mobility is affordable housing in an otherwise high-dollar school district. This residential basis to the interconnection of romance, education and class mobility in suburban high school movies reveals zoning as the essential foundation to the suburban way of life. The logic of zoning is the imagination and ideology of American suburbia, promising universal mobility only to circumscribe it spatially. Zoning's 'rational' delineation of allowable building is of paramount concern to mobility or economic inequality. Actually, existing zoning is the key ideological component to suburban life, which makes its invisibility in literary and film studies troubling. Slums of Beverly Hills and The Breakfast Club solve the problems of suburban inequality discursively; Brian and Vivian only change their thinking about the organization of their families, educations and social interactions, not the spatial organization of their home town. Suburban high school films continue to believe in the promise of class mobility that zoning-enabled and facilitated education holds out, the very definition of an ideological solution to the problem rather than a concrete change to the built environment.