While much has been made of the increasing diversity of the suburban population in the United States, individual suburbs and their neighborhoods are not necessarily themselves diverse. In fact, as the population of suburbia becomes more racially and ethnically diverse, some suburbs are beginning to experience the same patterns of white flight and neighborhood disinvestment previously seen in central cities. This concern provides the context for Erica Frankenberg and Gary Orfield’s edited volume on resegregation in suburban schools. They and their contributors focus on the ways in which racial and ethnic population change play out in suburban schools, which tend to reflect changing neighborhood demographics even earlier than the neighborhoods in which they are located. Consequently, the volume highlights a critical issue in education policy and provides a useful contribution to our understanding of the policy implications of the changing demographics of suburbia more generally.
Pointing to “decades of social science evidence” that shows that integration produces better learning outcomes than segregation, Frankenberg and Orfield underscore the vital need to pay attention to changing levels of integration at suburban schools (p. 18). Despite the urgency of the issue, however, they suggest that many suburban districts are in fact ignoring the complex racial and ethnic issues that their schools increasingly face. This is problematic given their contention that “[d]oing nothing is surrendering to segregation and its many powerful consequences” (p. 20). At the same time, those leaders who choose not to ignore the issues of diversity and integration operate with little guidance and under many constraints.
The majority of the volume is focused on seven case studies, each separately authored, of particular suburban districts and their responses to racial and ethnic population change. In most instances, the districts are granted anonymity, but we know the state and metropolitan area in which they are located: Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, San Antonio, and Florida. The cases were chosen on the basis of several criteria: First, each is serving “an increasing share of minority and low-income students.” Second, the cases vary on the “rate of racial transition,” with some experiencing rapid population change and others, most notably the Chicago suburb of Oak Park, enjoying relatively stable levels of integration over many years. Third, in all of the cases, in the words of the editors, “diversity was a current issue” and “three or more racial/ethnic groups were present” (pp. 20–21).
The details of the case studies differ in the degree to which leaders in the district actively embrace diversity and seek to explicitly confront the problem of resegregation. However, what becomes clear across all seven cases is the extent to which these school districts operate in local, state, and federal policy environments that actively hinder the ability of schools to respond to changing demographics in ways that promote diversity and integration. For example, in the Minneapolis suburb, local housing policy allows clustering of affordable housing in one part of town, and therefore clustering of low-income students in schools. In suburban San Antonio, local political pressure results in the drawing of school boundaries to allow higher-income white families to leave an older, more racially and economically diverse school to attend a newly constructed school. State initiatives in California dismantle bilingual education and prohibit affirmative action, complicating the ability of an Orange County suburb to promote integration in the schools.
As this volume also highlights, current federal and state incentives are all in the direction of improving test scores. For this reason, many of the case study districts seem to conceive of their approach to diversity solely in terms of improving the test scores of low-performing “subpopulations.” In the words of Frankenberg and Orfield, the focus on these scores has not only diverted attention from the issue of segregation but actually contributed to it by “ devalu[ing] many good schools and teachers who were dealing with more diverse student bodies, creating the inaccurate impression that such schools would damage the education of middle-class students. … At its worst, [this] encouraged whites to move still further out and sped the resegregation of communities” (p. 233).
The final chapter focuses on what can be done (and who should do it). In it, Orfield highlights the special responsibility that he believes the press and academic researchers have to both describe what is happening and offer strategies for how to respond. He highlights a key role for Civil Rights organizations that cross municipal boundaries. He calls on leaders to have a clear vision for what diverse communities can be like. He underscores the need to diversify the ranks of school administrators and staff. In addition, he highlights the need for more regional cooperation across school districts and cooperation between school officials and “housing, planning and civil rights officials” (p. 227). In particular, he suggests that some key initiatives may be the creation of regional magnet programs and interdistrict transfer programs, as well as the merger of small suburban districts into larger countywide districts.
While all these recommendations make sense, the volume offers little guidance as to how they might actually be implemented. As Orfield writes, “In a high-stakes accountability era, there is no significant accountability for integrating schools” (p. 219). For this reason, the middle of the volume seems somewhat mismatched with the introductory and concluding chapters. The rich descriptive case studies provide fascinating insight into the struggles and strategies of individual school district personnel, school principals, community leaders, and classroom teachers. However, it is difficult to link the individual cases to the concluding chapter and its suggestions for how to respond to and prevent resegregation in suburban schools. The main lesson from the case studies seems to be that most school districts lack a comprehensive and proactive approach to racial and ethnic population changes. Local politics and current state and federal policy largely work against far-reaching efforts to stem resegregation.
Orfield suggests that “researchers have a special responsibility—and it isn’t to conclude what is politically feasible right now” (p. 235). However, it is hard to put aside these concerns about political feasibility given the magnitude of the institutional and political constraints within which school districts operate and the difficulties of altering those constraints. Orfield’s arguments for more regional approaches to local education include both cooperative arrangements across existing district lines and the creation of more formal regional school districts. These ideas will be familiar to many who study urban politics, as much of that literature has focused on the mismatch between urban boundaries and regional problems that need regional solutions. At the same time, that research has also underscored the political difficulties of moving from a local to a regional scale, without clear incentives from the state or federal government or a clear constituency for regional approaches.
An additional contribution is Frankenberg’s chapter that develops a typology of school districts. The six district types that the author identifies are based on degree of racial and ethnic diversity, rate of change in the level of diversity, degree of socioeconomic diversity, size and proximity to the central city. The districts in the volume represent four of the six categories. Outside of the chapter in which it is developed, however, this typology is not systematically revisited, either in the case studies themselves or in the final concluding chapter. It would be interesting to know more about whether the nature of responses in these districts varies according to district type, and perhaps even more importantly, whether the recommended strategies and actions in the final chapter also vary across district types.
Finally, what can we learn about the politics of school integration in these different contexts that might offer guidance to school and community leaders who agree with this volume’s diagnosis of the problem and appreciate the wisdom of Orfield’s policy recommendations, but who wonder how to make them happen? One can only hope that this volume leads to further work that addresses these important questions.
