Equity & Diversity

Suburban Schools Have Changed Drastically. Our Understanding of Them Has Not

By Corey Mitchell — January 26, 2021 2 min read
Image of a suburb.
  • Save to favorites
  • Print

What comes to mind when you picture an urban school district? How about a suburban district?

If those images are completely different, you may need to re-evaluate your answer.

Suburban school districts were once mostly white and affluent spaces outside of city boundaries, but those spaces have undergone significant demographic shifts—and yet our public understanding of them has not kept up, argues a leading scholar on race in education.
Differences between urban and suburban districts are less distinct than people think, John Diamond, a sociologist of education and the Kellner Family Distinguished Chair in Urban Education at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and two colleagues explain in their recently released study, Reframing Suburbs: Race, Place and Opportunity in Suburban Educational Spaces.
Schools in the suburbs are not havens from issues, such as poverty and educational inequity, that city schools have long grappled with. Diamond said that makes them ideal locations to study key issues that communities must confront: economic inequality, white supremacy and why school segregation still persists nearly 70 years after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision.

While much of the focus on school segregation focuses on divides across district borders, the in-district boundaries also play a major role in the schools and opportunities that students have access to, the researchers argue. Public resistance to local school integration plans has emerged as an issue in suburban districts across the country.

“Racial inequality is built into the bedrock of suburbia, and this understanding of suburban schooling necessitates understanding how place and race intersect,” the authors wrote in their analysis.

Overall, the focus on the urban-suburban divide continues to shape research funding, how school leadership is studied and what undergraduate and graduate courses aspiring teachers and school administrators, Diamond said. In those contexts, ‘urban schools’ is often shorthand for districts that are majority non-white, have a significant number of families living in poverty and have sizable immigrant and English-language learner populations.

“There’s a fascination with city schools,” Diamond said in an interview with Education Week. “The way that people study leadership and education is often focused on urban leadership and urban schools. There may be courses on rural education, because that tends to be a category that people pay attention to, but suburban often gets overlooked.”

That is despite the fact that the majority of the nation’s K-12 public school students attend suburban schools.

While a growing body of research has begun to document the demographic shift and inequities in suburban education, more work remains.
To better understand the shifts in suburban education, Diamond and his colleagues also call for more researchers to push beyond the binary Black-white view of race to examine how Latino, Asian and indigenous students and their families experience education in racially diverse suburbs and how educators have adapted to change.

Teachers and principals are working in districts “that don’t look like they did 15 years ago and they’re grappling with issues that they may not have thought they were have to going to understand,” Diamond told Education Week. “The demographic shifts that people experience make them anxious and hungry to find out more information about how to respond to those changes.”

Events

This content is provided by our sponsor. It is not written by and does not necessarily reflect the views of Education Week's editorial staff.
Sponsor
Classroom Technology Webinar
How to Leverage Virtual Learning: Preparing Students for the Future
Hear from an expert panel how best to leverage virtual learning in your district to achieve your goals.
Content provided by Class
English-Language Learners Webinar AI and English Learners: What Teachers Need to Know
Explore the role of AI in multilingual education and its potential limitations.
Education Webinar The K-12 Leader: Data and Insights Every Marketer Needs to Know
Which topics are capturing the attention of district and school leaders? Discover how to align your content with the topics your target audience cares about most. 

EdWeek Top School Jobs

Teacher Jobs
Search over ten thousand teaching jobs nationwide — elementary, middle, high school and more.
View Jobs
Principal Jobs
Find hundreds of jobs for principals, assistant principals, and other school leadership roles.
View Jobs
Administrator Jobs
Over a thousand district-level jobs: superintendents, directors, more.
View Jobs
Support Staff Jobs
Search thousands of jobs, from paraprofessionals to counselors and more.
View Jobs

Read Next

Equity & Diversity Opinion American Education Hurt Black Students. We Deserve Reparations
The value of the educational harm inflicted on my generation of Black students exceeds $2 trillion, writes Bettina L. Love.
5 min read
Illustration of a young black woman with missing pieces. Some of the slices are sliding back into place, making the figure whole again.
Vanessa Solis/Education Week + Madina Asileva/iStock
Equity & Diversity Schools Struggle to Properly Count Native Students. Some States Want Them to Try Harder
Michigan recently became the latest state to require the collection of data on Native K-12 students' tribal affiliations.
7 min read
Indigenous Navajo high school students in the hallway of a high school.
E+
Equity & Diversity Legacy of Native American Boarding Schools Comes Into View Through a New Interactive Map
The list of boarding schools that once sought to “civilize” Native Americans, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians is getting longer.
1 min read
James Nells, of the Navaho Tribe, and a teacher at Riverside Indian School, leads the Riverside Indian School color guard during opening ceremonies on July 9, 2022, in Anadarko, Okla., for a meeting to allow U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, rear, to hear about the painful experiences of Native Americans who were sent to government-backed boarding schools designed to strip them of their cultural identities. The list of boarding schools in the U.S. that once sought to “civilize” Native Americans, Alaska Natives and Native Hawaiians is getting longer. The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition released a new interactive map on Aug. 30, 2023.
James Nells, of the Navaho Tribe, and a teacher at Riverside Indian School, leads the Riverside Indian School color guard during opening ceremonies on July 9, 2022, in Anadarko, Okla., for a meeting to allow U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, rear, to hear about the painful experiences of Native Americans who were sent to government-backed boarding schools designed to strip them of their cultural identities. The list of boarding schools in the U.S. that once sought to “civilize” Native Americans, Alaska Natives and Native Hawaiians is getting longer. The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition released a new interactive map on Aug. 30, 2023.
Sue Ogrocki/AP
Equity & Diversity School District's Anti-CRT Resolution Prompts Lawsuit From Teachers and Students
Teachers, parents, and students in a California district claim the resolution restricts their rights.
5 min read
Members of The Temecula Valley Educators Association, students and parents cheer in support of Temecula Valley Unified School District Superintendent Jodi McClay during a meeting at Temecula Valley High School on June 13, 2023.
Members of the Temecula Valley Educators Association, students, and parents cheer in support of Temecula Valley Unified School District Superintendent Jodi McClay during a meeting at Temecula Valley High School on June 13, 2023. The school board voted to fire McClay that day. TVEA and students are suing the district over its anti-critical race theory resolution.
Anjali Sharif-Paul/The Sun/SCNG via TNS