Bridging the Gap between Urban, Suburban, and Educational History

Abstract

As educational history and urban history have developed in recent decades, a significant gap has opened up between them. On one side, educational historians have focused on the rise and fall of big-city school districts. On the other side, urban historians have documented how governmental housing, tax, and transportation policies fueled the postwar decline of cities and expansion of outlying suburbs. But these two fields have failed to connect with one another. In general, educational historians have not yet connected the decline of urban schools with the growth of the suburbs, and the broader political and economic shifts in the metropolitan context. Likewise, urban historians have rarely discussed what role schools played in the transformation of cities and suburbs. This chapter seeks to bridge the historiographical gap between urban, suburban, and educational history by demonstrating how these works can inform one another. It highlights major books that have served as the foundations in each field over the past few decades, as well as the rising body of new scholarship that attempts to span the distance between them.