The Fight for Local Control
Schools, Suburbs, and American Democracy
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4156869 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Ansley T Erickson (0009-0009-9935-0644, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, New York, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2018 |
| Volume | 104 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 1065-1066 |
| Publication date | 2018-03-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of American History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-8723 • E-ISSN: 1945-2314 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1093/jahist/jax520 |
| OpenAlex | W2809900695 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 5 |
What happens when historians think about U.S. suburbs not as the product of growth outward from a city but as encroachment on the rural landscape? Campbell F. Scribner's The Fight for Local Control takes this approach to reconceptualize the history of education in twentieth-century U.S. suburbs. Many valuable accounts of suburban politics focus on how bedroom-community dwellers built mutual alliances, often to defend racial and class-based exclusionary policies. Scribner recognizes this pattern but focuses instead on the encounter between white rural agricultural communities and their traditions of educational governance and financing, on the one hand, and new suburban and exurban residents and new educational ideas circulating nationally, on the other. Established and newly arrived inhabitants on the suburban fringe, Scribner argues, found common ground around the oft-contested idea of “local control” of public education. The practice of school consolidation—in which state governments pressed to combine small schools or districts into larger units—drew decades of rural resistance, informed by a deep sense of local attachment to community schools. As suburbanization accelerated in the post–World War II years, the mix of established and newly arrived local voters had to decide whether to fund a new facility or tolerate an aged one, and whether to seek higher-qualified and better-paid teachers. Raising taxes to support schooling could yield a property value appreciation enjoyed by those who slept in the exurbs. For those who worked the land, though, the same increases in value could threaten economic survival. Across disparate positions, new and established residents came to agree that they, rather than state or federal education officials, should make choices about school funding, curriculum, and the role of professional educators. Scribner explains that “rural traditions of community control seeped into suburban politics” as localities debated desegregation and teacher unionization (p. 58). By the late twentieth century, however, new debates—over school funding and increasingly national curricular trends—revealed fissures in rural and suburban commitment to local control. Property tax caps, for example, proved suburban voters were willing to limit local control in return for lower tax burdens
Democracy · Desegregation · Economic growth · Economics · Geography · Metropolitan area · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Suburbanization · Value (mathematics · Law · Public Administration · Race, History, and American Society
| Citations per year | 0.83 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2020 - 2025 (6) |
| Highly cited | No |