Understanding Suburban School Segregation: Toward a Renewed Civil Rights Agenda

Executive Summary

For at least the last fifty years, incentivized by government policy, the suburbs and their schools have rapidly expanded. In the largest U.S. metropolitan areas, suburban school districts enroll 14.4 million students, far more than the 6 million students enrolled in the same metros’ urban districts. In fact, students enrolled in the suburban school districts surrounding the 25 largest metropolitan areas represent roughly 30% of the nation’s entire public school enrollment.

Suburban growth has occurred alongside the creation of a segregated, metropolitan society through policy, law and practice. Discriminatory loan practices, federal highway construction, site selection for subsidized housing and exclusionary zoning are examples of how racial discrimination permeated to origins suburban society. State and federal governments are dominated politically by those representing suburban constituents too often eager to maintain an exclusionary status quo. Social policy routinely has ignored the metropolitan and, increasingly, suburban nature of segregation. Yet the fragmented nature of U.S. metros makes it impossible for suburban communities to “go it alone” in solving racial and economic isolation. Most suburbs can do nothing as forces large and small impact population flows. Opportunities exist in those changing flows—including stronger relationships across racial and economic lines and with them an emerging, multiracial urban and suburban coalition around addressing inequality. But those possibilities often are undermined by the current paradigm of racial politics, regional fragmentation and misguided law and policy. 

As shifting populations change suburban school enrollment, education policy trends formerly confined to urban districts have spread to suburban ones. Many suburban school districts have experienced growth in the charter school sector, as well as a rash of school closures. Suburban schools and districts reflect broader societal problems, paradigms, and possibilities. Yet, if our society is to advance equitable opportunity for all, children learning together in suburban schools must be part of the solution. In order to think clearly about what a renewed civil rights agenda entails given our complex and multiracial geography of inequality, we must understand the extent to which suburban school districts are segregated—and why. We also need to think deeply about policy responses to advance integration with equitable status for all children. 

In this paper, the authors draw on federal enrollment data from the nation’s largest 25 metros from 2011-2020 to descriptively analyze suburban school enrollment and segregation at the school district-level, seeking to understand different district contexts and their relationship to student segregation. The emphasis on districts helps us better understand potential levels for policy levers to remedy segregation...

See the complete Executive Summary with a summary of findings and the detailed Report attached.

This report is also available at:  escholarship.org/uc/item/17m5k36f