The problems Ferguson faces are due to past government policies, from redlining to urban renewal to themore publicized and more recent problems with policing and municipal financing. Therefore, changinggovernment policies may help address these problems. After Michael Brown’s death, there have been manyconversations about changing the ways police work, starting with installing body cams. There should bemore conversations about changing how housing works: capping the mortgage interest tax deduction, betterinsuring fair lending practices to make up for more than a century of discrimination, authorizing Fannie Mae& Freddie Mac to modify lending policies for struggling homeowners, and more strictly enforcing laws againsthousing discrimination. Those conversations about housing and home financing relate to conversationsabout education and municipal financing, because it is clear that Michael Brown was failed by his schoolbefore he was ever failed by his police.Until we begin to see the huge range of suburban spaces in America, we cannot begin to fix their problems.We cannot understand that Irvine’s subprime mortgage lenders are connected to Ferguson’s strugglinghomeowners, or see that Irvine’s HOAs are connected to the over-policed pools in McKinney, Texas. Wecannot see this interrelated system in which some of us have inherited privileges that we did not earn. Thebuilt environment actually solidifies inequalities from the past and extends them over generations in waysthat make it all the more important to understand now

Still, Orange County conservatism has meant, in the built environment, a penchant for privatization. OrangeCounty contains America’s first walled community, Rossmoor; first age-segregated community, LeisureWorld; and first Home Owners Association, in Huntington Beach. Irvine is so privatized that it has one of thelargest HOAs in the nation, the Woodbridge neighborhood with 10,000 homes, 35 parks, 48 pools, and 2manmade lakes. This, too, is connected to the history of race and space. In Orange County, Mondays used111213

Many of us New Suburban Historians found an odd sort of vindication in the recent public attention toFerguson, Missouri, after the tragic death of Michael Brown and the impressive protests that followed. AsTom Sugrue wrote, with admirable regret, “Sometimes, I wish my scholarship were not so relevant.” Itcreates an interesting teachable moment because journalists repeatedly label Ferguson a suburb, yetFerguson does not resemble the typical media image of suburbs. In 2015, Black Lives Matters protestssprang up in many suburbs, from the former suburb of Staten Island, where Eric Garner was choked todeath, to the suburban HOA pool in McKinney, Texas, where a police officer tackled unarmed blackteenagers. I will focus on Ferguson. Ferguson is not white, not wealthy, not prestigious–and it is a vitallyimportant suburb, illustrating a great deal of 20th-century urban history. In interesting contrast, Irvine,California (the meeting space of the 2015 Western Humanities Conference, where this talk was firstdelivered) is also a not-quite-white suburb, but it is wealthy and prestigious and, especially in the circulationof credit markets, in some intriguing ways Irvine enables Ferguson.

Although school finance litigation has generally not achieved the goals advocates have set for it, it has had one lasting, unintentional impact. In shift-ing away from race and toward resources, the focus on funding reform has helped narrow the conversation about what to expect from schools. From the outset of the common school movement in the mid-nineteenth century, schools were seen as both academic and socializing institutions, where students would learn not only how to read and write but also how to become good citizens. Integration was consistent with this tradition insofar as it held out the hope that white and black students would learn from one another. When Justice I Marshall lamented in his dissenting opinion in Milliken that "unless our chil-dren begin to learn together, there is little hope that our people will ever learn to live together;' he captured the belief that integration could help prepare stu-I dents to live in a diverse, pluralistic society.7

When legislatures finally respond, they usually provide a bit more state funding to poor school districts while leaving the wealthier districts alone. The

While the Crawford case would not be settled until the 1980s, re-zoningand busing became a threat as early as the 1960s, given the activities of inte-gration advocates in the courts, in city hall, and in the schools. An article inthe Pico Post in February of 1968 quoted Superintendent Jack Crowtherbeseeching citizens to maintain calm about desegregation and potential bus-ing: “We cannot allow these false rumors to continue, for their only effect isto create a feeling of panic and dissension. I plead to all responsible citizensand especially to the communications media that they do everything possibleto combat these rumors.”45A few months thereafter, the Los Angeles City Board of Education passeda motion in favor of small-scale busing. Before the vote was taken, Dr. RalphSchneider / WHITE FLIGHT FROM LOS ANGELES1003

For six days in August of 1965, the Watts riot consumed Los Angeles, andwould forever change the context of integration in the city. A total of thirty-four people were officially reported killed during the riot, 1,100 were injured,4,000 were arrested, and an estimated $35 million in damage was done. Watts,and by extension Los Angeles, joined New York and Philadelphia, which hadexperienced race riots in 1964, as an urban crisis zone. Coverage of the Wattsriot brought the concept of violent race-conflict into public discourse. Post-riot news coverage included “considerably more attention to interracial vio-lence . . . mainly due to discussions of the riot . . . [and] unfavorable [media]references rose from 15% before the riot to 34% afterward.”30A 1971 study by Johnson, Sears, and McConahay, led the authors to con-clude that race conflict in Los Angeles in the late 1960s, though it was pre-sented as a present and significant threat, “served as the justification forfurther inattention and inaction, and for added repression.”31It worked. In herSchneider / WHITE FLIGHT FROM LOS ANGELES1001

Formany adolescents of color, dropping out of school was the only way to avoid“psychological and cultural demoralization.” By World War II, most studentsof color had come to accept the futility of seeking an education in the hostileand indifferent environment of the Los Angeles educational system.2

A year later, in 1963, the family of Jay Jackson, a black student inPasadena, a neighboring city to Los Angeles, brought suit against thePasadena school district—a case extensively covered by the Los AngelesTimes and the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner. The court, in its ruling, sidedwith Jackson, and “in the process applied Brown v. Board of Education toCalifornia for the first time.”15The court held that “residential segregation isitself an evil,” and that school boards must do more than just “refrain fromaffirmative discriminatory conduct.” School boards, the court argued, must“take steps, insofar as reasonably feasible, to alleviate racial imbalance inschools regardless of its cause.”16Residential segregation, the court found,was not an excuse for segregated schools—a potentially disastrous findingfor families that had managed to maintain segregated communities, butwhose children nevertheless might be faced with integrated schools

In 1962, the California State Board of Education began to address the issueof desegregation directly. The board asked districts to give “serious and thought-ful consideration” to the problem of racial imbalances in schools, and inOctober required districts to “exert all effort to avoid and eliminate segrega-tion.”12These directives, however, particularly given their vague nature, weremet mostly with inaction. Consequently, California schools at this time, partic-ularly in Los Angeles, were more segregated than those in Louisiana, Alabama,North Carolina, Virginia, and South Carolina.13Legislative inaction in the faceof these high levels of segregation did not mean that the issue would be ignored

In 1966, 396,654 whites were enrolled in LAUSD schools;10by 1980,only 127,281 would be enrolled. It was precisely during this period that LosAngeles public schools were engaged in a very public struggle over schooldesegregation. Although Los Angeles schools would remain highly segre-gated until the 1980s, the desegregation struggle began two decades earlierand stirred up enough fear and resentment among working- and middle-classwhites that many enrolled their children in private schools or reassessed thevalue of living in Los Angeles.11A critical mass of white families left the dis-trict, and in doing so changed the way future parents with school-agechildren would view Los Angeles public schools. Many who were alreadyconsidering leaving the city decided to leave. Many who might otherwisehave chosen to put down roots in Los Angeles saw a school system inupheaval and joined the throngs of new commuters transforming formerorange groves into suburban refuges. Los Angeles became a city for thosewithout children, for those who could afford private schools, and for thosewho could not afford to leave. In short, it became the city it is today

Although the white population would experience a significant overalldecline by 1980, certain whites had been rapidly leaving the city for twodecades. Families with school-age children were rapidly disappearing fromLos Angeles between 1960 and 1980.8Interestingly, they were fleeing thepublic schools at even greater rates than those at which they were leavingthe city. Though other cross-sections of the white population would begin996JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / September 2008

Working- and middle-class whites in Los Angeles were also highly protec-tive of their property. Upon judicial repeal of restrictive housing covenants,upwardly mobile blacks began to move out of segregated neighborhoods.3Many whites perceived this expansion as a threat to the character of their neigh-borhoods, and thus “a threat to their opportunities as working Americans.”4Inresponse, whites used real estate associations, banks, and community organiza-tions to keep people of color out of their neighborhoods. In doing so, theyframed their actions as part of a larger effort to maintain a particular vision laterassociated with suburbia: family authority, traditional middle-class white val-ues, and a respect for individual freedom and private property.

The traditional story of white flight centers around post-WWII federalhousing and highway programs, deteriorating urban housing stocks, theapplication of mass manufacturing techniques to home construction, and thein-migration of populations of color to urban areas.

In 1960, Los Angeles was still a decidedly white city. By 1980, it no longerwas.

The expansion of American education in the early twentieth century was often described in language drawn from the theater or the circus: "dra-matic," "spectacular," "amazing," "extraordinary." Though overdrawn, the adjectives capture certain dimensions of the phenomenon. How else describe a system that within the half century from 1890 to 1940 saw the proportion of all children five to seventeen years of age attending school soar from 44 to 74 percent? How else portray an industry in which the annual expenditure per child climbed from 17 to 105 dollars in the same period and for which the average number of attendance days rose from 60 to r30?4 Ordinary words fail to convey the scope of an enterprise which from a rudimentary dedication to teaching reading, writing, and citizen-ship prided itself by the 1920s and '30s on its medical services, vocational guidance programs, mental hygiene clinics, social dances, orchestras, gym-nasia, free lunches, and community centers. Small wonder that the words of description were often also words of praise, suggesting that like the triumphant economy of which it was part, the development of education in the United States was simply larger than life.

The reasons for the increased reliance of the schools on forms of think-ing that emphasized the inborn rather than the learned were complex as I hope the following discussion will reveal. But certain underlying influences can be more simply suggested. First, by emphasizing schooling as sociali-zation, progressive social reform had impressed upon the schools the ne-cessity to define the child whose schooling was their object, and this made the schools turn to those tools, above all the IQ, which could provide an efficient and cheap definition. Secondly, progressive school reform, which exerted an increasing influence as school systems grew in size and com-plexity, was part of another face of progressivism-managerial reform, from which it drew significant inspiration. And while social reformers expressed P_rogressivism's most generous impulses and humane directions, manage-rial reformers, who were enamored of efficiency, expertise, and a system-atic approach to institutional development, cast a long shadow over the entire period. Thus while social reformers' expectation of the new role that schooling would play in society added gravity to the schools' burdens and renewed seriousness to their purpose, it was the emphasis on system and b r,

In the 1920s, views like those of Thomas, which explained racial char-acteristics in primarily cultural terms, grew in certain academic circles, es-pecially in anthropology and sociology. But these views competed with and were frequently eclipsed by another and increasingly powerful expla-nation that provided very different answers to Thomas's concerns. In an-swer to Thomas's inquiries about mental capacity in the context of immi-gration, this view brought a sharp and unadorned emphasis on differences that were inborn, unlearned, and impermeable. And it was this set of be-liefs, deeply informed by a psychology of measurement and expressed in IQ testing, that exerted the most powerful influence on the schools.

To avoid political controversy in the schoolroom, Mann proposed that the teacher avoid any discussion of or comment that touched on political disputes. However, "when the teacher, in the course of his lessons or lectures on the fundamental law, arrives at a controverted text, he is either to read it without comment or remark· or at most he is only to

Common school advocates argued that if children from a variety of religious, social-class, and ethnic backgrounds were educated in common, there would be a decline in hostility and friction among social groups. In addition, if children educated in common were taught a common social and political ideology, a decrease in political conflict and social problems would result. Obviously, this aspect of the common school movement can be traced to late-eighteenth-and early-nineteenth-century educational advocates who wanted to teach nationalism as a means of promoting national unity and to those supporters of charity schools who wanted to use education as a means of eliminating poverty and crime. The idea of using education to solve social problems and build a political community became an essential concept in the common school movement. The term "common school" came to have a specific meaning: A school that was attended in common by all children and in which a common political and social ideology was taught.

It is important to understand that children went to school before the lofty dreams of social reform were actualized by common school reformers. Before the common school period, a variety of public and private school organizations existed. Massachusetts had laws requiring the provision of education and had established the first system of urban education in Boston in the 1790s. Many states, such as New York and Pennsylvania, supported charity schools, although a majority of children in those states attended private schools. Newer states had passed laws allowing for the development of schools but had not actively cre~ted organized systems of education. For instance, Ohio, after its admission to the Union in 1802, passed legislation in 1806 and 1816 allowing for the organization of schools supported by rents from lands and tuition. Beginning in 1821, Ohio law permitted the taxation of all property in a district for the support of schools. The state created a permanent school fund in 1827.

Horace Mann was on to something. When he witnessed an angry street riot in New England, his conviction that "the educated, the wealthy, the intelligent" had gone morally astray by abandoning the public was fortified {Johnson, 2002, p. 79). Mann chided the economic elite for shirking obligations to their fellow man by favoring private education over common schools. He conceptualized public education as "the great equalizer," or the most powerful mechanism for abating class-based "prejudice and hatred," and, most important, the only means by which those without economic privilege or generational wealth could experience any hope of equal footing.

Public schools are essential to make the American dream work, but schools are also the arena in which many Americans first fail. Failure there almost cer-tainly guarantees failure from then on. In the dream, failure results from lack of individual merit and effort; in reality, failure in school too closely tracks structures of racial and class inequality. Schools too often reinforce rather than contend against the intergenerational paradox at the heart of the American dream. That is understandable but not acceptable. The first chapter of this book expands on the themes we have introduced here; it more closely examines the dilemmas created by the American dream, the ed-ucation system in which those dilemmas must be addressed, and the structures

In the United States, class is connected with race and immigration; the poor are disproportionately African Americans or recent immigrants, especially from Latin America. Legal racial discrimination was abolished in American schooling during the last half century (an amazing ac-complishment in itself), but prejudice and racial hierarchy remain, and racial or ethnic inequities reinforce class disparities.

An honest attempt to secure a good education for poor children therefore leaves policymakers with two difficult choices. They can send them to schools with wealthier children, or they can, as a reasonable second best, seek to give them an education in their own neighborhood that has the features of school-ing for well-off students. The former has proved so far to be too expensive po-litically, and the latter has often been too expensive financially. Americans want all children to have a real chance to learn, and they want all schools to foster democracy and promote the common good, but they do not want those things enough to make them actually happen.

Where it has been tried, educating poor children with students who are more privi-leged, or educating them like students who are more privileged, has improved their performance and long-term chance of success. Quality preschool, indi-vidual reading instruction, small classes in the early grades, and consistently challenging academic courses have been demonstrated to help disadvantaged children achieve, just as they enable middle-class children to achieve.

Hispanics and inner city residents still drop out much more frequently than others, the gap between black and white achievement rose during the 1990s after declining in the previous decade, the achievement gap between students from lower-and higher-class families has barely budged, and poor students in poor urban schools have dramatically lower rates of literacy and arithmetic or scientific competence. Most importantly, life chances depend increasingly on attaining higher education, but class back-ground is as important as ever in determining who attends and finishes a four-year college.

The American dream is egalitarian at the starting point in the "race of life," but not at the end. That is not the paradox; it is simply an ideological choice. The paradox stems from the fact that the success of one generation depends at least partly on the success of their parents or guardians.

Despite this consensus Americans disagree intensely about the education policies that will best help us achieve this dual goal. In recent years disputes over educational issues have involved all the branches and levels of government and have affected millions of students. The controversies-over matters like school funding, vouchers, bilingual education, high-stakes testing, desegrega-tion, and creationism-seem, at first glance, to be separate problems. In im-portantways, however, they all reflect contention over the goals of the American dream. At the core of debates over one policy or another has often been a con-flict between what is (or seems to be) good for the individual and what is good for the whole; sometimes the conflict revolves around an assault on the valid-ity of the dream itself by certain groups of people. Because education is so im-portant to the way the American dream works, people care about it intensely and can strongly disagree about definitions, methods, and priorities.

Public schools are where it is all supposed to start-they are the central institutions for bringing both parts of the dream into practice. Americans ex-pect schools not only to help students reach their potential as individuals but

T HE AMERICAN DREAM IS A POWERFUL CONCEPT. It encourages each person who lives in the United States to pursue success, and it cre-ates the framework within which everyone can do it. It holds each person responsible for achieving his or her own dreams, while generating shared values and behaviors needed to persuade Americans that they have a real chance to achieve them. It holds out a vision of both individual success and the col-lective good of all.

T HE AMERICAN DREAM IS A POWERFUL CONCEPT. It encourages each person who lives in the United States to pursue success, and it cre-ates the framework within which everyone can do it. It holds each person responsible for achieving his or her own dreams, while generating shared values and behaviors needed to persuade Americans that they have a real chance to achieve them. It holds out a vision of both individual success and the col-lective good of all.