Schooling Suburbia: The Politics of School Finance in Postwar Long Island

Abstract

“Schooling Suburbia” is the first comprehensive history of suburban educational inequality. It analyzes the relationship between public education, property markets, fiscal politics, and social movements by comparing seven school districts in Long Island during the decades after World War II. The study is divided into two parts. Part I, titled “Foundation,” uncovers the sources of resource disparities between these districts. Instead of only tabulating the disparities, however, this section makes legible the institutional structures, the mechanisms, that distributed resources unevenly. This requires looking beyond the schoolhouse walls to examine real estate, municipal debt, commercial development and other broad capitalist processes. The unequal outcomes of these processes then drove political conflicts over the ensuing decades. Part II, titled “Fault Lines,” compares three campaigns that directly challenged educational inequality: school desegregation, state aid lobbying, and school finance lawsuits. While each campaign assembled different coalitions and utilized different tactics, none of them could dislodge the unequal foundations embedded amid the postwar boom. Thus, the contemporary metropolitan landscape—of stark wealth disparities, entrenched segregation, and profound differences between neighboring places—is not a recent development. To the contrary, as this dissertation shows, this landscape is the cumulative product of uneven capitalist development and unfinished political battles.