Why the Rise of the U.S. City Is Good for Our Kids
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Posted Friday, June 29, 2012, at 12:54 PM ET
Cities now have a big opportunity to create better, more integrated schools.
Photo by Joe Corrigan/Getty Images for Bing
Will Oremus asks whether it is “a good thing” that, for the first time since the 1920s, American cities are now growing faster than suburbs.
When it comes to educational equity, the answer is yes.
The white flight of the mid-20th century was motivated, in part, by the desire of middle-class white parents to segregate their children in suburban, predominantly white schools.Tiny suburban towns often maintained their own independent school districts, and in many regions of the country, actively resisted cooperation with schools in nearby cities or even more diverse suburbs. The result has been the steady racial and socioeconomicresegregation of American public education, particularly in the North, where segregation was de facto, not de jure, and federal Courts declined to intervene.
We know school segregation is a major social crisis because—despite the good