The urban school drama has found its way into the leafy suburbs

A Midwestern district with 6,000 students recently passed a budget that, if all goes according to plan, would result in a deficit of $13.2 million, or more than $2,000 per student. This follows deficits of $10 million in each of the previous two years. Cash is running out. The district’s own financial advisor told the board that “the status quo will lead the district to either financial or academic bankruptcy.” Bankruptcy, he warned, would lead to a state takeover. The district has lost 20 percent of its enrollment since 2018.

Sounds like an economically depressed community that can’t catch a break. Perhaps good jobs have disappeared, leading to out-migration and a shrinking tax base. Well-known story.

No. This is Evanston, Illinois, an iconic, leafy suburb on the shores of Lake Michigan. Home to Northwestern University and a local population of nearly 80,000 that has risen—not fallen—in recent decades. Nearly 70 percent of local adults have a college degree. (The national average for college degrees is 34 percent. The full list of census comparison statistics for Evanston can be found here.) It regularly appears on lists of the top places to live in the United States

Does this community seem oppressed?

What about financing? Evanston’s schools are well-equipped in every respect. According to the adequacy formula adopted by Illinois, the state has 117 percent of the financial capacity necessary to properly educate its students. Chicago, which borders Evanston to the south, has just 75 percent.

And yet Evanston’s schools are nearly bankrupt. Something feels weird, right?

It’s not an isolated case. In college towns and suburbs, we see bad headlines typically associated with high-poverty neighborhoods.

• Ann Arbor (MI) is cutting foreign language, arts and music programs to close a $25 million budget gap. At the same time, 38 percent of students are chronically absent, compared to 13 percent before the pandemic.
• Princeton (NJ) separated from its superintendent after just two tumultuous years on the job and paid her a severance package of nearly $250,000.
• A number of prestigious districts around Boston — including Cambridge, Brookline and Newton — have lost private school enrollment in recent years. To add insult to injury, Newton also had to endure an eleven-day teachers’ strike that caused divisions.
• Thirteen federal civil rights investigations are underway in Montclair, NJ, into issues such as students’ excessive use of seclusion and restraint.
• Loudoun County (VA) has developed a “reputation problem” after its mishandling of student sexual assault led to the superintendent’s firing and criminal charges.
• Berkeley, CA, closed a middle school for two years after discovering a widespread dry rot that had long gone undetected. It also faces a federal anti-Semitism investigation.
• Journalists Laura Meckler and Mike Hixenbaugh have published compelling, book-length reports on school integration struggles and racial tensions in Shaker Heights, OH, and Southlake, TX, respectively.

The list goes on. These are communities known for their well-educated citizens, high taxes, and high student achievement. People move to these places for the schools. For the solid programming, the great teaching, the competent administration, the safe hallways.

Why are so many of them in turmoil?

Possible drivers

I’ve spent some time talking to people and trying to better understand this (possible) trend.

Are we experiencing a parental rebellion post-Covid? According to this theory, parents were disappointed by the quality of instruction they saw during Zoom school and outraged by the lack of urgency to reopen buildings. Some listened to Emily Hanford’s “Sold a Story” series about literacy education deficits that were pervasive in affluent communities. They no longer have the same trust in their school system and do not feel acute social pressure to keep their children in public schools.

There may be demographic changes at play. Some say more privileged districts are only now facing challenges long common in urban communities. The suburbs are becoming more diverse. Addressing a broader range of student needs — and focusing on equity — can increase administrative complexity and provoke backlash from wealthy families accustomed to the district being a top priority. A variation on this argument is that districts are overly concerned with social justice and some families balk because they want to focus entirely on education and achievement.

It is possible that there is a lack of district governance. Some boards have increased spending—particularly to hire more staff—on the assumption that the public would be willing to invest more (i.e., pay higher taxes) to maintain those staffing levels. Maybe they went too far. Evanston, for example, decided to build a new school whose construction projections far exceeded budget. With so much enrollment now lost, the district will likely close buildings and lay off staff.

I don’t know enough about the soil dynamics in each of these communities to say which arguments are valid. There are probably different factors from district to district. The symptoms themselves are very different. However, there is a pattern of friction that feels new.

The dominant educational narrative for decades has focused on urban districts. There were belligerent bosses, fraud scandals, government sanctions, school closures and labor disputes. There were National Merit Scholars in the suburbs. At least that’s how it seemed in the popular imagination.[1] Now some of the most interesting debates in education — and some of the most sensitive conflicts — are taking place in communities that once hovered above the fray.

Why is it important?

There is palpable glee among urban school advocates when privileged districts struggle. They are tired of being compared negatively to peers who, in their opinion, have much lower buoyancy.

I argue that we should pay close attention to the new disruptions in the suburbs for another reason. They can provide an outlook on the future of education policy and ask critical questions such as:

• How should we define equity in public schools? Historically, equity generally meant closing gaps in test-based achievement and graduation rates. More recently, increased attention has been paid to differences in access to advanced courses, the rigor of school discipline, the availability of holistic support, the inclusiveness of curricula and the diversity of teachers. Districts — some in the suburbs — have adopted a range of new academic strategies to pursue this broader vision of equity. Examples would be limiting early access to algebra, eliminating high school courses, and eliminating F grades. Meanwhile, progress on legacy equity measures has stalled. Would you like an example? Evanston has only 11.7 percent of its black students scoring well on state math tests — a discouraging result that is only slightly better than Chicago’s figure of 7.8 percent, even though Chicago fares higher relative to its students’ needs has fewer resources. Neither well-funded nor underfunded schools are performing as well on key academic metrics as they did ten years ago.
• What does the future of accountability and oversight look like? Federal law, including NCLB, left wealthy districts almost completely alone for decades. They were presented as role models and not as problems. From time to time, prestigious districts failed to make sufficient progress in key subgroups and ended up on a state list, but rarely progressed further. Meanwhile, struggling schools in low-income communities were often placed in turnaround status, forced to change leadership and sometimes turned over to outside operators. In the future, it will be harder for officials to keep their hands off when suburban districts report poor performance in areas such as financial management, student enrollment and safety, in addition to their performance. A possible side effect could be insufficient attention to neighborhoods that still have their own challenges.
• How much funding is sufficient? As more residents of prestigious suburbs choose private schools for their children, these communities may see a weakening of local coalitions that defend robust public education—and the high taxes that come with it. County leaders must build confidence among homeowners that resources are being invested properly. Otherwise, they can expect opposition to future referendums to raise more revenue to increase. Voters could demand greater fiscal discipline and operational efficiency in return for dollars. Similar to what was the case with city districts in the past. Evanston taxpayers want more than just Chicago-level services for historically marginalized students.
• What choices should families be offered? Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) have quickly gained traction, especially in red states. We can all agree that in blue states like New Jersey, New York, Illinois, or Massachusetts, they have little chance of being adopted any time soon. However, keep an eye on this issue. As Mike Goldstein shows in his podcast series, there is a new generation of homeschooling parents using ESAs. They are not necessarily religious or conservative. They want a personalized, curated educational experience for their children—and the money from an ESA makes it affordable. Mike’s first episode is about a mother who grows food in her own garden and teaches children to cook with it. There are many wealthy, working families who might be attracted to such an arrangement if their local district’s government is spiraling into bankruptcy.

Welcome to the brave new world. When suburban districts have problems, efforts to improve them will not take long. And no one can guess what lies behind this curtain.

Editor’s Note: This was first published on the author’s Substack. The education daily newspaper.