Punishing Schools: Fear and Citizenship in American Public Education

2. Talking Out of School: Living and Learning in Suburbia

Chapter 2 Talking Out of School Living and Learning in Suburbia Our careful analyses, together with those conducted by components of the justice system, have demonstrated the pervasiveness of youth violence in our society; no community is immune. —David Satcher, Surgeon General (2001)1 Remember why you came to Suburbia? It was because of the schools and the style of life that this community afforded. —Superintendent of Schools, Suburbia, Ohio The misbelief that every child is in imminent risk of becoming a victim has as its corollary a still darker delusion: Any kid might become a victimizer. —Barry Glassner (1999)2 I. Introduction The small town of Suburbia, Ohio, is lovely. The visual impact of its rolling hills, spacious green lawns, and renovated town square, where band concerts are staged in the gazebo on summer nights and everyone turns out to see the high school homecoming parade, is amplified by our collective, willful nostalgia for the small town.3 Such nostalgia, with its concomitant belief that the rare quality of small-town life depicted in our popular culture is fast disappearing, is founded in part on our sense of its familiarity—regardless of whether we have ever lived in such a setting. We know Suburbia. Such spaces are sentimentalized and commonly depicted in popular media and in twentieth-century film and literature as the locations of “real” community: shared values, common goods, and an absence of fear.4 Towns like Suburbia are also, however, relatively homogenous spaces, where community identity appears on the surface to be both obvious and unified, in part because “difference” is less visually present and power relations are often less disorderly—less openly con13 tested—than in more heterogeneous communities. But while such tensions and struggles may be more subtly articulated in places like Suburbia , difference is no less widely understood as dangerous. In fact, in such culturally idealized spaces, it is the absence of difference that is often deemed responsible for those shared values and common goods, as well as the collective sense of security enjoyed by residents. Therefore , a seemingly civil, but ongoing, concerted effort to eradicate difference and its markers is often waged aggressively and effectively within smaller, relatively homogenous communities—and nowhere are such efforts more apparent today than in the schools, where the community ’s greatest hopes, as well as its worst fears, reside. II. Suburbia County, Ohio Suburbia County’s rural townships, as well as the small city of Suburbia (the seat of Suburbia County), have become suburbs of a nearby metropolitan area. Suburbia County’s rapid population increase (growing over 20 percent in the past ten years), housing boom, and subsequent immediate need for schools to accommodate the children of the working professionals moving into the area indicate how quickly the county is changing from a quiet, rural area devoted to regional manufacturing enterprises and family farming to a quaint, wealthy suburb of several surrounding urban centers. The 2000 census ranks Suburbia County in the top ten fastest growing counties in Ohio, a fact that is reflected not only in population but in construction, per capita income levels, and tax revenue, as well as school construction and funding. While the state population was 11.5 percent black, the county was less than 1 percent black. Private home construction increased more than 100 percent in Suburbia County in the 1980s. During that same period, new homes in all of Ohio increased by 43 percent, while, nationally, new home construction decreased by 0.4 percent. Suburbia County has conspicuously outstripped both state and national growth rates regarding population, private home construction, and average home value—a figure that speaks not only to growth but to the economic status of the majority of families relocating to Suburbia County. All available indicators suggest that Suburbia County enjoys an impressively strong economy as compared to both state and national data. The relatively high income and construction levels and the increasing value of the homes being built and occupied by Suburbia’s 14 Punishing Schools growing number of residents translate into increased revenues for the county. And though the tax rate is low compared to statewide figures— another reason why residents find Suburbia County an attractive place to live—the revenue generated from property taxes is comparatively high, providing the kind of funding for the county’s schools that urban areas, hit hard by white flight and a shrinking tax base, cannot approximate...