Creating the Suburban School Advantage is an impressive contribution to the growing literature about how Americans with power and influence used the processes of suburbanization to develop remarkably inequitable school systems in the long postwar era. These systems, Rury makes clear, geospatially divided (mostly) middle-class and wealthy white suburbanites with college educations from (mostly) low-income and poor black urbanites with less education. In the suburbs, white families, elected officials, and developers leveraged taxpayer money, notably for roads and home construction, to engage collectively in what Rury labels educational “opportunity hoarding” or intense forms of “localism.” Within their communities, which were defined by school-district boundary lines above all, “sharing resources was not high on the agenda,” and “[w]hen considering a proposed policy or public expenditure, individuals…would focus resolutely on how it could affect their immediate neighbors and themselves” (12).
As Rury notes, Americans still more or less live within this educational...