| Description |
People "shopping for schools," which is paying a premium for homes that are in areas within the attendance zones of prestigious schools, routinely do not consider test scores, curriculum, or teachers when defining what is a "good school." This dissertation argues that suburban mayors use incorporation frameworks and operate out of a "my city" framework towards schools and school districts. This can lead to a desire by suburban mayors to gain more control over educational institutions like school districts in order to help make their individual city a more desirable and prestigious place to potential residents who are shopping for schools. I call this process municipal structuration. This dissertation focuses on how boundaries in suburban regions, particularly at the school district and city level, were used to bolster or exclude particular (class, racial, etc.) populations. I advance the position that the creation of smaller school districts, or municipal attempts to take more control over school districts, often described as local control, can carve out class and race divisions. This dissertation is principally focused on the use of boundaries to isolate communities and/or reify divisions and distinctions between communities. The initial context that created tensions for a school district in the suburbs south of Salt Lake City, Utah to divide and another neighboring school district to narrowly avoid dividing are discussed. A combination of qualitative individual and focus group interviews are paired with Geographic Information Systems (GIS) spatial demographic data to help understand the topic. This dissertation works to understand how the distribution and patterning of different age, class, and racial groups across suburban regions played a role in suburban school district division attempts in the Salt Lake metropolitan region. The legal maneuvering that created the new school district is discussed, with careful attention given to the political back and forth between suburban city mayors, state legislators, and community members in the policies that shaped the school district division. After that, the dissertation addresses ways that the newly created school district worked to remake advantages and inequalities through new and updated school buildings. A national example of school district division tensions with a similar sized region to Salt Lake City in Fresno, California is analyzed through GIS analysis in order to provide additional comparisons for generalizability. |
