Invisible fences for humans, Part III: Importing desirability to schools that lack the demographic advantages.

My previous post on this subject explored my hypothesis, on how school districts derive most of their competitive advantage from demographics that favor high educational attainment. The greatest public schools earn their cachet far more from demographics that skew towards either low poverty or ethnic homogeneity (or ideally a combination of the two) far more than intensive credentialing for teachers, sophisticated pedagogical technology, or a high per pupil funding.

If it wasn’t clear from that analysis, perhaps the picture above, from the highly ranked suburban school district of Plainfield, Indiana, should communicate exactly how this country regards its patchwork of widely divergent school systems. I’ll reiterate my conclusion from the previous post: Despite a non-exclusionary structure that resembles a public good, school districts are first and foremost commodities of variable quality which forces them to compete for patronage. When highly marketable, school districts endow land within their invisible boundaries with greater value. Therefore, both municipal governments and electorates themselves have commodified schools so intractably that it has become their ambition to refine the district continuously, ideally so that it attracts the demographic base that will allow it to perform at a high standard as efficiently as possible.

Realtors have long known that it behooves them to become proficient in the nuances regional school quality, particularly if the prospective buyer is under 50, but even older, childless clientele often seek good districts because they know it will influence the appreciation of their home values. Websites like http://www.city-data.com/forum/ provide a “grassroots” information exchange for people seeking to relocate, in order to get firsthand information from locals in that prospective region; the overwhelming majority inquire about school districts. In Indianapolis, the local respondents consistently steer people directly toward the suburbs, advising them to shun IPS and avoid most of the collar townships, with the possible exception of Washington Township, Franklin Township, Speedway, or Beech Grove—the four school districts outlined earlier in the map above. Thus, within Marion County, only the districts featuring the two darker shades of purple enjoy the consistent reputation of desirable places to raise a family, due to the quality of the public schools.



Where does this leave those districts that fall somewhere in the middle, the ones that are neither wealthy (like Bexley) nor homogeneous (like Beech Grove), nor entrenched with poverty and a lack of parental involvement, the way Indianapolis and Columbus Public Schools are? This comprises a considerable amount of the city’s land area. Many of these districts, such as the majority of the collar townships in Indianapolis, are currently simply average, which is hardly appealing to newcomers with high aspirations when they can find exceptional school districts just a few miles away, outside the city limits. Because these average districts fail to contain in their boundaries the demographics that make them high-performance, they can quickly translate to “unsuccessful” and will hemorrhage the student population whose parents have the wherewithal to seek better public schools. In time, the collar townships of Indianapolis, or suburbs like Whitehall in Columbus, could contend with the same malaise and atrocious test scores as the inner city public schools, when all the committed students and their families have left. The polarization of school districts into haves and have-nots continues.

My recommendations have little to do with school management. I’m not a superintendent or a professional educator, and I wouldn’t pretend to know how to change operations within a particular school or classroom to adapt the curriculum to an evolving student body. Many of these recommendations would no doubt come across as naïve to someone intimately involved in public education. They probably are naïve. But I have been able to observe declining public attitudes towards some districts, while others remain ironclad bastions of academic excellence, and I have scrutinized the population changes taking place within these jurisdictions. Nearly all of the school districts in the collar townships of Indianapolis had strong reputations twenty years ago, and now many of them don’t, despite the fact that many of the same faculty and staff are still working there, just as committed as they were before. How can these middle-tier schools cope with demographic change? I propose a framework for rethinking the branding of schools districts that aren’t hot commodities like Bexley, or comfortably lily-white like Beech Grove—observations the ways to reinvent themselves so that their image, and the educational product they sell, can remain competitive.

1) Stop using the top-tier school districts in the rich suburbs as a model to emulate; look instead to the creative responses to challenges that the inner city schools are facing. Much of Indianapolis and Columbus city limits encompasses what demographers and urban planners are typically labeling inner-ring suburbia. These regions within the metropolitan landscape typically share similar features; among the most prevalent are their homes built before the 1960s, often in an automobile oriented configuration. The inner-ring suburban neighborhoods eschew the urban street grid, using curvilinear streets in a hierarchical configuration in which residential areas are segregated from commercial districts with minimal through-streets. The unadorned, outmoded strip malls in these areas are often heavily vacant, the houses are small (by today’s standards) and old-fashioned, and the newly arrived populations (often foreign-born or African American) have significantly lower spending capacity than the middle class folks who preceded them. These areas are, in many regards, economically declining. Thus, it is wishful thinking for the school districts that serve these areas (many of the collar townships in Indianapolis, for example) to continue to think that new school spending on state-of-the-art smart classrooms, stadia, or auditoriums will necessarily attract well-heeled newcomers to the public schools. Nonetheless, many of them have recently tried levying a new tax through mostly unsuccessful referenda. The fact remains that the middle class who once lived in these areas is receding, as families with the spending capacity make beelines to the excellent school districts in the shiny, new, poverty-free suburbs and exurbs. The new student population is less likely to have committed parents or college aspirations, which is typically reflected by higher drop-out rates and lower standardized test scores. These districts cannot compete with suburbia on academic performance statistics alone. They should instead look at the initiatives of inner-city districts, which struggle to attract anything other than the extreme poor to their catchment area. Indianapolis Public Schools offers a diverse array of charter programs (more than just about any district in the country), with a success rate that is mixed but still often surpasses the conventional inner-city schools. Magnet programs are an excellent way of preserving a degree of heterogeneity in a school district. Unfortunately, they typically sequester the highest achieving, more affluent students living in an inner city district through a college-placement curriculum, so that the poorer, less academically minded students only share the same roof with the aforementioned kids while taking completely different classes. Nonetheless, magnet schools instill a measure of socioeconomic diversity otherwise unseen in the overwhelmingly poor, minority districts throughout American inner cities. Many inner-ring districts in Indianapolis offer innovative programs, such as charter schools or a language immersion school in the collar township of Lawrence. School districts have to offer a viable service, and some families with enough disposable income to be choosy will seek innovation and creativity, even if it takes place in outmoded buildings. The continued popularity of magnet programs at schools such as Broad Ripple and Arsenal Tech prove that the political catchphrase of “instruction not construction” can elicit measurable results. By all means, fix the leaky pool or aging boiler, but no Olympic sized pool on its own is going to draw affluent families to the district if the suburb next door has a good pool and high test scores.

2) Embrace the cultural and ethnic diversity typically inherent in these school districts, particularly by accommodating programming in the fine arts, humanities, and athletics. With their diverse economies and low costs of living, cities like Columbus and Indianapolis have become increasingly desirable destinations for both middle class families and aspiring recent immigrants, particularly in the past decade or so. The dichotomy between the aforementioned groups, however, is profound—the white middle class families exercise their spending power and build new homes in the suburbs or buy in places like Bexley (if they can afford it), while the immigrants and foreign-born often settle with the older housing stock in the central cities. The inner-ring suburbs, though economically declining by many metrics, still offer better schools, lower crime, and greater accessibility to the scattered jobs in these decentralized metros than the aging housing in the inner cities, with their extreme mix of gentrified yuppie enclaves and profound minority poverty. The inner-rings are some of the most diverse areas in the nation, often boasting 20 to 30 languages within a few square miles, co-existing peacefully for the most part. In Indianapolis, few of schools in the collar townships in 1990 had a need for English as a Learned Language programs (ELL); today, nearly all of them do. A few of the elementary schools in the formerly lily-white Perry Township (just south of downtown Indy and IPS) now have student bodies that consist of 20% to 30% Burmese refugees. Clearly these foreign-born students have needs distinct from their English-speaking peers, but to what degree should they be sequestered? My speculation is that schools (at least in Midwest cities like Indianapolis and Columbus) are doing a much better job at recognizing this observation than my Observation #1. Many schools engage these students through international and cultural festivals, while classes with fewer language needs—such as mathematics and physical education—are frequently fully integrated. Administrators might be able to take this a step further by incorporating it into curriculum where an international Weltanschauung benefits everyone, including the native English speakers. Courses such as world history (sadly an elective across much of the US), art history, music appreciation, civics, phys ed (international sports), or even a sociology class devoted to immigration—all of these have the potential for malleability that would allow them to adapt to a broader cultural outlook, even if it only involves one or two days out of the entire semester. Not every middle-class parent is seeking ethnic homogeneity in the school districts; homogeneity just tends to yield the best test results, and people gravitate to favorable numbers. Branding schools as diverse by adding the multicultural perspective that international schools successfully adopted long ago (often with great success), could help turn around the struggling inner-ring suburban districts by tapping into the aspect of their identity that can distinguish them positively.

3) Accommodate socioeconomic or aspirational strata through increasingly divergent curricula beyond elementary school. I’ve read City-Data forum postings where well-educated, liberal parents have shrugged their shoulders at the fact they are shielding their kids from cultural diversity by sending them to the highly-ranked suburban public schools; they argue that their kids will get plenty of multicultural exposure in college and it’s more important right now to send them to a top school. I could hardly criticize this argument. Of course, much of the homogeneity that affluent parents seek in good school districts has less to do with race or ethnicity that socioeconomics. Not all these middle class families are so prejudiced that they move to the suburbs solely to avoid racial minorities. Wealthy, top ranked districts in the suburbs, such as Carmel High School north of Indianapolis, are not uniformly Caucasian. Many of these schools have a strong racial minority and foreign-born population; the difference is that these minorities are equally affluent and strive to send their kids to the top public schools in the region. Their parents have raised them in an English-speaking environment, either because the household is multilingual or they are second- and third-generation immigrants. The inner-ring collar townships of Indianapolis and the suburban outskirts within Columbus city limits aren’t remotely economically one-note. Even if, all too frequently, the more aspirational (and often wealthier) kids tend to become segregated into the accelerated educational track, both wealthy and poor students bump shoulders in the hallways between classes or in the non-weighted subjects, such as music or phys ed. High schools in the collar townships will continue to encompass socioeconomic diversity, which may prove beneficial for dealing with life down the road, since, unless we all move to places like Carmel, we all have to engage with people outside our income level now and then. Probably 30 to 50% of students at the inner-ring school districts go on to college; about 90% in Carmel do. Since only about 30% of all Americans have a college education, you can guess which school system is more reflective of the greater American population at large. I can’t help but wonder if the economically diverse schools appear under continuous strain because they have to accommodate such a wide variety of aspirations. Many reformers have argued that the American system has left itself hamstrung by nationwide, standardized minimum curricula, forcing nearly all students to get at least three years of mathematics, two years of science, four in English, etc, even when it is clear that a large contingent lack the aptitude, ambition, interest, or need for algebra or Julius Caesar. It makes me wonder how well an increasingly diverse nation such as Germany is adapting to its multi-tiered system, in which, after the Grundschule from grades 1 through 4, students are divided, based on academic ability and parents’ wishes, to one of three facilities. The five-year Hauptschule teaches some advanced subjects at a slower pace and prepares students for vocational apprenticeships. The six-year Realschule includes part-time vocational schools and advanced apprenticeships, with the possibility of moving up to the nine-year Gymnasium, the school for university-bound students. This structure generally favorably skews international test scores for Germans, since many standardized math and science exams only target the students enrolled in the full 13-year Gymnasium. From an American perspective, the German system may appear overly deterministic and highly segregated, filtering out students by ability at an inordinately young age. But lateral mobility from school to school is always possible, and it already bears a passing resemblance to the hierarchy of accelerated, gifted/talented, special ed, or remedial programs that exist throughout the US. Placing such a system under one roof would allow different aspirational levels to find a specific niche that allows a broader array of students the opportunity to excel, but it would still give the district the ability to focus quality programming on the college-bound contingent among the students. Some high achieving parents actually prefer such an educational environment because it is less “snobby” or elitist than the fancy suburban schools, but the standards for the college-bound students remain high. For parents with the financial resources who don’t want the demographics of their high school to echo the nearest country club, a school with diversified academic tracks aligned with ability may be a better fit.

4) Encourage the populations living in these districts who are unaffected by school quality to engage with the districts. This intense discussion about accommodating families with school children leaves out one sizable demographic: those for whom public schools are irrelevant. This contingent may even comprise a majority of the population in many major cities, since it includes households with no children, households for whom the children are grown and out of school, or households who send their children to private schools. Most struggling inner city public schools are experiencing a net decline in student enrollment form year to year; if these districts are experiencing any population growth whatsoever, chances are the new arrivals belong to one of the groups listed above. Many of these people have made the choice to move or remain in the central city despite steeper crime rates, higher taxes, deteriorating infrastructure, and a floundering public education system. The reasons for remaining are diverse, but embedded in many of them is a commitment to living in the city to support the amenities that urban centers have to offer (even if, as is frequently case in Indianapolis and Columbus, the environment in which they may live remains auto-oriented and suburban). Many of these people are themselves well-educated and affluent; the property owners among them have voluntarily subjected themselves to a certain level of taxation to support the local districts, even though it has no bearing on them personally, beyond the truism that good schools equate to higher home values. If school districts forged ways of getting these people involved in their respective districts, it could only broaden the aggregate level of stewardship. How can they achieve this? Recent retirees and empty nesters often seek volunteering opportunities and may be eager to help tutor ELL students, coach freshman football, or serve as an assistant director for school plays. Publicity for major events—the annual musical, a major basketball rivalry, a statewide debate tournament—should target far more than just the parents of children involved. These individuals could easily offer a relevant outsider’s perspective on school boards or education foundations. I think the inner-ring school districts have only just begun to tap into the communitarian-mindedness of the local childless population, perhaps because they would appear an unlikely source for additional financial support; after all, they’re already paying heavy taxes for a service they don’t use. But the property owners among them still have an interest in successful school districts because of the impact it can exert on their home’s value. The potential for volunteerism and fresh ideas these people offer remains generally overlooked.


If it isn’t obvious already from this long analysis, school districts across the US tend to polarize; the status quo is homogeneity, often by race and nearly always by social class. The inner-ring, collar county schools—the mediocre ones—get very little attention, sandwiched between the superstars in the outer suburbs and the deeply troubled ones of the inner-city. The success stories among schools that fit into this category rarely make it into the local newspaper, but in Marion County, one school district does seem to enjoy the lion’s share of positive press: Washington Township, the collar township directly north of Indianapolis Public Schools, outlined in yellow in the map above. North Central High School, the only grade 9-12 public school in the district, still enjoys a reputation that ranges from good to superlative, all while being far from racially or economically homogeneous. Department of Education snapshots reveal that the student body of over 3,200 is under 50% white, and the district encompasses some Indianapolis’ most prestigious neighborhoods, such as Williams Creek and Meridian Hills, while also feeding into some of the lowest income neighborhoods in the region, such as parts of The Meadows; 29% of the student body qualifies for the free lunch program.

Within the Indianapolis metro, North Central’s reputation is of an institution that manages to wield its colossal size and diversity towards overwhelming self-affirmation. It caters to a tough crowd yet annually sends kids to Harvard and Yale; it has a permanent security team after successful arson attempts in the 1990s yet offers a full array of Advance Placement and International Baccalaureate programs; it provides curricula to kids living in Section 8 as well as trust fund beneficiaries. The fact that it is “tough” and “urban” yet still elite has evolved to one of its primary selling points: the wealthy kids can prepare themselves for college while still understanding the need for street smarts that comes from having classmates who grow up entirely without privilege. Those same lower-income students may receive a discipline and sufficient exposure to academic success to motivate them when they find no inspiration or support in their immediate families. Co-existence of polar opposites under North Central’s mammoth roof is not a guaranteed success, but it has sustained itself for decades. My generalizations about the rich and poor are of course superficial to the point of being patronizing, but the essence of a school’s reputation is often based on similarly facile stereotypes. North Central’s reputation of tough and top-tier derives largely from the fact that it attracts an urban liberal gentry committed to a diverse worldview, and it is possible some of its programs—particularly the costly International Baccalaureate—would be hard to replicate in the other inner-ring, collar township schools of Indianapolis. But it is clearly getting something right that other districts such as Pike and Lawrence Township, are struggling to achieve as their growing diversity has resulted in a decline in the academic reputation. North Central remains the regional paradigm.

As I conclude this intensive study inspired by the differences inside and outside the Columbus suburb of Bexley, I am likely to subject myself to a wide array of criticism, much of it no doubt deserved. It may appear that I have overemphasized the importance school districts play in the overall desirability of a location. I’m sure other educational policy analysts would assert that I have focused on demographic influences on public schools, almost deterministically and at the exclusion of other variables. But I remain convinced that teachers, principals, facilities, computers, and overall cash flow have far less of an impact than the home environment to which students return at the end of a day. Dedicated teachers, sophisticated technology, and tremendous public spending will seldom compensate for lack of familial support. If too many students come from families who cannot be motivated to value their children’s education (as is the case in Indianapolis and Columbus Public Schools), educators will not be able to cultivate an environment that appeals to those families who do care. Perhaps I focus on the middle-tier schools that are losing ground because I went to an inner-ring school district myself and received a perfectly good education from it. A little over a decade later, many of the same teachers remain in my high school as committed to their jobs as ever, even while the student population has skewed increasingly toward foreign-born newcomers and racial minorities, seeking an alternative to dysfunctional inner-city schools but not wealthy enough to afford the elite exurbs. While the forces that instigate urban decline and renewal are infinitely complicated, for a significant portion of the American population, schools are the tail that wags the dog. We really do—at least many of us—value education that much.

Gowns rewrite the town—twice over.

A casual scan across most urban campuses reveals that they have been building increasingly densely to accommodate new growth, after several decades of building at a lower density than the at their original, historic core. More often than not, they have no other choice. Suffering a scarcity of available land but benefiting from a captive clientele of student pedestrians, the campus planners and leadership must build upward on former parking lots or grassy corners. Otherwise, facilities planners often recommend purchasing homes in the adjacent neighborhood, so that the schools can claim them as administrative offices if they don’t bulldoze them altogether.

Some campuses have been widely constrained by the surrounding city for as long as anyone can remember, such as Harvard University and its heavily built-up surroundings of Cambridge, one of the most densely populated cities in the country (and almost definitely tops for densely populated suburbs). In this example, the venerable old academic buildings rest behind the gate along the right side of the principal artery Massachusetts Avenue while downtown commercial buildings of Cambridge’s Harvard Square sit along the left.

This next photo, taken at the dead center of the urban plaza Harvard Square, demonstrates how the public space has become a vertex of activity generated largely from three powerful forces.

The most obvious indicators are the brick Harvard buildings which comprise the background, but I am also standing at the heart of downtown Cambridge, where the cluster of buildings hosts both university administration and a variety of other prominent companies on their upper levels. Meanwhile, immediately to the right of this photo is the entrance to the Harvard Square T stop, with one of the highest average daily commuter traffic levels in the entire Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority’s rail network. The photo below more clearly reveals the centrality of the subway stop at this prominent urban node.

Cambridge’s densely commercial downtown has stymied Harvard’s ability to grow to the south of its campus core (the original Harvard Yard), so the majority of the university’s newer buildings trail northward, which is clearly visible to a pedestrian walking across campus from the remarkable shift in architecture. A third “phase” in the university’s development is largely discontiguous from the old and new campus: a few blocks south of Harvard Square sits the Kennedy School of Government and numerous university residential halls. From there, the university’s development pattern played leapfrog again: just south across the Charles River sits the Allston campus, which is currently home to the Business School and the majority of the athletic and sporting facilities. As sizable as this portion of the campus is, the Allston portion of Harvard is only poised to grow over the ensuing decades: the University has long been land banking various parcels in this old Boston neighborhood, and eventually the Allston campus, based on a carefully articulated planning process, will burgeon into the new life sciences hub for the school. (Recent news reveals that, in the face of the financial turmoil, the University has indefinitely suspended its prior plans for the Allston expansion indefinitely.)

Harvard and Cambridge share an antecedent that is quintessentially Northeastern—the majority of their conception predates the radical shifts in urban form precipitated by 20th century innovations. Other parts of the country have adopted a completely different approach, with development patterns that largely reflect their respective population growth trends. The southern boomburg of Nashville and its preeminent Vanderbilt University exemplify this trend, which could hardly be more different from the physical form of Harvard, Cambridge, and Boston.

Perhaps the most interesting element of Vanderbilt University’s history is the unusual level of disassociation with the person after whom it was named, Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt. Distant relative and Methodist Bishop Holland N. McTyeire of Nashville stayed with the Commodore while recovering from surgery in New York; he was able to persuade the 79-year-old rail magnate to endow and build a new university in the South that would “contribute to strengthening the ties which should exist between all sections of our common country.” McTyeire chose the site and supervised the construction of buildings, but Vanderbilt himself never saw it. He never visited Nashville, dying four years after the dedication, without knowing that his only major act of philanthropy would even be named after him.

Looking at the campus today, it takes no stretch of the imagination to surmise that it was largely conceived in a vacuum, judging from the striking contrast in physical form between the campus and the surrounding area—or, for that matter, the contrast between “the Vanderbilt community” and “the Harvard community”. The layout of the buildings themselves fits into the less rigidly formalistic design popular among many universities founded in the 19th century, with an almost consistent tree canopy, the biodiversity of which earned Vanderbilt campus classification as a national arboretum.

(I contrasted Vanderbilt’s campus with the neighboring Peabody campus in greater detail during an earlier blog post.)

What does the area immediately surrounding the campus look like? It’s not the outer suburbs, but it’s also clearly not quite the city center; downtown Nashville is a mile to the northeast. But it’s also not a particularly residential neighborhood, no does it meet conventional standards of older urban development. The streets which comprise the perimeter of the original Vanderbilt campus look much more like the photos below, where I was looking outward onto 21st Avenue South while standing at the campus edge:


The retail mix is largely the restaurant/coffee shop/bar combination one might expect to cater to a heavy concentration of college students. But the majority of it consists of freestanding, one-story buildings with abundant parking in front or at the side. Nearly all of it is automobile-oriented and less than forty years old. The other primary perimeter street to Vanderbilt, West End Avenue, offers a similar landscape:

The development embodies your average planner’s migraine: wide streets meant to convey automobile traffic quickly, with buildings that overwhelmingly fail to stimulate pedestrianism. To add insult to injury, the fact that the buildings are larger and detached gives them a higher gross leasable area and more opportunity for off-street parking, making the structure far more likely to accommodate tenants that are national chains with deep pockets. Even the few structures that are built flush with the sidewalk still seem to repel mom-and-pop stores. Instead of eclectic local enterprise immediately outside one of the nation’s most respected universities, the visitors’ eyes are greeted with this:



The horror! Frankly, I don’t want to devote a post to criticizing this sort of development; it might not be conducive to heavy tree canopy and might seem blandly suburban to some, but it has done nothing to harm the verdant beauty or repute of the University, and it does provide an abundance of convenient shopping opportunities for the students. Instead, I hope to evaluate it on its own terms, based on what it reveals about Nashville’s development in and around Vanderbilt.

Nashville was not a prominent city at the time of Vanderbilt’s establishment. With a population barely over 25,000, it may have been a comparatively large city within the mid-South region, but it was hardly a national center on par with a dozen different cities in the Northeast. (By comparison, Cambridge, Massachusetts had nearly twice as many people at that time, and it was always the adjacent community to the much larger city of Boston.) Even in the 1950s, the city limits of Nashville only contained about 175,000 inhabitants; the city’s emergence as the key city of Tennessee, surpassing Memphis to become a capital of the booming New South, did not really take place until the 1970s. Vanderbilt was founded in an almost rural area at the time; the urbanization of central Nashville clearly didn’t jolt in the direction of the school until well after the automobile. The photos below offers a quick snapshot of the “membrane” that connects Vanderbilt campus to Nashville downtown, where West End Avenue crosses Interstate 65:

The interstate forms a distinct edge between the downtown (on its northeast side) and the strikingly automobile-oriented growth pattern on the opposite, southwest side. My suspicion is that the US Highways 70 and 431, which comprise the general eastern and western boundaries of Vanderbilt, were predominantly quick exits from Nashville until suburban development patterns engulfed them. Interspersed amidst the auto-oriented development are visibly older structures, such as this church next to a contemporary office building:


Another example shows what appears to have been an old automobile service station that has been adaptively reused into conventional retail, all while preserving about two dozen off-street parking spaces:

And the structures below were featured from a distance in one of the earlier photos. They appear to be older private residences that have been adapted to retail uses:

The one on the right appears to have undergone a particularly intensive façade alteration in order to endow it with the first-floor fenestration that makes it a retail-friendly building. The prevailing question remains: how many of these older vestiges faced the bulldozer to make way for the strip mall development that predominates? Was the area immediately surrounding Vanderbilt always so sparsely settled? Not all of the greater Vanderbilt area consists of this fascinating automobile oriented/urban hybrid, but the exceptions are rare. Among the few areas near Vanderbilt with the true feel of an urban neighborhood is Hillsboro Village, a former streetcar suburb that emerges as one continues southwesterly along 21st Avenue South, the old Hillsboro Road. The area was long ago annexed by Nashville, but it retains a short strip of one- and two-story commercial buildings flush with the sidewalk; the only widely visible parking is directly on 21st Avenue. Not surprisingly, the floor plate of these structures, much smaller than your average auto-oriented retail building and typically with a 1-to-3 width-to-depth ratio, more widely supports the local restaurants and vendors typically associated with university communities—the type we often describe as “eclectic”. I unfortunately don’t have photos of Hillsboro Village of my own; this Flickr photo effectively captures the neighborhood’s character: perhaps the closest to Vanderbilt community’s Main Street.

Vanderbilt’s development offers a sort of architectural palimpsest, with one developmental language superimposed on another, based largely on expediency of the time period. From my observations, it appears that, for the first fifty to seventy years of Vanderbilt University’s institutional life, it sat in an almost rural setting on the purlieus of the small city of Nashville—a city which may have been less than 10 square miles in its totality at the time. As the city grew, predominantly after the automobile, the two primary streets (West End Avenue and 21st Avenue South) remained efficient arterials for conveying traffic out to the neighborhoods such as Hillsboro Village and the adjacent countryside, even as the countryside rapidly suburbanized. The built environment between Vanderbilt and Nashville thus overwhelmingly supports cars. Only in recent years have developers adapted to growing consumer preferences for a community with a more urban character, offering infill construction that supports higher residential density and promotes the walkability that seems natural for a large university environment. And the City of Nashville has demonstrated a growing support for higher density in these areas close to the downtown through the relatively recent implementation of Urban Zoning Overlay districts. The Vanderbilt area has undergone a distinctive succession of development styles: initially largely rural, it became stereotypically suburban before its proximity to downtown and the reliable employment base made it a potential location from emergent neighborhoods. The photo below, taken from a mid-rise hotel, effectively captures all three phases:

The turn-of-the-century residential presence largely suffered demolition to accommodate strip malls and car-friendly shopping plazas, but now mid and high-density multifamily developments, hotels, and office buildings are taking advantage of infill opportunities on the remaining tracts of vacant land. Nashville may never be as dense as Cambridge (and most likely the majority of Nashville’s residents prefer it that way), but the lack of density in some regards enhances its versatility, like a painting with a great deal of canvas still exposed. The transitional area around Vanderbilt University is showing a remarkable adaptivity to cultural shifts in preferred lifestyles, fusing urban intensity with the relaxed vibe of a college town through incremental infill developments. In another decade or two, fashionable urban living may demand new architectural incarnations, and I am willing to bet that Nashville will be more receptive to it than many places—it’s clearly less hemmed-in than a city like Cambridge and widely open to reinvention. If the city can retain its high level of housing affordability, I imagine it will enjoy many more years of boomtown status to come.

Retail’s softer side.

Of all the major department stores hoping for bang-up business over the holidays (at least compared to the 2008 nadir), perhaps the one that’s been the quietest in recent years is Sears. For over half of a century, the Sears, Roebuck and Company was the number one retailer up until the early 1980s, before the rapid ascension of the juggernaut Wal-Mart and its respective competitors. It remains a mainstay in many middle-class suburban malls across the country, though it has been common knowledge for quite some time that the company is a shadow of its former self. First squeaks of Sears’ struggles began as long ago as 1993, when the company discontinued its “Big Book” catalog, which signaled the end of a once prominent retail medium. It continued over the next decade to divest itself of superfluities such as its retail credit division a decade later, only to be purchased by another floundering retail giant, Kmart Holdings Corporation, in 2004. The new company, Sears Holdings Corporation, continues to operate stores under both brands, but even their combined power still ranked them as merely the 8^th largest retailer in 2008 according to the SAP study, with no changes in sales from the previous year. It is routinely listed as a company where bankruptcy appears eminent. But you hardly need to study investor reports to get the vibe that Sears continues to struggle; just take a trip to your nearest mall.
 

Within the northern city limits of Indianapolis, Castleton Square Mall used to be the region’s premier mall for big-name products. As suburbanization continues unabated, Castleton has lost some of its primacy to other lifestyle centers open in the northern suburbs nearby, but it still remains a largely successful retail hub, even as the abundant strip malls around it have seriously begun to shed tenants. The mall itself remains about 98% occupied, and during the Christmas season one could hardly tell that the nation is barely recovering from the most profound recession in anyone’s recent memory. Many of these pictures will look terrible; I had to take them on the sly from a cell phone’s 1-megapixel camera. But they still show Castleton in full bustle on a weekend night.

The mall assumes a more elaborate take on the dumbbell shape, in which a central hall of inline stores remains sandwiched by two large department stores on either end. In the case of Castleton, the central hallway boasts other department stores along the sides. In addition, one former department store in the south central portion of the mall, an L.S. Ayres, was demolished a few years ago and converted to an outdoor, lifestyle center model, with Borders Bookstore, a few restaurants, and a movie theater. Despite this minor “t-shape” configuration, the predominant structure of the mall is linear. Sears occupies the easternmost end of this long corridor. But the entire “Sears wing” has taken on a subtly different retail character than the rest of the mall. Walking down the wide passage toward Sears, one would at first see broadly familiar national chains, but that ends quickly after reaching these two stores.

Christopher and Banks and Lane Bryant sit across the hall from one another, and they represent a sort of threshold for major retailers. Continuing down the hall toward Sears beyond this threshold are a different set of inline stores.

As Seen on TV is among the first. Is it a major national brand? They might have locations scattered across the country, but the interior does not show the markings of a committed tenant. Notice how little the tenant has improved the walls and floor and how closely it resembles a vacant store. In addition, the partition in the back of the store reveals that this retailer is only using about half of its total gross leasable area. Its diminutive sign costs little to install as well. Why would a tenant waste so much of its space and invest so little into an enticing interior? My suspicion is that As Seen of TV will depart the Castleton Square Mall quickly after sales decline, most likely when the holiday season is clearly over. It shows all the trappings of a pop-up store: here for a few months to capitalize on certain shopping surges, then disappears without a trace.

The low-rent signage continues as one walks closer to the Sears, with other retail curiosities that lack a national presence.

Nirvana, a hippie-themed apparel store, has lasted several years in multiple malls across the Indianapolis area, but it lacks a website—it’s clearly a home-grown chainlet.

Moving one storefront closer towards Sears is KT Sports, a low-rent competitor to national, category killer sports themed megastores like Dick’s (which sits elsewhere in the Castleton Mall). The signage again is the best indicator that the store is hardly a national brand: a one-piece metal template is far cheaper than the individually carved letters of the Christopher and Banks. Immediately across the hall from it is another local apparel store, Unplugged.

At this point the shopper is more or less at the entrance of Sears. Despite the activity generated by a harnessed trampoline attraction, the retail presence at what should be a hub—immediately fronting one of the main anchor tenants—is bleak. The wall to the immediate right of Sears is devoted to a series of candy vending machines.

Stepping back, however, one can see that “Sweet City” is not just a confectionary corner; it’s a false front that disguises what otherwise would be a reasonably large tenant.

Simon Properties, the mall’s manager, has inserted a mild bit of commerce in what otherwise would be a completely dead corner. The storefronts to the left of the Sears entrance aren’t any better:

The left-hand tenant in this photo is North American Insights, LLC, a marketing research firm that poises itself “in high traffic malls with varied demographics.” This offers an excellent description for Castleton, which generally remains a heavily frequented mall, though its demographics have changed from affluent white shoppers to an extremely varied mix in recent years—offering predominantly upper-middle income retail offerings to a clientele that shows no evidence of any one clear cultural majority. But North American Insights is not a retail outlet in itself and is scarcely a generator of any new retail traffic. The storefront immediately to its right is vacant.

This “cul-de-sac” is the least active corner in the entire Castleton Square Mall, and the featured department store is Sears—hardly a compliment to a stalwart of American retail that it is unable to attract any national brands in its close proximity. Most market analysts will argue that the presence of “mom-and-pop” retail tenants in a mall is a clear indicator of the mall’s decline in popularity or market presence. However, the only section of Castleton lacking a concentration of national brands is the area around Sears. Elsewhere, the mall still hosts upper-moderate businesses such as Brookstone, Swarovski Crystal, and Ann Taylor LOFT. Is the Castleton Square Mall struggling or is it mostly a reflection that Sears is the least desirable corner? It’s obvious that the leasing system in malls correlates to a certain price per square foot, so a larger storefront will clearly pay more than a smaller one. But, like any commercial node, no mall property manager can expect to command rents at the periphery that compare to the core. Eager to fill these spaces in the mall where foot traffic is low, Simon Properties had to lower the price to the level that lower-tier tenants such as KT Sports and Nirvana can afford. Major brands turn their noses at this section of the mall and are perfectly willing to pay higher rents for premier locations.

A similar phenomenon has taken place at another mall far away, further demonstrating Sears’ widespread weakness at attracting people into its doors. The Cortana Mall in Baton Rouge had long been the dominant retail presence in the region since its opening in 1976 east of downtown, but the 1997 arrival of the Mall of Louisiana to the southeast, where most of the new development is taking place, quickly relegated the Cortana Mall to second-tier status. When I visited Cortana during the holiday season of 2005, it hardly showed sign of decline, with good crowds and generally solid occupancy levels—except for the area around Sears. The Cortana Mall failed to secure any tenants around the department store; one had to walk past about a dozen vacant inline stores to get to the fully-operative Sears. I haven’t been to Cortana Mall since then, but a quick trip to the blogosphere reveals that its popularity has only declined further: apparently some of the inline storefronts around Sears are now filled with non-traditional tenants like a post office and Army/Navy recruiting centers.

Castleton Square is nowhere near this level of “mall rot”—truthfully the mall’s occupancy levels outside of the area around Sears remain almost perfect, and even the area around Sears can at least find tenants. But the combination of a formerly pre-eminent mall and a faded department store may be too much for places like Castleton and Cortana. I can’t help but wonder if the presence of North American Insights, LLC is part of Simon Properties’ attempt to retain Castleton’s viability by having a marketing research firm as a permanent installation to track vulnerabilities in a mall with an exceptionally diverse demographic, in an era where malls, like public schools, frequently filter toward homogeneity. The legacy of dying and dead malls over the past 20 years has proven that Americans will easily bypass the mall down the street from them if it’s less active, ultimately driving tremendous distances to the mall with more energy, even if both centers have many of the same department stores and inline tenants. Castleton’s future is probably rosier than Sears, but in a time of prolonged economic uncertainty, retail centers have to capture the American consumer spirit that favors continued re-invention if they are to remain viable. As Michael Brush with MSN Money put it, Sears “the place Grandma shopped”. Property managers need to continue to tap into the market where young professional moms and dads with kids like to shop, and those folks are moving increasingly further from Castleton. Good luck to Simon Properties: at least they’ve proven far savvier at keeping a fresh image than Sears.

Invisible fences for humans, Part II: Harnessing control through the schools.

Infill development near Bexley Main Street: a new synagogue.




After a longer lapse than usual, I treat whoever is interested to a feast of text with this post—not much to get excited about I suppose, but I promise this isn’t the new norm, and any responses are greatly appreciated.

In a recent post, I observed the distinctive character of the suburban enclave of Bexley, Ohio, which is surrounded by the bigger city of Columbus. Bexley abuts some of the larger city’s rougher neighborhoods yet remains resolutely prosperous—one of the metro area’s premier places to live, in fact. By the conclusion of the post I surmised that Bexley’s consistent desirability derived less from its attractive urban character or governance (it certainly shows no evidence of legislation that deliberately excludes the poor), as much as it achieved favorable demographics early in its development, then promptly built a political fortification around itself. Those favorable demographics—an affluent, well-educated, largely Jewish, predominantly white population—anticipate the city’s highly ranked school system: such a community will inevitably have high test scores or Harvard-bound graduates because it’s filled with high achievers. The stellar reputation of the system in turn amplifies Bexley’s property values. With Columbus surrounding it on all sides, the city’s limited housing supply will never meet its demand, so values are significantly higher than the regional norm, further pricing out low and even middle income people. Its only option for expanding its housing supply has been through infill development on parking lots and formerly low-density sites, but even these will immediately command a high price tag. Bexley’s elite status is virtually etched in stone.

Such “maximum-performance” suburbs are common to almost every large city in the county, so Bexley is not unique. The second half of this study is going to veer away from Bexley—I’ve talked enough about the town already—and more about its most powerful political tool: its school system. Not so much a stick for fending off the undesirables (as I inaccurately referred to it in the first essay), the Bexley Public School District is more of a defensive gesture—it’s too passive to equate it to something like law enforcement. My suspicion is a city like Bexley would need a more robust police force than its comfy demographics might suggest (certainly more than rich outer suburbs like Dublin, Ohio), simply because the criminality of Columbus is so much closer at hand. I’m happy to be proven wrong, but I speculate that Bexley and other enclaves wield their power through their prestigious public school systems.

In Furious Pursuit of the Best Public Education

The state of American primary education—particularly in the context of public schools—undergoes countless scholarly and journalistic reviews for its widely divergent and often abysmal quality. Scarcely a year passes when some new statistic shows American high and junior high school students’ mediocre performance on international tests in mathematics, science, and the humanities, compared to other developed nations (as well as developing ones).

Education reform has long served as a cudgel by which opposing political viewpoints use to beat one another: the left frequently asserts that inadequate funding for teachers or supplemental resources leave American students flagging academically, while the right rebuts that permissiveness and a lack of structure have killed the majority of public schools beyond reform, frequently advocating voucher programs to allow academically minded parents of limited incomes to “buy” a slot in the reputable private schools nearby. International reports shake their heads, frequently allying with the left, sometimes to the point of condescendingly suggesting that underfunded schools demonstrate the low regard that Americans have for public education in general.

That final observation could not be further from the truth. Wide variability in educational aptitude exists in every nation. But the strongest proof that a sizable portion of Americans are driven to succeed is not manifest in our internationally admired higher learning institutions (in which many of the American public universities rank among the best), nor is it evident in the high representation of Americans among prestigious global honors such as the Nobel Prize. The best demonstration that, fundamentally, Americans in general value education is through their moving and resettling patterns.

Look at any metro area in the nation. Those with high public school test scores are invariably the fastest growing districts. In the Midwest, cities like Naperville (west of Chicago), Carmel (north of Indianapolis), or Overland Park (west of Kansas City across the Kansas state line) absorb a significant portion of their metro areas’ growth rates because of the enduringly high quality of the public schools. High demand pushes land values upward, ensuring that any new growth in the undeveloped areas of these sprawling suburbs will remain prestigious because only the affluent can afford to live there—a population who, in this meritocracy, will typically ensure the public schools’ test scores remain high. However, if a certain district is no longer growing because it lacks the room to grow—like Bexley—then its property values are typically through the roof. Parents often search aggressively for the district even within a single metro with the ideal public school system to meet Billy and Suzie’s needs, relocating to a new suburb if necessary.

Sometimes these aspirational parents even engage in benign deception, as one man did whose family owned a fancy home just outside of Bexley in Columbus, but rented an apartment for him and his children in Bexley limits, living apart from the wife/mother so they could attend the schools there. Bexley officials caught on to the scam, asserting that the kids still spend the majority of their time in the Columbus house rather than the Bexley apartment, and ousted the family. The father sued to get his kids re-enrolled; the City countersued; legal fees have escalated into the thousands of dollars. All this just to get the kids into Bexley Public Schools.

Carving an Academic Enclave

Desirability of school districts almost invariably exerts an influence on residential property values in an area, even if the region in question has previously been largely undesirable. A recent initiative in Philadelphia provides an excellent example: the Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander School (grades K – 8), better known as Penn Alexander, began in 2001 as a partnership between the city’s public school system and the adjacent University of Pennsylvania. The University has offered subsidies and teaching expertise to serve this West Philadelphia neighborhood, with income levels that range from profound poverty to urban gentry. Degreed professors and yuppies sit cheek-by-jowl with the inner city (most African American) poor in a part of the city where prosperity and personal safety often varies from block to block, if not house by house. The Philadelphia Public School system is predictably troubled, and prior to 2001, most affluent residents of West Philadelphia either had no children or sent them to private schools, leaving the public schools almost exclusively to the area’s poor. The result is a neighborhood where children of less advantaged households have little opportunity to engage with those whose parents seek the best educational options for their children.

But the Penn Alexander School’s performance, curricula, and innovative programming have ranked it comparable to the best private schools in the region, and local realtors have pounced on the housing within its constrained catchment area. The predictable results? Home prices have skyrocketed. Along the boundaries of the catchment area, a three-story house on one side of the street could be worth as much as $100,000 than its less favorably situated neighbor on the other side. Many of the low-income residents for whom the Penn Alexander School intended to serve can no longer afford to live in the area, whereas wealthy professors from Drexel or Penn quickly snatch up the properties so they can send their kids to the school. The goal of reaching across multiple strata through this Penn-Assist program has weakened as the gentrifying West Philadelphia has become increasingly socioeconomically homogeneous.

In essence, the minds behind the Penn-Philly Public School partnership have appropriated a small pocket of the West Philadelphia neighborhood and rendered it prestigious by interpolating a new catchment area that aligns with this generously endowed school. Everything around it remains saddled with the struggling Philadelphia Public School system (sans partnership). Are the boundaries for the Penn Alexander School the be-all and end-all? Crime rates, education levels, percentage of vacant/abandoned houses, and job growth indicators in West Philadelphia remain variable and generally compare unfavorably to the Philadelphia suburbs, yet the catchment area remains extremely desirable, suggesting that many people seeking housing are willing to overlook crime and urban grit if they can find a good public school. Regardless of the original intentions, the lucre of this school district in a diverse urban environment could eventually shift the demographics in this area to a duplicate of Bexley, but without the distinction of two adjacent municipal governments—only school administrative authority.

How Populations Respond to Fixed School District Boundaries

Returning to the Midwest, Indianapolis offers a particularly unusual patchwork of jurisdictions and school districts, unlike Columbus, or any other large city in the country. The city, formerly comprising most of the center of Marion County, expanded its boundaries to coincide with that of the county through the 1970 initiative known as Unigov. Today, Marion County and Indianapolis city limits are nearly coterminous, with the exception of four excluded communities—Southport, Beech Grove, Lawrence, and Speedway—which each have almost complete autonomy, with their own mayors and city councils. (A fifth municipality, Cumberland, would also have been considered an excluded community except that its city limits straddle both Marion and the adjacent Hancock County.) The Wikipedia map below illustrates how these systems operate within Marion County, with Indianapolis comprising the red portion of the county, while the excluded cities are labeled in the gray regions:

Any unlabelled gray regions on the map above are “unexcluded towns” with limited self-governance but are essentially incorporated within Indianapolis. They have limited political authority on their own. As you can see, three of the four excluded communities—Southport, Beech Grove, and Speedway—are enclaves, functioning much the same way as Bexley, with the city of Indianapolis surrounding them.

The school districts, though, are an entirely different matter: Marion County has 11 of them, mostly tied to the nine townships that stack within the county like a tic-tac-toe board. Indianapolis Public Schools comprises the central portion of the county, including all of Center Township and parts of some the surrounding townships; its irregular boundaries comprise the Indianapolis city limits before the city-county consolidation through Unigov. Each of the surrounding eight townships, hereafter referred to as the “collar townships”, has its own school district. Meanwhile, two of the four excluded cities, Beech Grove and Speedway, have their own districts outside of both the townships and Indianapolis Public Schools. The other two excluded cities, Southport and Lawrence, remain part of the township school districts in which their boundaries rest. The map below from the SAVI Community Information System illustrates this effectively, showing the success rates of 10th graders on the 2008 ISTEP based by school district throughout the metro area:


Indianapolis Public Schools (IPS) occupies the amorphous blob in the center of Marion County, colored in the palest shade of purple. Like most inner city school systems with high concentrations of poverty, its statistics are unimpressive: according to the legend to the left of the map, less than 43% of students in the high schools there passed the Math and English portions of the ISTEP, the worst results in the entire region. The eight surrounding “collar townships” performed somewhat better, with results all above 43% and some as high as 75%. (Of course, none of these statistics compare to the stellar scores in surrounding counties such as Hamilton or Hendricks, where the darkest purple indicates ISTEP pass rates of 75% to 92%. Nonetheless, the focus must remain on Marion County, where the various school districts labor valiantly to improve academic performance, yet only a few districts show above average results. Which areas show the highest desirability? Two of the townships rate more highly than the others. Washington Township north of the IPS district (outlined in yellow) is generally perceived as a strong school district; while racially diverse, it also houses many of the most affluent households in the entire metro, as well as some of the families with the highest levels of college education. Franklin Township, to the southeast of IPS (outlined in green), is not as wealthy as Washington Township, but is much more homogeneous, remaining predominantly white and middle class, with relatively new exurban development.

Lastly, and most compellingly, the two enclaves with their own school districts, Speedway (outlined in blue) and Beech Grove (outlined in brown), also have ISTEP pass rates above the city’s mediocre average. Both districts abut gritty parts of the low-performing Indianapolis Public district, yet their respective districts continue to perform relatively well and generally have strong reputations. Could they be the Indianapolis equivalent of Bexley? The racial composition suggests that might be the case:


Like Bexley, both Speedway and Beech Grove are more homogeneous than their surrounding city and metro. Beech Grove in particular is overwhelmingly white. But neither Speedway nor Beech Grove share Bexley’s economic advantages. While Bexley’s 2000 median household income was $70,200, placing it well above the national average, Beech Grove’s median income was $41,548 and Speedway’s $37,713. Neither town can claim the affluence of Bexley; it would be safe to refer to either community as lower-middle or even working class. Thus, the differences between Beech Grove or Speedway and the Indianapolis that surrounds them is far less striking than is the case with Bexley and Columbus. Nonetheless, they remain more desirable than many sections of Indianapolis because their school system have a superior reputation, even if nowhere near as highly ranked as the system in the better educated suburb of Bexley. The differentials in property values between Beech Grove/Speedway and Indianapolis are far less profound than between Bexley and Columbus, but they’re still significant enough that a low income family looking to get out of the IPS district may struggle to afford the housing in Beech Grove or Speedway just a few miles away. In all three cases, the enclaves are less ethnically and economically diverse than their surrounding communities, which translates to a selling point for families looking for a good school system that fits within their price range.

This study has already asserted that most Americans generally demonstrate a value for education through the population growth trends that favor suburbs with great schools. These enclaves in Indianapolis and Columbus would suggest that Americans value homogeneity just as much: rich, white communities can grow astronomically yet remain rich and white. I’m not convinced that Americans are so fixated on racial prejudice that they are identifying these suburbs as “good” solely because they are mostly white, but a couple of embedded demographic features are shaping these settlement patterns. 1) Whites remain the numerically dominant race as well as the wealthiest, and they consequently have the greatest freedom to move into communities of their choice (though the numeric and economic dominance of whites is slowly declining). 2) Homogeneous educational environments do tend to foster greater academic success, whether homogeneity is ethnic or (particularly) economic.

If this latter postulate seems discomfiting, it’s not derived from racial or ethnic prejudice so much as the fact that homogeneity of all types facilitates efficiency of resources. The more racially diverse school districts in Indianapolis, such as IPS or the collar townships, must cater to a broader economic array, from the affluent to the extreme poor, while the suburbs generally only educate the affluent, regardless of race. School districts in Indianapolis (excluding to the two homogenous enclaves of Speedway and Beech Grove) require English as a Learned Language (ELL) programs for an increasing array of students. Even if the suburban school districts enroll some ethnic minorities and foreign-born citizens, the language and cultural barriers are smaller because these ethnic minority families already had the financial strength to move to the suburbs. Indianapolis Public Schools and the surrounding collar townships must assimilate a rapidly growing array of foreign born students. For better or for worse, economically and culturally homogenous communities—the Bexley, the Beech Grove, or the Speedway—typically demand far fewer resources in aggregate and are therefore easier to teach.

Buying the Right School System

Despite a non-exclusionary structure that resembles a public good, school districts are first and foremost competitive commodities. When highly marketable, school districts endow land inside their invisible boundaries with greater value. Therefore, both municipal governments and the electorates themselves have commodified schools so intractably that it has become their ambition to refine the district continuously, ideally so that it attracts the demographic base that will allow it to perform at a high standard as efficiently as possible.

Where does this leave the other schools? The final section of my already complete report will focus on my own recommendations for how schools that are neither suburbs of a single social class, nor impoverished inner-city can harness their diverse demographics to remain recognizable and competitive.