Racism in Philly suburban schools isn’t new and is a symptom of a deeper malady

The details in the recent discrimination complaint filed against the Pennridge School District in Bucks County are appalling.

Some students reportedly derided the “slanty” eyes of their Asian classmates. Others wielded the N-word as a weapon in school hallways and on school buses, in Snapchat conversations, and during school art projects. Still others responded to a lesson about Frederick Douglass by calling a Black classmate a slave.

Even more troubling is the district’s alleged response. According to the complaint — filed by local group the Pair UP Society, the NAACP of Bucks County, the Education Law Center, and the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School’s Advocacy for Racial and Civic Justice Clinic — Pennridge teachers ignored requests for meetings sent by parents of color worried about their children’s safety.

Pennridge administrators, meanwhile, allegedly handed out some short suspensions to students who used racial slurs — but harshly punished the children of color who fought back, not just with lengthy suspensions, but with criminal charges and 45-day bans from extracurricular activities. Not to be outdone, then-school board members, five of whom were reportedly affiliated with the right-wing group Moms for Liberty, disbanded the district’s diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, sparking a bitter fight for control of the board.

The elimination of DEI initiatives was a particularly bitter blow; the complaint against Pennridge’s 7,000-student school district describes an institution that suspends Black students at three times the rate of their white peers, even as white children are nearly five times as likely as their Black classmates to be enrolled in Advanced Placement courses.

“A lot of families think that’s just what we have to deal with if we want to live in the suburbs. But it takes a toll,” Adrienne King, an African American mother of two and the founder of the Pair UP Society, told me recently. “We’re taxpayers, too. We should be able to send our children to the public schools we’re paying for without fear of them being continually subjected to race-related bullying, harassment, and discrimination.”

Perhaps most alarming, however, is how pervasive such problems have become.

In recent years, families across the Philly suburbs have faced a barrage of racist incidents, from white children in Tredyffrin-Easttown recording themselves using the N-word to Quakertown students hurling rocks and slurs at football players and cheerleaders of rival Cheltenham. Such abuse — and the anger, frustration, and disillusionment that follow — all echo the stories of families living outside of Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, and Pittsburgh whom I spent the past four years following for a new book on the challenges facing suburbia, and the families who’ve pinned their hopes to its public schools.

The repetition suggests a deeper malady.

The roots of the tensions now tearing at suburban schools can be traced to the post-World War II suburbanization of America. The residential development boom was supposed to spread opportunity across the country. And it succeeded — at least for those first few generations of mostly white families like mine, who received guaranteed mortgage loans, massive tax breaks, and sparkling new infrastructure, including the public schools we spent decades molding in our own image.

Americans embraced the myth that endless, outward expansion could deliver the “suburban lifestyle dream” in perpetuity. When an older suburb’s infrastructure began to crumble, its tax base dwindled, and its test scores slipped, we refused to face facts and start the hard work of repair and renewal. Instead, millions of mostly white families like mine fled inner suburbs to newer suburbs one ring farther out, restarting the same cycle somewhere new, blithely confident we could outrun the debt, disinvestment, and disrepair we left in our wake.

There’s a term for trading quick bursts of short-term wealth for massive long-term liabilities that are pushed off onto future generations. It’s called a Ponzi scheme.

It’s called a Ponzi scheme.

In suburbia, this scheme has been fundamentally racialized, with Black, brown, and immigrant families all too often fighting to get into suburban communities, only to be met with racial hostility and fresh rounds of white flight, followed by an even more horrible realization: They’ve been stuck with the bill for all the opportunity whiter and wealthier families already extracted.

As tends to happen with Ponzi schemes, however, this cycle is starting to unravel.

One big reason is accelerating demographic changes. Bucks County, for example, was 91% white at the turn of the century, but has since seen its white population drop by more than 18,000 people as its Hispanic population grew by more than 26,000 people. Such change underpins the racial tensions inside Pennridge schools, which in the past decade alone lost roughly 20% of their white students, nearly 1,400 children in all.

Once, a critical mass of families would likely have fled such change for a newer suburb somewhere else. Now, though, many of those families feel stuck in place.

Hypothetically, the resulting racial tensions in suburban school districts like Pennridge could present an opportunity to acknowledge the corner we’ve painted ourselves into, learn from our mistakes, and proactively minimize the harm done to our children as we search for a way out.

Instead, we’re seeing concerted efforts to ban books by Black authors and scrub the curriculum of references to racial oppression.

From the content school systems teach to the budgets they enact, the discipline policies they impose to the enrichment opportunities they extend, there are countless facets of suburban schools that desperately need to be critiqued and improved.

But for the disillusioned suburban parents of color forced to have adult conversations with their young children, the core issue is at once more simple and far deeper than that.

“It feels like we’re taking our kids’ innocence away, and it just gets normalized,” King told me. “That’s why I try to impress upon people that what’s happening and how it’s being responded to are not OK.”

Benjamin Herold is a Philadelphia-based journalist and the author of “Disillusioned: Five Families and the Unraveling of America’s Suburbs.” Learn more at benjaminherold.com.