An Enduring Legacy of Inequality

This concluding chapter provides a summary of the volume's principal points and larger implications. It shows that Kansas City offers a nearly archetypal case of the metropolitan revolution, with suburban sprawl transforming the region's social, economic, and demographic landscape. At the same time the educational system changed profoundly as well, with so-called suburban districts growing rapidly and the once preeminent central city district suffering a near collapse in significance and stature. It is telling that school district boundaries, rather than municipal limits, became the lines demarking suburban versus urban residential zones. This institutional form of education became a badge of status as a consequence, a telling indication of the power that this particular dimension of metropolitan life came to represent.