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This chapter explores the Advanced Placement (AP) program in suburban school districts. Even as urban centers like Fort Worth and New York typify today's livelier venues for AP expansion, the program has deep roots in the prosperous suburbs that abut them. Along with elite private schools, upscale suburban high schools were among the program's earliest adopters, and they remain natural habitats for a nationally benchmarked, high-status venture that gives strong students a head start on the college education that they are almost certainly going to get and perhaps an extra advantage in gaining admission to the universities they aspire to. Yet they are also ripe for attention as they struggle with equity and growth issues of their own. The chapter then reviews two well-known yet very different suburban districts: Dublin City Schools in Ohio and Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland. Both are celebrated as education successes in their states and both boast long and impressive AP track records. Both, however, face distinctive challenges as they seek to serve today's constituents. Their stories illustrate how AP is functioning in places that know it well yet continue to evolve with it.

This chapter examines the evolution and efficacy of Montgomery County's growth policy as a technique for staging growth in concert with the expansion of public facilities and in light of concerns for environmental, social, and economic sustainability. It first provides a background on the Adequate Public Facilities Ordinance (APFO), adopted with the aim of preventing “premature” development anywhere, before discussing the Montgomery County Planning Board's three reports that developed a conceptual model for growth management and perfected an approach to using growth forecasts to assess risks of alternative levels of public investment aimed at sustaining acceptable levels of service. It also discusses the Board's next two reports, which laid the foundation of the growth management system that endured for the next thirty years. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the the link between Montgomery's planning politics and growth policy.

This chapter examines the strategy and tactics of planning politics in the creation of Montgomery County's Agricultural Reserve and in protecting it from fragmentation by exurban subdivisions and other incompatible uses. It begins with an overview of the General Plan's recommendation to organize development in corridors separated by wedges of rural landscape, open spaces, and low-density suburbs. This is followed by a discussion of the proposed Dickerson wastewater treatment plant and force main that were rejected by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 1977. The chapter also considers the Functional Master Plan for the preservation of farmland, along with the successes and problems of the Agricultural Reserve. Finally, it highlights lessons that can be drawn from the Agricultural Reserve project.

This chapter examines whether Montgomery County's planning politics served the public interest. It first considers the various schools of thought regarding the public interest, including utilitarianism, Public Choice Theory, pluralism, John Rawls' theory of justice, and Regime Theory. It then reduces these theories to a number of questions about how well Montgomery's planning politics satisfies different substantive and procedural notions of public interest; for example, whether the General Plan and the pattern of development fostered by it have embodied widely accepted public values; whether the overall pattern of development has been more beneficial than costly to the county as a whole; whether decisions have been made in ways that honor core principles of fairness and democratic governance; or whether the politics of planning has fostered the development of civic capital and problem solving.

This chapter examines how planning errors combined with developer violations, public protests, politics, economic recession, and environmental impacts to create a major development scandal and complicated Clarksburg, Montgomery County's last major greenfield initiative. It begins with an overview of the 1968 master plan for Clarksburg, followed by a discussion of the new urbanism envisioned for the proposed corridor city. It then considers the politics underlying the approval of the plan, along with the legislation that was drafted to create a three-step process for establishing development districts. It also recounts the scandal that rocked the Clarksburg project and concludes with an overview of useful lessons that can be drawn from Montgomery's experience as a natural experiment in the limits of local planning politics.

This chapter examines the problems that arose during the planning and development of three corridor cities in Montgomery County: Rockville, Gaithersburg, and Germantown. The idea of corridor cities melded the interests of Montgomery's miniature and commercial republics—a rare consensus in land use policy. According to the General Plan, Rockville, Gaithersburg, and Germantown would each be developed as a complete, compact “new town.” The chapter considers the opposition of the municipalities of Rockville and Gaithersburg to the idea of becoming corridor cities and how the problem of many governments obstructed development in accord with the General Plan (although Rockville eventually evolved in a way close to the vision). Germantown presented a different problem, that of many builders without a coordinating master developer. Rockville, Gaithersburg, and Germantown offer lessons on the effectiveness and limitations of using infrastructure extension and regulations to manage the pace and character of development.

This chapter tells the story of the Depression-era, Jim Crow world from which Julius LeVonne Chambers emerged, recounting his childhood, family, and formative experiences. LeVonne Chambers (Julius Chambers's birth name) was born in October 1936, in the tiny crossroads town of Mt. Gilead, in rural Montgomery County, North Carolina. No black child born to such a time and place easily escaped the fetters imposed by the South's rigid racial segregation. Not one black child in ten in Montgomery County completed high school in those years; not one in one hundred graduated from college. Yet, by some combination of ability, effort, and good fortune, and with the unstinting support of his parents and community, Chambers set himself on a path that would lead to, at age thirty-four, to the appellant's lectern at the U.S. Supreme Court.

This chapter examines how planning politics produced a distinctive pattern of development in Montgomery County over a century of land use decisions. It introduces a conceptual framework to help make sense of how and why that particular development pattern emerged. It also considers the respective and complementary roles played by planners and politicians by focusing on the distinctive ways they think; the ideas and values that guide the principal interests that influence land use policy; and innovation, inertia, and transition in land use policy and the interests or values those policies reflected. The chapter shows that land use decisions reflected the “balance” struck between the reasoning of planners and politicians and the interests and values of the two virtual republics represented in the four governing regimes of different eras of county development. These two republics are rooted in Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian ideals and contest different notions of property rights, democracy, community welfare, efficiency, fairness, governance, and the public interest.

This book examines the impact of planning politics on the public interest by focusing on the case of Montgomery County and its land use policy. In particular, it considers Montgomery's pioneering approach to inclusionary zoning, the Moderate-Priced Dwelling Unit Ordinance, in terms of its effect on development patterns and the character and cost of housing. Montgomery was among the earliest fast-growing suburbs to stage development concurrently with the provision of public facilities. Its land use policies were efforts by the county's planners and politicians to solve practical problems in the public interest. The book analyzes the chain of strategic decisions that transformed Montgomery County from a rural hinterland of Washington, D.C. into a socially diverse urbanizing county of a million people in Maryland. This introduction provides an overview of the growth of suburbs and its implications for neighborhoods and residents, Montgomery County's suburbanization, and the organization of the book.

This book concludes with a discussion of Montgomery County's contribution to understanding planning politics. Montgomery's experience highlights the complementary roles and reasoning processes of planners and politicians as they sought to act in the public interest. One of the most valuable lessons planners and political leaders can take from Montgomery's cases is the importance of persistence in land use policy. This is evident in the General Plan, the Agricultural Reserve, and Silver Spring. Furthermore, Montgomery shows that planning matters even if planning politics is hard. This conclusion argues that planning for the next half-century will require a fusion of traditional land use planning with a broader capacity for rethinking Montgomery's role in the metropolitan, state, national, and world political economies. It ends by speculating on the county's future.

This chapter examines the decade-long political struggle for regime change that resulted in the adoption of Montgomery County's General Plan, On Wedges and Corridors: A General Plan for the Maryland-Washington Regional District, in 1964. As important as it is in planning literature, what makes the Wedges and Corridors General Plan a model is less its particular provisions or basic form than how it evolved from a static document into an organic “constitution” for land use policy with enough flexibility to adapt to new conditions in suburban life, the development industry, and the planning profession. The chapter first considers the Year 2000 Plan, first released on May 8, 1961, before discussing the planning politics underlying the Wedges and Corridors General Plan. It also provides an overview of broader lessons that can be learned from Montgomery's experience in approving Wedges and Corridors.

This chapter focuses on the trials, tribulations, and results of planning and managing redevelopment of two activity centers in Montgomery County: Friendship Heights and the Hills and Bethesda. It first considers the decision of the Committee on the Planning, Zoning and Development of Central Business Districts and Transit Station Areas to rethink its development strategy for the twelve Metro station areas under county jurisdiction. It then describes the committee's proposal for three Central Business District zones, called CBD-1, CBD-2, and CBD-3, which secured the approval of the Montgomery County Council. It also discusses the planning politics of Friendship Heights and Bethesda and shows how the two projects provided tests of the legal theories underlying new hybrid zones and for balancing land use with the capacity of public facilities, especially transportation.

This chapter examines the decline and revival of Silver Spring, the oldest commercial center in Montgomery County, and the important lessons it offers. The growth of Silver Spring followed a trajectory common in Montgomery. Large tracts were subdivided for homes, followed by commercial development along highways and at major intersections. Landowners and developers led the first fifty years of Silver Spring's development. By the mid-1970s, Silver Spring still generated a high level of retail sales, but the first signs of collapse were becoming evident at this time. A 1975 sector plan and the imminent arrival of Metro failed to revitalize the district. This chapter discusses the planning politics and redevelopment strategy that led to the transformation and eventual revival of Silver Spring. It describes the Silver Spring case as a testament to the importance of effective political leadership in ultimately resolving what had seemed an intractable problem.

This chapter focuses on White Flint, a 400-acre obsolete commercial strip on Montgomery County's most congested roadway, and some of the important lessons it offers with respect to successful planning politics. The most recent of Montgomery's efforts in planning for mixed-use, transit-oriented activity centers, White Flint was envisioned as the best place to create a model for a new generation of land use policy. The chapter discusses the plan for White Flint, the key issues that needed to be resolved before it could move forward, and the project planners' new approach to zoning. White Flint illustrates the value of careful economic analysis; engagement of major property owners and community groups in making plans; and willingness to abandon old ideas in favor of new ones that fit the circumstances at hand. The case of White Flint also highlights the problems of bureaucratic and political resistance to new ways of financing infrastructure.

William E. Ray (1896–1971) was a notable fiddler of his day and place. He won the Kosciusko fiddlers’ contest on at least one occasion (believed to be in the early 1930s), and was recalled by Hoyt Ming and Lonnie Ellis, among others. Ellis remembered the reserve of the Ray Brothers at the May 1930 recording session in Memphis that they all attended: unlike the other old-time players present, the Rays would not join casual picking sessions but kept to their room. Dr. A. M. Bailey also spoke about the Rays’ guarded reception of overtures of interest in their music. Will Ray’s fiddling is of a quality to make one pardon any eccentricities. While his tunes are less surprising than, say, Willie Narmour’s, his playing is uncommonly graceful, the frequent slides beautifully executed, the high parts rendered with sweetness. The fluid bowing occasionally recalls Gene Clardy, who lived for some years in Choctaw County and may have been known to him. Sandy Vardaman Ray (1903–77), guitarist on the records and singer of the two vocal numbers, taught in local public schools. He could also play banjo. Will Ray farmed, but in 1940 he was enumerated as a public-school teacher of music. In later years, both men lived in Kilmichael.

In the spring of 1970, Fannie Lou Hamer was in Chicago’s Loop College as part of its “Decade of Civil Rights History, 1960–1970” speakers’ series. Founded in 1962, Loop College, now known as Harold Washington College, also honored Hamer with a Citizen’s Achievement Citation in recognition of her civil rights activism. This chapter reproduces the speech delivered by Hamer at Loop College on May 27, 1970. Hamer began by recounting daily acts of resistance to Mississippi’s Jim Crow way of life, as well as the physical violence she experienced following her failed first attempt at voter registration and the abuse she endured nine months later in Winona. For the first time, Hamer also explicitly detailed the sexual violence she encountered in the Montgomery County Jail in Winona on June 9, 1963.