The Changing Terrain of the Suburbs: Examining Race, Class, and Place in Suburban Schools and Communities (original) (raw)
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Reframing Suburbs: Race, Place, and Opportunity in Suburban Educational Spaces
Educational Researcher, 2020
M ost students in the United States attend suburban schools, yet the vast majority of education scholarship focuses on urban schools rather than suburban ones. For example, between 2000 and 2018, of the articles published in the top five American Educational Research Association Journals, 80% explicitly focused on urban schools, 11.7% focused on suburban schools, and 8% focused on rural schools (Diamond & Posey-Maddox, 2020). Indeed, in contrast to "urban" and "rural" education, "suburban" education is not a keyword option for articles published in AERA journals. This is, at least in part, because many core educational issues-race and class inequities, demographic change, immigration, and English learning-are commonly perceived to play out most acutely in urban (and even rural) contexts instead of suburban schools. Our collective image of metropolitan regions is rooted in a conceptual shorthand that identifies urban spaces with minoritized youth, high poverty, lan
This report is a clarion call for those paying attention to the changing racial and ethnic demographics of this country and its suburbs in particular. It is the in-depth story of one suburban county and its public schools as the demographics of who lives in the suburbs versus the cities in the 21 st Century is shifting quickly, as the affluent and the poor, the black and the white are trading places across urban-suburban boundary lines. The same story could be told about hundreds of suburban counties across the country that are facing similar pressures and approaching similar breaking points.
Educational Studies, 2023
Within public schools in gentrifying U.S. neighbourhoods, affluent, White families’ priorities collide with those of families from economically disadvantaged and racially minoritized groups. Grounded in raced-classed theories of space and place, we examine how various indicators of gentrification intersect with parents’ experiences in schools and how parents negotiate competing claims to space amid neighbourhood change. We foreground interviews with parents from gentrifying schools in Greater Boston and Washington D.C. Findings reveal how neighbourhood racial and socioeconomic changes informed parents’ connections to schools. Residential proximity to schools and commercial centres shaped parents’ sense of belonging in schools. Parents’ negotiation of racial, spatial, and classed hierarchies in schools and neighbourhoods reveals a need to situate their experiences and perspectives as foundations for school reforms and urban planning initiatives that address and contest social and educational inequities.
2012
Woven throughout the history of the United States is a narrative of human movement. The story of this country, we argue, is a tale of the constant flow of people across geographic spaces-both voluntary and forced immigrations, migrations, and the settlements of vil lages, city neighborhoods, and suburban communities. Beginning with Native Americans' ancestors who traversed the Bering Straight, "movement" has been a central, identifying theme of this nation. 'The flow of several waves of European immigrants onto colonial shores and across the plains and the haulage of millions of Africans via the slave trade redefined the United States demographically and geopolitically, as did the mass migration of freed African Americans from the South to the North and from the farms to the cities in the 20th century. The post-World War II construction of suburbia enabled the European immigrants and their dece dents to migrate from the cities to the suburbs en masse, changing not only the character of suburbia but also the cities and ethnic enclaves they left behind. As if choreographed by the federal government, local zoning laws and real estate markets, this flow of whites to the suburbs was synchronized with the arrival of African American migrants into specific and highly contained city neighborhoods. But even the resulting racially segregated pattern of "vanilla suburbs" and "chocolate cities" that seemed fairly stable by the late 1970s across most metro areas was subject to change. Beginning in the late 1960s, new waves of immigrants, primarily from Latin Amer ica and Asia, entered the urban neighborhoods abandoned by their European immigrant predecessors. By the 1980s, growing numbers of African Americans had begun migrating to the suburbs. And, in the last decade, more Latino and Asian immigrants have chosen suburban communities as their port of entry to the United States. At the same time, whitesparticularly affluent and well-educated professionals-are migrating back into cosmopolitan and gentrified city neighborhoods, opting out of increasingly diverse suburbs. Within these patterns of movement and change, human agency-manifested in the desire or need to leave one place and seek another-has been shaped, contorted, and compro mised by social structures and powerful norms that create, maintain, and legitimize deepseated inequalities in our society. This intersection between migration patterns and their spatial outcomes-for example, the dispersal of people across separate and often unequal places according to variables such as race/ethnicity, class, and social status-is central to 125
Teachers College Record
Background: Research has demonstrated the importance of understanding the multiple factors that shape parents' relationships with schools, including the resources parents have at their disposal, their own educational histories, and the influence of school cultures and policies. Less is known, however, about how parents' engagement relates to their everyday experiences across school and community spaces, particularly for Black parents in nonurban, predominantly White settings. Purpose: The purpose of this study is to examine Black parents' school and community experiences in a predominantly White suburb and how their experiences and engagement may vary based on social class and gender (and their intersections). Participants: A socioeconomically mixed sample of 56 Black parents (16 men, 40 women) with children in Grades K-7 participated in the study, as well as 2 longtime residents whose children attended district schools. Research Design: The findings are based on an ethnographic study of Black family-school relationships in a predominantly White Wisconsin suburb. The data include semi-structured parent interviews; field notes taken in monthly districtwide African American Parents (AAPO) meetings; an analysis of district and AAPO documents related to district resources, demographics, academics, and family engagement; and an analysis of census and demographic trends in the suburb and the broader county. Findings: Results reveal that parents supported their children's education in a variety of ways, and most parents valued the resources and opportunities the suburban district and community context provided their children. Yet parents described experiences with racial microaggressions in their interactions with school officials and community members. These microaggressions were often classed and gendered, and, for a number of parents, relived and reinforced in their children's schools. The results reveal both the everyday racism Black parents encountered in the predominantly White suburban community and school district, as well as the dynamic ways they navigated, resisted, and sought to change barriers to Black student and family success. Recommendations: The research findings suggest the utility of educators recognizing the often racialized arenas many Black parents traverse in their everyday lives, legitimating parents' alternative forms of engagement, and building on what parents are already doing to support their children's education and well-being. Given the growing number of students of color in
Confronting Suburban School Resegregation in California
Confronting Suburban School Resegregation in California investigates the struggles in a central California school district, where a predominantly white residential community recently undertook a decade-long campaign to "secede" from an increasingly Latino-attended school district. Drawing on years of ethnographic research, Clayton A. Hurd explores the core issues at stake in resegregation campaigns as well as the resistance against them mobilized by the working-class Latino community. From the emotionally charged narratives of local students, parents, teachers, school administrators, and community activists emerges a compelling portrait of competing visions for equitable and quality education, shared control, and social and racial justice.