Debating Equity through Integration: School Officials' Decision-Making and Community Advocacy During a School Rezoning in Williamsburg, Virginia (original) (raw)

The Politics of School Rezoning in the "Cradle of a Nation": Racial Segregation, Settler Colonialism, and Private Property in Williamsburg, Virginia

Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, 2022

Rezoning public school attendance boundaries offers important possibilities for promoting school integration; however, it tends to generate contentious debates, often with white, middle-class parents furiously opposing school reassignments. In this paper, we ask: what logics and discourses do race and class-privileged parents draw on to justify educational inequities, and how are such discourses employed? To explore these questions we analyze a high school rezoning controversy in the Williamsburg-James City County School Division in Eastern Virginia. We conducted a content analysis of public commentary collected from school board meetings, two district-administered surveys, and social media and local news outlets. We bring together Critical Race and Settler Colonial theoretical perspectives to argue that white, middle-class parents and residents mobilized the intertwined logics of private property and whiteness to claim entitlement to the highly ranked Jamestown High School. They did so by combining well-worn colorblind, deficiency frameworks with argumentative logics that leveraged their position as property owners in affluent neighborhoods. First, they linked home ownership in expensive, residential subdivisions to "responsible parenting," "freedom," and "choice." Second, they constructed the social bonds and "community" forged in overwhelmingly white, high-cost, residential subdivisions as valuable to schools, making residents deserving of assignment to "the best school." This analysis sheds crucial light on the discursive linkages between color-blind racism and white private property and how white, class-privileged parents mobilize these deeply intertwined logics to defend entitlement to educational resources.

Policy Storms at the Central Office: Conflicting Narratives of Racial Equity and Segregation at School Committee Meetings

Research in Educational Policy and Management, 2020

This article reports findings from a multiyear critical ethnography that examined race talk dilemmas of school leaders at the central office at a small urban school district to understand why racialized educational policies and practices still persist against African American students. This study takes a structural approach to investigating the impact that race talk has on educational policymaking at the local district level. The guiding research question in this paper examines how we can understand educational reform and policy implementation and the unintended consequences of those interventions through the local from a historical context.

Finding the old in the new: on race and class in US charter school debates

Race Ethnicity and Education, 2006

This study examines how charter school advocates and district administrators in a suburban US school district work in concert, although not in unison, to create a public charter school that reinforces the interests of White, economically advantaged families. Drawing on ethnographic data, interviews, census data and charter school documents, we find that district administrators, charter school parents, and charter school officials at the US Department of Education have a tendency to 'pass the buck' for responsibility about enrollment and admissions. We also find that district administrators are caught within the social and political dynamics of a school system that in this case compels them to make decisions and enact policies that reinforce existing hierarchies. Our findings contribute to mounting evidence that rather than liberate students from the educational inequalities inherent within the regular public school system, charter schools hold the potential to reproduce racial exclusion and class stratification.

Killing Two Achievements with One Stone: The Intersectional Impact of Shelby County on the Rights to Vote and Access to High Performing Schools

2016

The Civil Rights Movement sought to ensure access to the right to vote and to quality education. Although these two pursuits are historically inseparable, scholars have addressed education and voting rights as separate struggles within one movement. This Article addresses the intersection of educational equity and voting rights by assessing the role of the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder on Black voters’ ability to participate in the politics of education and educational policy via school board selection processes. This Article argues that the Court’s decision in Shelby County restricted access to political participation for Black voters in New Orleans. In particular, this Article argues that the Shelby County decision allows states to use the charter school movement to displace predominately Black and elected school boards with predominately White and non-elected school boards. Furthermore, this Article asserts that there are better formats for charter school go...

Divided We Fall: The Story of Separate and Unequal Suburban Schools 60 Years after Brown v. Board of Education

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.

Confronting complexities of public school integration: School district leaders of diversity and equity navigating the professional, the personal, and the political

2013

This study of school integration policy examines discussions about how race, ethnicity and class operate in schools, and how concepts of diversity, opportunity, and educational equity are constructed in local and state discourses. Although many studies have examined policy implementation from the top-down, and from-bottom-up‖ (front-line) perspectives, I chose to situate this study from the middle, as an overlooked but essential part of the work done on school desegregation / integration in the state of Minnesota is conducted by a group of people positioned in intermediary roles. These district leaders are tasked with promoting diversity and equity initiatives in a complex policy environment, one in which economic priorities relative to educational funding are constantly shifting and changing demographics are changing broader social environments. Exploring new understandings of the role of diversity in education offers an important look at how such educational policies operate. This chapter reviews relevant aspects of the history of school desegregation / integration in the United States and introduces particularities of Minnesota's state policy context. I will then move on to the rest of the dissertation, in which I show how local school district diversity and equity leaders act as intermediary policy actors, interpreting messages of ideology and policy purpose from local and state sources and responding with efforts to influence policy at both levels. The United States is ostensibly committed to desegregated public schooling, as evidenced by the landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision and subsequent efforts across states to legislate school integration. After a period of aggressive enforcement, however, many school districts were released from court-ordered mandates to address racial isolation of students. Concurrently, a demand for a return to neighborhood schools was heard in many communities, resulting in the dismantling of busing and magnet programs. Many school districts across the country are now more segregated by Gateway Falls Cedar Bend-Riverville-Lakestone Sisseton Plains job title

“My eyes were opened to the lack of diversity in our best schools”: Re-conceptualizing competitive school choice policy as a racial formation

The Urban Review, 2017

This article documents minority youth sense-making around the concept of diversity and the founding of a youth activist group that seeks spaces for policy thinking and protesting against racial inequalities in selective enrollment schools and access to the high quality education that those schools often provide. Utilizing the sociological theory of racial formation and the concept of racial projects, this article draws on data from a critical ethnography. The author argues that youth activists offer a critical perspective for researchers and policy-makers in the face of neoliberal school choice policy. Findings reveal that youth activists understand a lack of diversity as racial imbalance in high status schools, and that they expose structural inequalities that are embedded in policy structures and processes such as selective enrollment high schools. Implications are discussed to show how re- conceptualizing policy as a racial formation can bring structural and institutional racist practices into view in hopes of transforming district policies to offer access to high quality schools for all students.