Review: Death of a Suburban Dream: Race and Schools in Compton, CA, Southern California Quarterly, (96.4) pgs. 476 - 479 (original) (raw)

“In the Shadow of the Happiest Place on Earth”: Schools as Community Institutions in Anaheim

VUE (Voices in Urban Education)

It has been my great good fortune in this life to work, in different ways and at different times, with two extraordinary educators. I have known Pedro Noguera, now Dean of the Rossier School of Education at USC, for upwards of 30 years, since he was my undergraduate professor at UC Berkeley. I have known Michael Matsuda, Superintendent of the Anaheim Union High School District (AUHSD), since we initiatied a robust partnership for leadership preparation between our two institutions in 2018. In Hebrew, a shadchan is a matchmaker. When I read the call for this special issue of VUE, with its focus on schools as community institutions, I thought of them both. My role was mainly that of shadchan; I proposed the Conversations in Urban Educationersation to the two of them, and edited the published version into something comprehensible for a reader outside of the California context. Dean Noguera and Superintendent Matsuda had met before; on December 16, 2021, Noguera interviewed Matsuda via ...

"A Few of The Brightest, Cleanest Mexican Children": School Segregration as a Form of Mundane Racism in Oxnard, California, 1900-1940. Harvard Educational Review, 82 (2012): 1-25.

"In this article, David G. García, Tara J. Yosso, and Frank P. Barajas examine the early twentieth-century origins of a dual schooling system that facilitated the reproduction of a cheap labor force and the marginalization of Mexicans in Oxnard, Cali- fornia. In their analysis of the 1930s Oxnard Elementary School District board minutes, alongside newspapers, maps, scholarly accounts, and oral history interviews, they argue that school segregation privileged Whites and discriminated against Mexi- cans as a form of mundane racism. The authors build on previous scholarship documenting the pervasiveness of racism in U.S. society to define mundane racism as the systematic subordination of Mexicans that occurred as a commonplace, ordinary way of conducting business within and beyond schools. Their findings complicate narratives that emphasize complete segregation in “Mexican schools,” while acknowledging the resistance of parents and the resilience of their children."

Until the Revolution: Analyzing the Politics, Pedagogy, and Curriculum of the Oakland Community School

Espacio, Tiempo y Educación, 2020

In United States conversations about progressive pedagogy and alternative forms of education, the longstanding models that scholars used were predominantly white. African-American historians of education have problematized this narrative. More recently, the interdisciplinary field of Black Power studies has increased investigation into Afrocentric pedagogy and Black politically-engaged education after World War II (Rickford, 2016). While much attention has been paid to the freedom schools, educational sites run by Black revolutionary nationalists have received less attention. One particular site is the Oakland Community School (OCS), the Black Panther Party's full-time day school. Initially a combined day-care and home school known as the Children's House in 1970, the school changed to become the Intercommunal Youth Institute in 1971. It then operated as the Oakland Community School from 1974 until 1982, earning acclaim from the California Department of Education and the governor of California (Gore, Theoharis & Woodard, 2009). While multiple historical studies detail the pedagogical contours of the school and its community engagement, very few elicit the voices of former students. This work incorporates such voices, in conjunction with traditional archives and digital archival material, as a means of contextualizing the OCS within the Black Panther Party's politics of the period and the school's implications for contemporary education.