Race and Rigidity: Sociocultural Practices in a Market of Racially Segregated Charter Schools

• In Event: Lessons Lost in Six Decades Since Brown: Resurrecting the Sociocultural Dimensions of Race and Education

Abstract

In a post-Civil Rights era, and sixty years removed from the Supreme Court's Brown vs. Board of Education ruling, the promise of equal educational opportunity today is heralded by national leaders in the form of school choice and accountability. In all but 10 states across the country, charter schools have emerged in the past two decades as the primary form of a publicly funded school choice system, one that offers freedom and choice in exchange for greater accountability; a bargain that has produced nearly 5000 charters and serving well over one million students. As these schools function autonomously from local district oversight, they indeed have the potential to create not only the racially diverse settings intended by court orders so many years ago, but they can ideally provide the intangible qualities of a culturally rich and diverse repertoire of innovative curriculum and pedagogy. Indeed charter laws in most states indicate that an important feature of these schools is to serve as “pillars of innovation in instruction” and primarily for students otherwise marginalized in traditional school settings (Lubienski, 2005).
Yet the growing number of diverse choices in our free-market system today has not yielded the tangible fruits of racial diversity, nor the teaching of cultural diversity itself and its intangible value. Hence, this paper will explore not only what research indicates about the failure of charters to promote racial diversity in school enrollments, but how and why such schools have tended toward the promotion of culturally inflexible and rigid forms of teaching and learning.
This paper utilizes cultural sociology to explore the socio-cultural dimensions of teaching and learning in charter schools and its implications for social stratification. Using theoretical and empirical examples from sociologists like Pierre Bourdieu, Prudence Carter, and Basil Bernstein, I consider what the beliefs and practices of 20 charter school leaders in one urban community means for the (re)production and transformation of dominant group and socio-cultural relations. In short, this framework recognizes that the forms of teaching and learning sanctioned or discouraged across schools are implicated in cultural struggles that challenge social group relations and stratification, expands or restricts possibilities for social change, and facilitates the production or transformation of social identities.
Results from this paper provide information not simply about the ways that socio-cultural approaches to teaching and learning, but indeed pedagogy altogether, have been ‘left behind’ (Trujillo, 2011) amid strong focus on managerial restructuring, or instrumental logics of test-score production, or individual, color-blind rationales for success. The paper also offers sites of contestation and struggle, on the part of charter leaders, whereby many grapple with the need for policies that reward culturally diverse forms of innovation in teaching. The paper will offer policy recommendations based on such struggles that can offer hope and possibility in the face of otherwise culturally homogenizing market forces.

Author

• Terrenda Corisa White, Teachers College, Columbia University