Community Schools as Urban District Reform: Analyzing Oakland's Political and Racial Landscape Through Oral Histories

• In Event: 75.061 - Roundtable Session 34
  In Roundtable Session: 75.061-9 - Community-Based Education Reform: Implications for Policy and Governance

Abstract

The Oakland Unified School District’s experiences enacting its current reform agenda exemplify the tensions and opportunities that arise when district leaders attempt to craft a large-scale, community-based, democratic reform. Since 2011, the district has designed and begun rolling out the nation’s first-ever, district-wide full-service community schools policy. Yet individuals’ awareness of and receptivity to this community-based reform, characterized largely by its acknowledgement of structural racism and its subsequent attempt to provide wrap-around social, emotional, academic and health-related supports to historically marginalized racial groups, depends in part on their personal, professional, and political status. The ways in which different stakeholders experience this ostensibly democratic reform rests on their lived histories within Oakland’s diverse communities.
The purpose of this paper is to analyze the multiple political and racial histories that have coalesced to produce support for or resistance to the Oakland Unified School District’s full-service community schools policy. We draw on three interdisciplinary concepts to guide our analysis. First, we employ the concept of structural racialization, which helps explain why individuals’ access to opportunity is not equally available to all, but rather is “produced and regulated by institutions, institutional interactions and individuals [that] jointly and differently provide and deny access along lines of race, gender, class, and other markers of social difference” (Grant-Thomas & powell, 2006, p. 2). Second, we draw on urban regime theory (Shipps, 2003; Stone, 1989) to analyze which local political arrangements and coalitions have shaped Oakland’s evolving reform agenda and the eventual political responses to its full-service community schools model. Finally, we use the concepts of intra- and inter-race social capital, which refer to the personal and institutional bonds within a racial community, as well as the cross-sector bonds of trust and cooperation across racial communities (Orr, 1999, p. 8).
We use these concepts to frame our analysis of oral history interview data with key stakeholders who represent the district’s major constituencies to explore the reasons why each individual, positioned differently within the larger district system and the city landscape, may or may not support a seemingly democratic, community-based reform. Through their voices, the paper explains the ways in which different local constituencies can interpret an urban district’s priorities, conceive of the appropriate role for a local district, and form community-based coalitions that either further or obstruct this democratic, equity-minded reform.

Authors

• Tina M. Trujillo, University of California - Berkeley

• Laura Elena Hernandez, University of California - Berkeley

• Tonja Michelle Jarrell, University of California - Berkeley

• René Espinoza Kissell, University of California - Berkeley