Undermined on All Sides: Suburban School Policies and Practices Thwarting Black Student Academic Success

• In Event: 30.038 - Underprepared, Undermined, and Underrated: Policy and Schooling Practices That Inhibit Equitable Academic Success for Students of Color

Abstract

Objectives/Purposes:
Attempts at achieving equal educational opportunity for Black students are touted as unfair and antithetical to equality (Castagno, 2014; Hochschild, 1984). According to Crenshaw (1988), a prominent critical race legal theorist, “society has embraced the rhetoric of equal opportunity without fulfilling its promise” (p. 1347). Teachers are uniquely positioned to implement equity-oriented acts and to witness attacks on equal educational opportunity. In this paper, the author examines factors that circumscribed equity-oriented actions for Black students in a majority White suburban school.

Theoretical Framework:
Aligning with the conference’s focus on equal educational opportunity, the author applies a critical race in education theoretical framework (CRT) and its analytical lens of expansive and restrictive views of equality. An expansive view of equality strives to combat the material conditions Blacks faced and concentrated on “equality as a result” while the restrictive view adheres to equality as a process. (Crenshaw, 1988)

Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry:
The author utilized data collected during a yearlong ethnographic study (Emerson et al, 2011) of a predominately White high school in a suburban, Midwestern metropolitan area.

Data sources, evidence, objects or materials:
The researcher relied on semi-structured interviews, classroom observations, and education policy documents.

Results and/or substantiated conclusions or warrants for argument/point of view:
Findings highlighted that teachers’ equity-driven actions were circumscribed by three factors (1) the district’s retreat from implementing a voluntary interdistrict transfer desegregation plan, (2) school-level institutional practices, and (3) teachers’ racial inequitable acts toward Black students.
Driven by White homeowners’ fears that dismal test scores would negatively impact home values, the district undermined the goal of the longstanding voluntary desegregation plan by choosing to admit mostly primary school students. At the school-level, administrators relied on a restrictive equality view to overturn the criterion for admission into the Knowledge Center, the school’s only grade-recovery class. The sole criterion for admission was having previously failed a course. Because classes were small and permanently staffed by three certified teachers, students received individualized attention. Thereafter, many White students enrolled who were within the top quartile of their class. This siphoned off the three teachers’ times and resources. Lastly, at the classroom-level some teachers argued that the Knowledge Center offered “too much assistance” and made it difficult to ascertain what percentage of an assignment had been completed by students. However, only Black students in the Knowledge Center recounted having their work marked down by teachers. The three Knowledge Center teachers corroborated Black students stories and also identified that their enrolled White students had not experienced this.

Scientific or scholarly significance of the study of the work:
By examining one suburban high school the author illuminated a multifaceted approach that coalesced to undermine Black student academic success and equality of opportunity. The author contributes to a burgeoning field of study focused on Black students in suburban schools (Chapman, 2014; Lewis & Diamond, 2015) and ways equal educational opportunity rhetoric entrenches racial inequalities.

Author

• Shameka Nija Powell, Tufts University