Gentrification and Parent Problem Solving in Schools

• In Event: Gentrification, Scarcity, and Closures: Public Engagement and Collective Action in Changing Urban Schools and Neighborhoods

Abstract

Although often defined in economic terms, gentrification is not purely an economic process. Gentrifying neighborhoods transform over time (from early stage to late stage), with successive waves of new residents and increased wealth. Research on collective efficacy in gentrifying neighborhoods demonstrates that “established” residents in gentrifying neighborhoods often have less influence on the formation and execution of community norms. This lack of influence is not, as early researchers determined, the outcome of an indifferent and deviant “underclass,” but a failure of spatial, institutional, and interpersonal factors that limit interaction across socioeconomic demographics.

Gentrifying families with school-age children may become substantially involved with their existing neighborhood public school, particularly at the elementary level, and this influx of new parents poses unique challenges and opportunities for parent problem solving in public school communities. Factions of “established” and “gentrifying” parents may work in parallel or at cross purposes. Alternatively, gentrifying school communities may capitalize on opportunities afforded by their diverse compositions. Namely, communities may leverage middle-class ties from the influx of new residents to facilitate problem solving and broker access to new resources.

While public schools do provide space for factions of established and gentrifying parents to interact and engage with each other, schools rarely facilitate the interpersonal skills required to create a truly inclusive public space. Parents may wish to work together to accomplish shared goals for schooling but they may lack the skills to do so across race and class lines. An intervention that educates parents on community organizing strategies (such as coalition building and conflict resolution) has the potential to create inclusive processes and outcomes, creating a “positive gentrification” that redistributes the new resources more equitably between gentrifying and established residents.

Do facilitated workshops on community organizing strategies in gentrifying schools create more inclusive parent social networks when compared to social networks of parents in gentrifying schools where there are only topical, informational workshops? Our mode of inquiry is a cross-case comparison of parent problem solving in two pairs of K-8 Philadelphia public schools in different stages of gentrification. One pair of schools is located in an under-resourced neighborhood experiencing the early stages of gentrification; the other pair in a neighborhood in a later stage of gentrification. Both pairs of schools have robust parent involvement programs. Within each pair of cases, facilitated workshops educate parents on community organizing strategies that could produce inclusive parent mobilization for better-resourced schools.

This paper contributes to scholarship about the use of community organizing strategies to improve public school education, particularly with groups marginalized by the urban power structure. Organizing produces bridging and bonding social capital between parents to strengthen collective efficacy. Workshops as an intervention in gentrifying schools can produce increased social capital for established parents, increased civic capacity for the school, and create a more positive gentrification process for the school and community, relative to schools without this intervention.

Authors

• Rand Quinn, University of Pennsylvania

• Akira Drake Rodriguez, University of Pennsylvania

• Amanda Jones-Layman, University of Pennsylvania