Toward a Multivocal Research Agenda: A Review of the Literature on Gentrification and Public Education

• In Event: Tensions Between School Choice and Neighborhood Schools in the Changing City

Abstract

Cities across the United States have witnessed a reversal of the decades-long flight of White or middle-class residents from urban centers to the suburbs. This demographic shift has prompted local officials, including school reformers, to reinvest and revitalize under-resourced communities to make them more attractive to White and middle-class families through commercial incentives, housing policies, and school reforms that are part of the broader trend of gentrification. Although proponents of gentrification-related reforms argue that the process will benefit upper- and lower-income residents alike, the extent to which the reforms achieve their intended and assumed policy goals remains opaque. This paper examines gentrification’s impact on public education, focusing on the ways that parent gentrifiers and non-gentrifying parents’ choices are transforming urban educational markets.

The debate on the effects of gentrification motivated two independently conducted literature reviews. The first review sought to understand the educational choices of middle-class residents and how those decisions affected public schools in gentrifying communities, and the second review examined gentrification’s effects on the educational opportunities and social networks of children and their families who previously resided in gentrifying communities.

Findings from the two reviews described above comprise this paper’s findings. The paper’s coauthors conducted a search of electronic databases for relevant empirical works on gentrification and public education. Sources included in the review were published after 1990 and set in a midsize or large school district in the United States that has experienced gentrification. The coauthors supplemented search results with additional sources identified through reviews of relevant bibliographies. The final dataset includes 44 peer-reviewed studies that examine the effects of gentrification on schools in the United States across seven cities. The paper’s authors analyzed sources to identify emergent themes about the interactions among families and children in gentrifying school communities.

The review of the literature identified key themes about how gentrifying parents used their capital to improve their children’s schools. Contrary to assumptions that all students benefit equally from the investments of gentrifying families, the literature revealed that non-gentrifying families did not always benefit from these investments. For example, researchers reported that lower-income children and parents were marginalized from middle-class social networks and in their interactions with teachers and administrators.

The review found that the existing literature frequently emphasizes the contributions and experiences of White, gentrifying families; the limited conception of who drives gentrification and school improvement limits the potential of the literature to understand dynamic fissures around class and race. Further, few studies incorporate the perspectives of all stakeholders, such as principals, teachers, and long-time community members. Thus, the paper calls for a research agenda that incorporates critical perspectives and draws on multivocal literatures (Malen & Ogawa, 1991) to develop a cogent understanding of gentrification’s effects on public education. As gentrification expands across urban and suburban centers, researchers must understand its effects on both the physical environment and the lived experiences of residents – newcomer and longtime, wealthy and low income, White and Black.

Authors

• Alisha Butler, University of Maryland - College Park

• Bradley Quarles, University of Maryland College Park