Facilitating Acceptance or Rejection: How Schools and School Leaders Mediate Urban Gentrification

• In Event: School Leadership and the Public Good: Reclaiming Community, Advocacy, and Justice

Abstract

There is a long tradition of research on gentrification and its effects on neighborhoods (Lees, Slater & Wyly, 2008). More recently, there is a growing body of work on the impact of gentrification on urban schools (Anderson, 2013; Cucchiara, 2009; Posey –Maddox, 2014). This body of work critically examines the role of gentry parents on schools and the implication of broader citywide policy that has been the source of much of the displacement of poor and working class Black and Brown people in cities. Although research on the specific practices of principals within the context of gentrification is limited, education scholars show that school leaders may play significant roles in the gentrification of their schools (Burns Stillman, 2013; Gordon, 2008, Smith and Stovall, 2008). Drawing on Anderson’s (1990) work on mediation and Bell’s (1992) Racial Realism Theory the purpose of this theoretical paper is to explore the implications of neoliberal policies such as school choice and entrepreneurial models of leadership on the mediatory practices of public school principals working in schools in gentrifying neighborhoods.

Illuminating the absence of race in principal perceptions and mediatory practices Anderson (1990) argues that the “legitimation” of mainstream models of leadership such as entrepreneurial models, often render race and the impact of racialized and oppressive mediatory practices on students and their families “invisible” (p.38). Examining the ways in which leaders mediate various interests he suggests that there are three aspects to mediation, which legitimate the larger organizational apparatus, “(a) mediation of conflict at the point of open contention, (b) mediation as day-to-day meaning management among organizational stakeholders, and (c) mediation as the cognitive task of resolving (or perhaps dissolving) contradictions within the structure of one’s own ideology” (p.47). These three forms of mediation are underpinned by the ways principals interpret their world. This conceptual paper centers race and racism and examines whether or not racial equality is possible in these new gentrifying schools although “integrated” at a time in which principals are increasingly viewed as entrepreneurs within an environment of school choice. How do principals understand this entrepreneurial model in the context of gentrification? What is the role of race in the enactment of mediatory practices? Do particular practices render race “invisible” and simultaneously displace Black and Brown families?

Drawing from scholarship in the sociology of the professions (Evetts, 2009), this paper explores the effects of neoliberal policies and New Public Management practices on the mediatory practices of principals as they make decisions in the context of gentrification. I also explore various proposals for a new conceptualization of school leadership grounded in an advocacy role for the displaced and disenfranchised (Anderson & Cohen, 2015).

Author

• Chy McGhee, New York University