Race, Class, and Belonging: School Desegregation in Gentrifying New York

• In Event: Promising Scholarship in Education: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

Abstract

My dissertation closely examines questions of race, class, and power in gentrifying schools and classrooms in New York City, the “epicenter of educational segregation for the nation” (Kucsera & Orfield, 2014, p. iii). In newly diverse schools, questions of race, class, and power intersect with classroom pedagogy and practice. Surprisingly, while these questions are central to the goal of educational equity, they have rarely been studied by educational researchers, who have to date focused primarily upon the impact of recent waves of desegregation and gentrification on school resources and culture (Posey-Maddox, Kimelberg, & Cucchiara, 2014; Wells, Fox, & Cordova-Coba, 2016). Despite increased scholarly and public interest in school desegregation and urban gentrification, researchers have not yet examined how changes in school demographics affect students, teachers, and classrooms. My research addresses this gap.

In this study, I explore how classroom relationships and teacher practices intersect with public discourse and educational policy. My research takes place in two stages. In the first phase, I use observations of public meetings, interviews with community stakeholders, and analysis of local media coverage to examine the shifting understandings, assumptions, and norms underlying debates over school desegregation in rapidly gentrifying areas of New York City. These data provide crucial context for the second phase of the study, which focuses on what happens within gentrifying classrooms. Ethnographic case studies of classrooms in two gentrifying schools examine how social interactions, instructional decisions, and labeling and sorting practices relate to broader community discourses of race, class, and academic merit. I find that tensions regarding the nature of school belonging – including who belongs in schools and to whom schools belong – circulate throughout racialized discourses and interactions in gentrifying communities. Inside schools, these questions are expressed in discussions of which students’ experiences and questions belong in the classroom curriculum, what it means to belong on the school’s honor roll, and which types of student behavior do or do not belong within the classroom community. By tracing the relationships between the “micro” of everyday interactions and the “macro” of public policy and discourse, this study offers a new lens for understanding the complex nature of teaching and learning in increasingly diverse schools.

Author

• Alexandra Freidus, New York University