Racing to School Gentrification: A Critical Examination of How Local Education Policies Shape Gentrification

• In Event: What Is Possible and Desirable: Conceptualizing Race and School Quality Across Local Contexts

Abstract

Objectives
Racism continues to be an influential force in neighborhood gentrification (Summers, 2019). As neighborhoods experience gentrification, race shapes community and schooling dynamics, and the ways in which quality is attributed to schools (Pearman 2020; Posey-Maddox et al., 2014). Despite often being taken up as an economic phenomenon (Stein, 2019), the economic, material and racial aspects of gentrification, as well as concomitant schooling dynamics, are often brought together through local education policies. However, most research on gentrification and policy focuses on housing (Chaskin & Joseph, 2013) and broader neoliberal trends (Lipman, 2013). We, however, know less about how education policies function to produce and reproduce varying impacts of gentrification on schools within and across districts. This paper critically analyzes local education policies in Portland, Oregon, and Austin, Texas, to better understand how they relate to school gentrification, and thereby confer notions of racialized “quality” to certain schools.

Theoretical Framework, Data, and Methods
We specifically examine 1) district transfer policies, 2) district enrollment reports, and 3) policies that govern school closures and consolidations across both Portland and Austin’s public school systems. To theoretically examine these policies we apply tenets from critical policy analysis as articulated by Diem, Young, and Sampson (2019), including a) concerns between the difference in policy rhetoric and practiced reality, b) concerns about policy roots, development, and how they reinforce the dominant culture, c) concerns and distributions of power, resources, knowledge, and policy “winners” and “losers,” d) concerns of social stratification and the effect on inequality and privilege, and e) concerns of resistance to the policy by “nondominant groups.” We anchor this in the theoretical backdrop that centers how anti-Blackness shapes education policy (Baldridge, 2020; Dumas, 2016a). Secondly, we draw from interviews with 24 principals across both districts regarding how local education policy contexts inform school gentrification.

Findings
Our findings suggest that school gentrification functions within a larger context of district investment and reinvestment of resources, school-level supports, and educational opportunities. Specifically, transfer policies, enrollment reports, and decisions to close and consolidate schools help to produce and reproduce the waves of district investment and reinvestment, which concurs with neighborhood gentrification. These waves have varying impacts on schools within and across the school districts. Additionally, we find that the fluctuations of district investment and reinvestment through education policies also correspond with student racial and socioeconomic demographic shifts in the districts. We situate these findings within a larger, emerging policy framework.

Significance
This study is significant because it explores how district level education policies shape neighborhood and school gentrification. In doing so, it describes how schools and neighborhood spaces are reproduced in racialized and classist ways. This study also offers an emerging policy framework of investment to understand the changes that schools experience in gentrified cities. Finally, this study is significant because the findings can inform school and district leaders and policymakers as they develop plans to intervene on the negative impacts of gentrification on children and youth, families, communities, neighborhoods, and schools.

Authors

• Terrance L. Green, The University of Texas at Austin

• Chloe Latham Sikes, The University of Texas at Austin

• Jeremy D. Horne, University of Texas at Austin

• Emily Germain, Michigan State University

• Andrene Castro, Virginia Commonwealth University