Leveraging Race in School Closure Deliberations

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

Abstract

Objectives

Officials frequently use race-neutral discourses to rationalize closures of ‘majority-Black’ schools (Ewing, 2018; Syeed, 2019). However, public hearings about these decisions occasionally feature racially-specific argumentation on the part of decisionmakers, suggesting fissures in the official bedrock of racial neutrality (Author, 2018). This paper explores how officials leveraged race in deliberations about educational quality and responsibility in a school closure decision; how school community members both took up and contested official framings; and the implications for educational possibility of the broader discourses reflected and refracted throughout the deliberations.

Theoretical perspectives and modes of inquiry

In this paper, I draw on critical policy analyses and work that examines discourse and framing in relation to racial groups (Bonilla-Silva, 2014; Dumas, 2016b; Dumas, Dixson, & Mayorga, 2016)—and in school closure deliberations specifically (Ewing, 2018; Lipman, 2011; Syeed, 2019). I take up Dumas’ (2016a) call to understand the “rate of neighborhood school closures” as one of many “sites of antiblackness” (p. 17) and reflect on hearing comments through the lens of work that explores anti-Blackness in education (and beyond); racial capitalism; and neoliberal multiculturalism (Baptist, 2014; Dumas, 2016a; Melamed, 2011; 2015; Williams, 2012).

Public hearing testimony about a school closure decision in 2017, captured as part of a larger study of closure, consolidation, and charter co-location decisions in New York City, featured the only racially-specific remarks by Department of Education officials that I heard across 17 hearings examined in the larger study. I parsed hearing testimony through critical discourse analysis, which involves close attention to many levels of text and a focus on assumptions and ideologies that underpin, facilitate, and even create power imbalances (van Dijk, 1993; Wodak & Meyer, 2001). Using a framework grounded in the work of Fairclough (1992), I engaged in fine-grained linguistic analyses of hearing statements, examining vocabulary, grammar, and other textual elements.

Findings

I found that Department of Education officials offered a racially-specific framing of closure that both positioned the decision as racially necessary and upheld logics of racial neutrality. Related logics included efficiency-focused measures of quality and school systems as marketplaces, framings long circulated in official rationalizations of closures of majority-Black schools. While school community members strategically leveraged concepts of neoliberal multiculturalism uplifted by officials (including by stating that their school created “good global citizens”), they also rejected racially-inflected discourses of blame for educational failures. School community members extended officials’ definitions of school quality, describing schools as sites of possibility that could counter notions of Black disposability and work against anti-Black aggressions including the separation of Black families.

Significance

Discourses reflect and determine what is possible. COVID-19, which is decimating school budgets, is likely to lead to more school closures and once again more “sites of antiblackness.” Given this eventuality, we must attend to racially-neutral and racially-specific school closure discourses. All iterations of these discourses carry implications for what is possible in schooling for Black students and their families and, more broadly, how educational resources and power should be distributed.

Author

• Jill Pierce, Research for Action