New York City School Integration Activists During COVID-19

• In Event: How Grassroots Activism Can Challenge Marketization of Schools

Abstract

Grassroots school integration activism has gained momentum around the country and especially in New York City (NYC), where the unified school district of 1.1 million students remains the most segregated in the nation (Kucsera & Orfield, 2014). Activists’ efforts have resulted in several promising initiatives, including pilot integration programs at some schools and the creation of the NYC Department of Education’s School Diversity Advisory Group (Veiga, 2018; Veiga & Zimmer, 2019). However, the Covid-19 pandemic has forced school closures and limited in-person organizing. Thus, we ask: How are grassroots NYC student and parent integration activists making sense of their work and organizing amid the Covid-19 pandemic?

Racially and socioeconomically diverse schools provide academic and socioemotional benefits to all students, equalize resources, and prepare students for a diverse society (Wells, Fox & Cordova-Cobo, 2016). Yet despite these benefits, US schools are more racially segregated today than in the 1980s (Frankenberg et al., 2019). Frustrated by segregation’s persistence, a new generation of activists has mobilized, advancing “integration” rather than “desegregation” to move beyond creating diverse schools to addressing equitable conditions within schools (Integrate NYC, 2018; Tyson, 2011). Research on contemporary integration efforts has examined privileged, white parents “opting-in” to majority-Black and Latinx schools (Posey-Maddox, 2014; Roda, 2018) and school- and district-level desegregation policies (Tractenberg et al., 2020; Kahlenberg & Potter, 2019; Potter, Quick & Davies, 2016). However, the work of grassroots integration activists remains under-researched.

Natural disasters like Covid-19 often lead to “shock doctrine” market-based policies (Klein, 2010). In education, these include charter school and choice expansion and the dissolution of elected school boards, reinforcing racial segregation (Scott & Holme, 2016). Reminiscent of privatization efforts in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina (Buras, 2010; Jabbar, 2015), New York Governor Cuomo is partnering with the Gates Foundation to “reimagine” education during Covid-19 (Amin & Barnum, 2020).

Yet activists also challenge these top-down strategies with grassroots alternatives (Dyrness, 2011; Fuentes, 2013; Warren & Goodman, 2018), including youth activism (Kirshner, 2015; Martinez, 2019; Negrón-Gonzalez, 2017; Rosen & Connor, 2019). This research examines how, despite ongoing neoliberal support for market reforms and limited opportunities for in-person organizing, grassroots NYC integration activists adapt their mobilization to envision an alternative to marketization.

In partnership with Integrate NYC and Teens Take Charge, youth activist organizations, we will include data from 60 semi-structured interviews with student and parent grassroots integration activists. Our design involves youth at both organizations interviewing student activists and the co-PIs interviewing parent activists. This design empowers youth activists, a process central to the work of both organizations. Data also includes participant-observations of online events related to school integration.

This project illuminates the adaptive efforts of activists as they work to educate others on how school integration intersects with the health and economic disparities magnified by Covid-19. To date, activists have adapted in critical ways: 1) maintaining their activism at a distance, through online meetings and social media campaigns; 2) assisting peers with needed resources; 3) advocating for temporary policy changes due to the pandemic to be made permanent; and 4) connecting integration to broader racial justice efforts.

Authors

• Mira C. Debs, Yale University

• Molly V. Makris, Guttman Community College - CUNY

• Elise Castillo, Trinity College