Urban STEM Education as Property: Race, Place, and Educational Inequity

• In Event: Defining, Conceptualizing, and Reimagining Urban STEM Education

Abstract

Purpose: The rhetoric around STEM education reflects a desire to imagine a new city that is poised to compete in a STEM-centered future. Therefore, STEM has been positioned as a critical part of urban education reform efforts. Aligning with the right to the city (Lefebvre, 1968/1996), this new imaginary responds to the cries of the disenfranchised for more and better education, jobs, and infrastructure. It also meets the demands of the dissatisfied for more opportunity for upward mobility. STEM-focused schools promise a future of STEM professionals that will be armed with a quality education and a commitment to the city that provided such opportunity. The city’s future hope lies in the middle- and working-class students who can be incentivized to attend local post-secondary institutions and to invest their talents back into the city. The potential return on investment in STEM education for these students is high as they will occupy both the future professional and working classes that will fuel the city’s future economy. These students also hold promise as the nation’s future leaders who will “play a critical role in whether or not our nation retains its leadership role on the cutting edge of science and technology” (Subotnik et al., 2010, p. 7).
In cities across the United States, schools labeled as “failing” are being repurposed as selective STEM-intensive academies to build a STEM education infrastructure that supports this imaginary. These academies operate under the guise of meritocracy but, through policies and practices aimed at supporting “diversity,” ensure that the schools serve the white middle class. This process is unfolding in Memphis, Tennessee, making visible issues with educational equity, exacerbated by school choice and gentrification processes. In this conceptual paper, I use whiteness as property (Harris, 1993), a tenet of Critical Race Theory, to examine STEM education in Memphis as a case of urban STEM-based education reform in the United States.

Theoretical Framework: Whiteness as property assigns those who possess whiteness—“the right to white identity as embraced by the law” (Harris, 1993, p. 1726)—with guaranteed rights similar to those afforded property owners. These rights attach to race without regard to class because “whiteness, the characteristic that distinguishes [whites who do not have power, money, or influence] serves as compensation even to those who lack material wealth” (Harris, 1993, p. 1759). Property, therefore, is a right “that preserves an organization of power central to ensuring Whiteness as the baseline for both private property as well as citizenship” (Aggarwal, 2016, p. 131).

Results: I describe claiming STEM education as property as a two-phase process in which middle class whites in urban areas participate to secure STEM education by repurposing “failed” black schools and to maintain it by institutionalizing selectivity. The first phase entails securing space for selective STEM schools to remake the city. Gentrification is key to this process. The second phase involves activating “the absolute right to exclude” as a benefit of property (Dixson & Rousseau, 2005, p. 8) building a meritocratic mechanism to maintain exclusivity.

Author

• Erika C. Bullock, University of Wisconsin - Madison
  Presenting Author