Navigating the Tensions: White Parents Organizing for School Equity

• In Event: Sheraton Roundtable Session Three
  In Roundtable Session: Moving Toward Equity in Current Education Policy Debates (Table 5)

Abstract

This study examines how white and/or privileged parents make sense of, reify, disrupt, or reproduce racism and the social construction of good schools in the context of their school equity efforts, how this sensemaking gets concurrently constructed across the individual, interactional, organizational, and structural level, and in identifying the limits or possibilities of these parents’ organizing efforts. I do so through a three-year qualitative case study using critical ethnographic methods to examine how white and/or privileged parents organize for school equity in Oakland, California. Preliminary findings suggest that ideologies around school choice and race at the individual and interactional level inform parents school equity organizing efforts and discourse, and that discourse shifts over time and settings.

Author

• Talia S. Leibovitz, University of California - Berkeley
  Presenting Author