Excluding Inclusion: How White Parents Hoard Educational Opportunities and Resist Inclusive Education

• In Event: Interrogating the Notion of Inclusive Education Through Research, Policy, and Teacher Preparation

Abstract

Objective

This paper critically examined how and why White parents in an affluent midwestern suburban school district successfully thwarted district efforts to advance equity training intended to address both the extensive academic disparities between Black and White students and the overrepresentation of Black students in special education. This paper sought to unveil (and disrupt) the ideology and tactics White parents employ to maintain schools as sites of exclusion, rather than inclusion, and monopolize access to valuable resources.

Theoretical Framework

This paper is guided by opportunity hoarding, a mechanism through which groups use bounded networks to monopolize access to valuable and renewable resources (Tilly, 1998), and Critical Whiteness, a field that aims to expose the invisible structures that (re)produce White supremacy and privilege (Applebaum, 2016) by building on the tenets of Critical Race Theory as advanced by Gloria Ladson Billings (1998). Framing education as a valuable resource and White parents as a network bound by Whiteness, opportunity hoarding affords an exploration of systemic inequity. However, because opportunity hoarding generally attributes the reproduction of inequality as an unconscious/inadvertent act, opportunity theory in isolation allows White people to ignore their role in the (re)production of inequalities and thus accountability. Conversely, Critical Whiteness seeks to expose the deliberate role of White people in the production of inequalities. Used in tandem, these theories provide a framework to examine how White parents fundamentally undermine inclusive education through exclusionary practices.

Methods and Data Sources

Using historical archives, this paper examines how an affluent, midwestern suburb developed historically to contextualize how White parents utilized an online Facebook group to rapidly mobilize resistance to district efforts to implement inclusive practices. Drawing on Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s (2018) discursive analysis of frames set by a hegemonic racial ideology to hide domination, Facebook posts were analyzed to determine how parents utilized abstract notions of political and economic liberalism to successfully halt district-wide equity training, school redistricting, the district’s exploration of the potential benefits of detracking, and district efforts to address the disparate over and underrepresentation of Black students in special and gifted education.

Results

The findings indicate White parents secured resources (access to high performing schools, small class sizes, advanced courses) for their children by restricting access to others. Under the guise of equality, White parents utilized discourse imbued with White supremacy to frame outside groups as deficient and oppose inclusive efforts to redistribute access to educational opportunities. The mobilization of White parents swiftly derailed the district’s attempts to address the overrepresentation of Black students in special education, evenly distribute resources through redistricting, provide equity training to an overwhelmingly White faculty/staff, and abandon detracting efforts intended to equalize access to educational opportunities.

Scholarly Significance
This research advances the struggle for inclusive education by demonstrating the immense power and control White parents wield in schools and how this power is maintained through opportunity hoarding. Illuminating the tactics and discursive frames employed by White parents to resist inclusive practices allows policymakers and educators to anticipate and address future barriers to inclusive education.

Author

• John Christopher Wilt, University of Kansas
  Presenting Author