“At What Cost?” New York City Young Activists’ Shifting Perceptions of School Integration

• In Event: The Persistence of School Segregation and Opportunities for Change: Lessons From New York City

Abstract

Purpose
School integration research rarely centers the people most affected by educational policy: students. This paper examines the evolution of how young people understand and engage with school segregation and racialized inequality. Using longitudinal data on student activists for integration in New York City, I consider the questions: “How do young activists’ perceptions of educational equity shift over time? How can these trajectories help us understand the possibilities and constraints of school integration as a strategy for racial justice?”

Theoretical Perspectives
Some educational researchers, practitioners, and advocates argue that integration – while imperfect – is the best avenue to address the effects of concentrated racism and poverty on children’s learning (Johnson, 2019; Orfield & Jarvie, 2020). Others argue that we should instead focus on white supremacy and anti-Blackness at the core of American schooling (Diamond, Forthcoming; Dumas, 2016). Young New Yorkers’ evolving views on school integration offer a unique window into these debates.

Rather than considering young people adults-in-the-making (Ferguson, 2000), I approach my participants as autonomous social actors who (like all individuals) influence and are influenced by intersecting yet segregated schools, neighborhoods, and sociopolitical landscapes (Rubin, 2007). In order to consider the ways in which integration policy is “productive, performative, and continually contested” (Shore & Wright, 2011, p. 1), I trace the arcs through which these “nonauthorized policy actors” (Levinson et al., 2009) interpret and interrupt education policies and policy discourses.

Methods and Data
This paper extends an ethnographic study of Teens Take Charge (TTC), a racially, socioeconomically, and academically diverse group of students fighting to end segregation in New York City high schools. During the 2019-20 school year, I conducted 56 observations of and 35 interviews with a diverse group of TTC members. In 2023, I conducted 26 follow-up interviews and 2 focus groups with participants from the original study. I used deductive and inductive coding based on recurring phrases to analyze the data, then wrote analytic memos in which I analyzed tensions in the data to arrive at my findings.

Conclusions and Significance
The COVID pandemic and high school graduation exposed many participants to contexts that shifted their understandings of educational policy. Based on recent experiences during the pandemic and in elite and community colleges, many former TTC members changed their stances on the significance of diversity. While some participants reported their interactions with diverse classmates had been “world-opening,” others argued that diversity is “not really doing anything for me” and focused instead on whether their high schools had adequately prepared them for graduation. In focus group discussions, participants asked each other whether “the ends really justify the means” and “at what cost does [diversity] come?”

These findings illustrate the inherent tensions in debates over what integration can and cannot offer educational justice. By examining both the costs and the benefits of school diversity, they nuance research on the benefits students derive from integrated schools (Ayscue et al., 2017; Wells et al., 2016) and that young people derive from youth organizing (Kirshner, 2015; Rogers et al., 2012).

Author

• Alexandra J. Freidus, University of Connecticut