Unflattening: Developing a Framework to Illuminate How K–12 School District Agency and Power Shape Racialized Hierarchies

• In Event: Level Matters: Inter- and Intra- District Analyses Exploring Nuances in Racialized Power Across Space and Place Over Time

Abstract

K-12 school districts are often the primary unit of analysis, particularly in quantitative research (Blagg et al., 2022; Blazar, David & Schueler, Beth, 2022). This can flatten nuances and longitudinal variation in across- and within-district characteristics in two central ways: 1) This treats school districts as singularly comparable, or comparable within large and general categories (e.g. urban vs. suburban), ignoring similarities and differences in district-level dimensions (space, place, race, time) that influence racial stratification; 2) It also ignores the wide variation across schools within the same district. Variation shows up across many dimensions including processes that result in inequitable distributions of resources, power, and voice. These inequities often stem from agentic actions that shape modes of (re)production which can reify racial stratification (Jabbar, 2016; Small, 2009).
We ask: How can quantitative scholars better conceptualize inter- and intra-district inequalities to attend to racial power dynamics, and along what dimensions? We present an epistemological orientation for studying school districts that attends to space, place, and race over time. We argue that this conceptualization, rooted in critical race and critical spatial theories across disciplines - including geography (Gilmore, 2002; Morrison et al., 2023), sociology (Ray, 2019), policy (Young & Diem, 2018), and education (Butler & Sinclair, 2020; Duke, 2015; Kelly, 2020; Turner, 2015) - will help quantitative researchers (re-)engage in key dimensions of school districts in their analyses. In so doing, researchers can attend to how district leaders and policies play roles in reinforcing or lessening deeply entrenched inequities in education. We use illustrative cases to show how situating districts socially, spatially, and temporally can surface comparisons of how powerful actors and entities influence these dimensions within and across districts.
We present a framework for conceptualizing K-12 school districts to more clearly attend to (racial) power dynamics. We argue that without considering how race, place, and space interact over time, analyses that aim to “isolate” particular dimensions results in work that ignores how these co-constituted dimensions dictate the distribution of district power over time. We demonstrate that dimension-flattening can result in unquestioned inequalities, and can contribute to race-evasive interpretations of findings. This can normalize inequalities rather than problematizing them. We also demonstrate that K-12 education scholars are not doing “enough” now to attend to power imbalances, and argue that we could do more by clearly attending to four dimensions: race, space, place, and time.
We provide cases demonstrating how re-inflating and investigating race, space, and place over time at both the inter- and intra-district levels reveals patterns that are lost by only analyzing at the district- or school-levels. Building from qualitative and mixed methods approaches, we show how these four dimensions shape and are shaped by power dynamics and variations in districts’ unique histories. Our framework amplifies racial power dynamics and allows for a more cohesive conceptual bridge bringing within-district dynamics into across-district analyses, and vice-versa. Importantly, our classifications attend to nuances within and across school districts that can be built upon and inform quantitative analyses, rejecting the notion that quantitative methods cannot attend to such nuance.

Authors

• Charity P. Scott, Virginia Commonwealth University

• Claire Mackevicius, University of Oregon

• Nicole Rodriguez Leach, Grantmakers for Education

• Cora Wigger, Elon University