Bounded Reform in Suburban School Districts

• In Event: Working Toward Equity in Suburban School Districts

Abstract

Despite their reputations as the best schools in the country, suburban schools remain rife with inequality (e.g. Lewis and Diamond 2015). In recent years, these districts have responded to this inequality with various forms of equity initiatives. However, we know little about what these initiatives look like, or how they are implemented on the ground. As schools and school districts continue to respond to inequality, it is important to better understand how they conceptualize and implement their policies and initiatives. In this paper, I ask: How do suburban school districts conceptualize equity, and plan to create equity initiatives to address stratified student academic experiences? Do these districts follow through on their promised equity initiatives?
To answer these questions, I analyze 79 interviews with teachers and administrators at three suburban school districts outside the same major city. These three districts varied in demographic makeup, with one district majority white and affluent, the second district majority white and socioeconomically diverse, and the third district racially and socioeconomically diverse. Interviews took place between 2019 and 2022. Despite these demographic differences between the districts, I find that there was a common understanding that equity meant providing access. With limited variation, all three districts followed through on initiatives to provide access, including: removing teacher recommendations, prerequisite requirements, and the bottom tracks from humanities courses; adding access points for advanced mathematics; and encouraging flexibility with academic work.
While previous work might predict that these initiatives would be decoupled from day-to-day life at school (e.g. Ray 2019) – not implemented with fidelity – I find that the districts did follow through on their initiatives. I introduce the concept of bounded reform to explain this phenomenon – while districts followed through on their equity policies, these policies were self-limiting, as they were bounded by the understanding of equity as providing access. By interpreting school district equity initiatives through the lens of bounded reform, we can simultaneously recognize the work that school districts are doing while acknowledging its significant limitations. This concept has the potential for use beyond the context of schooling, as it centers institutions and organizational constraints rather than individual intentions, which are difficult to measure.

Lewis, Amanda E., and John B. Diamond. 2015. Despite the Best Intentions: How Racial Inequality Thrives in Good Schools. Oxford University Press.

Ray, V. (2019). A Theory of Racialized Organizations. American Sociological Review,
84(1), 26–53. https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122418822335

Author

• Emily Handsman, Rutgers University