Becoming an Antiracist School District

• In Event: Working Toward Equity in Suburban School Districts

Abstract

I draw on data from an ethnographic study of a predominantly white and affluent but increasingly racially and socioeconomically diverse suburban community and analyze how, in the wake of the 2020 protests for racial justice, the school board’s approach to equity shifted. This paper builds on the work of scholars of suburban educational inequality, who have found that despite suburban schools being well-resourced, suburban students’ experiences too often remain deeply divergent depending on race and class (Lewis-McCoy 2014; Lewis and Diamond 2015).

The data for this paper come from a multi-year ethnographic study which took place from 2019-2021. The data drawn on in this paper are primarily fieldnotes from observations of three years’ worth of bi-weekly school board meetings, as well as analysis of district documents related to equity; in addition, I draw on interviews with a small number of teachers and district leaders, to complement my analysis of the public-facing discourse I observe in the school board meetings. To analyze this data, I coded my fieldnotes using Deterding and Waters’ (2018) flexible coding approach; in addition, I engaged in memoing and further coding in an iterative process which yielded the findings outlined below.

I find that surprisingly, Kirkwood had a robust discourse around equity that predated the pandemic and the 2020 protests. As early as 2013, Kirkwood’s school board emphasized the importance of diversity. I find that this attention to diversity, however, emphasized some kinds of diversity over others, focusing primarily on race rather than class. Kirkwood, however, went beyond comfortable, celebratory discussions of diversity, delving into inequalities and disparities between groups of students and discussing how best to remedy those. In these discussions, Kirkwood did not simply report out on outcomes it was required to, like test scores, but also on other outcomes of interest, like participation in athletics, enrollment in advanced coursework, etc. I discuss the steps Kirkwood’s school board and district leadership took to address these inequalities, analyzing how the pandemic and protests sharpened the focus on racial equity. However, I highlight how, despite evidence that there were stark classed inequalities in addition to the more frequently discussed racial ones, attending to the needs of low-income students was more often left off the agenda.

As suburban schools now educate the plurality of students, this paper’s findings offer a valuable window into the landscape of educational equity in an understudied and increasingly important kind of community: American suburbs. Furthermore, this paper takes an intersectional approach to thinking about equity, attending to how a suburban community is (or is not) enacting change to address the twin harms of racial and socioeconomic marginalization.

References:

Deterding, Nicole M., and Mary C. Waters. 2018. “Flexible Coding of In-Depth Interviews: A Twenty-First-Century Approach.” Sociological Methods & Research 0049124118799377. doi: 10.1177/0049124118799377.


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

Lewis-McCoy, R. L’Heureux. 2014. Inequality in the Promised Land: Race, Resources, and Suburban Schooling. Stanford University Press.

Author

• Nadirah Farah Foley, Washington University in St. Louis