The Hidden Curriculum of School Diversity: Choice and Gentrification in New York City Schools

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Saturday 9:50 am Four Seasons Ballroom 4
  In Roundtable Session: Integration Efforts in School Choice Systems (Table 12)

Abstract

A wave of recent research on school choice and segregation emphasizes the positioning of White and middle-class families as “valued customers” in gentrifying cities (Cucchiara, 2013; Gordon, 2010; Posey-Maddox, 2014). This body of work examines the ways in which neoliberal approaches have not only fundamentally shifted school and district governance structures; choice-based policies “reconstruct values, social relations, and social identities,” creating a new social imaginary in which public school students and their families are consumers of services, rather than citizens with rights (Lipman, 2011, pp. 10–11). As Turner (2018) argues, school marketing decisions are structured by policymakers’ and administrators’ tacit recognition that the choice-based market for public schools is highly racialized with White middle-class and professional families as the target audience.

This paper expands on that body of work to argue that in New York City, district administrators and school leaders market schools’ potential diversity to gentrifying families. I examine the hidden curriculum of school diversity – the ways that policies and policy discourses not only reflect, but also reinforce, deeply rooted assumptions about public school students, their families, and their communities. My findings are based on two years of ethnographic data collection in a gentrifying area of New York City, including participant-observation of district meetings and school marketing events, interviews with school leaders, district administrators, educators, and community members, and analysis of local media sources.

I find that school and district staff signaled to gentrifiers that local schools had the potential to become, in Berrey’s (2015) terms, “model diverse communities” (p. 174) – despite the school system’s extreme racial and socioeconomic stratification. Many district employees and school leaders urgently wanted to increase Black and Latine students’ access to educational resources. However, school and district administrators struggled with tensions between their goal of diversifying schools and the limits of neoliberal approaches. With the support of the NYC Department of Education, these administrators marketed public schools to the people they saw as capable of realizing this goal: primarily White, professional families. For example, a community school district superintendent urged one principal in a gentrifying neighborhood to pay attention to the three cranes outside his window, asking, “What are you doing to engage new families in the district?” School leaders spent a considerable amount of time hosting tours for families who appeared to be overwhelmingly White, professional, and very careful school choosers.

As they navigated this contested terrain in district meetings, school tours, and local media, school and district administrators made and remade district policies on the ground. In order to help gentrifiers feel welcome in “neighborhood schools,” school and district staff explicitly appealed to these families’ priorities, tastes, and values. They therefore rebranded segregated schools that served primarily low-income Black and Latinx children as potentially diverse – if only White, affluent families would choose to attend them. As a result, these policy actors inadvertently exacerbated, rather than reduced, the racial inequality they strove to interrupt.

Author

• Alexandra J. Freidus, University of Connecticut