Working with Race to Pursue Equity: Chicago’s Proposal for a (Chinatown?) High School

• In Event: Opening Up New Possibilities for Race and Equity: Contexts and Controversy in School Creation

Abstract

For several decades, urban education reform attempted to induce competition through school openings while simultaneously incentivizing improved academic achievement through the looming punishment of school closure. However, following legislative action and sharp criticism in response to the racialized impact of an unprecedented wave of school closures in 2013 (Ewing 2018; Weber, Farmer, and Donoghue 2020), Chicago Public Schools (CPS) officials adopted an equity framework (Chicago Public Schools 2018) and transitioned to a planning process that prioritized neighborhood schools.
In this paper, I consider the case of a proposal to build a new, diverse high school at the intersection of the Greater Chinatown, South Loop, and Bronzeville neighborhoods. For some, the proposal represented the culmination of over thirty years of advocacy on the part of Chinatown residents for a culturally responsive local high school that provided targeted language access and support services; but, as a proposal for a diverse school, it became embroiled in the conflicting interests of affluent South Loop residents and Black affordable housing advocates from Bronzeville. Through this case, I analyze how CPS, community organizations, and residents strategically invoke ideologies and practices of race and community to advocate for a proposal to promote greater equity.
For this study, I collected field notes, multimedia data, and recordings of public meetings concerning the proposed high school and broader district planning processes between July 2022 and May 2024. I also interviewed key informants and residents in the area to better understand their sensemaking about the significance of the proposal and the related planning processes. This paper focuses on data from the public meetings and interviews with community organization employees.
To begin, I provide historical context about education and urban development to explain the structural roots of racial and class differences between these three neighborhoods. Here, I show that the interests of residents in these neighborhoods cannot be separated from the trajectory of urban development. With this background, I analyze the approaches of conflicting community groups in which these interests become possibilities for making claims about equity and building coalitions. Next, I analyze the discourse that emerged from CPS officials, its non-profit partners on the proposed high school’s design team, and a coalition of non-profit community organizations opposed to the school.
I find that data-driven versus historical approaches to equity and representational versus solidarity-based approaches to coalition building generate conflicting solutions and justifications for addressing inequity. In opposition to CPS’s proposal for a diverse high school, opponents promote a vision for a more racially homogenous high school to serve the needs of Asian residents. I show how each vision can be seen as a different way of responding to racial tension and ongoing urban development. My results illuminate the limitations of institutionalized approaches to equity and the important role that non-state actors play in operationalizing equity in local context.

Author

• Andrew Frangos, University of Chicago