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

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

This symposium examines recent debates about race and equity happening around plans to create new schools in the Chicagoland area. Shifting racial demographics and ideologies have created contention within communities over the associated meanings of diversity, integration, and segregation. Our papers explore how these new school proposals are conceptualized to solve problems related to race by changing patterns of resource distribution and interaction among different racialized groups. These purported “problems” differ by context: within neighborhood segregation, historic ethnic neighborhoods lacking a school of their own, and what counts as a diverse neighborhood school. These papers focus on educational renewal in its most literal sense: what should a new school look like and can it remedy past injustices?

Sub Unit

• Division G - Social Context of Education / Division G - Section 2: Differences and Intersectionalities

Chair

• Andrew Frangos, University of Chicago

Participants

• Jennifer Etienne, University of Chicago

• Maximilian X. Cuddy, University of Chicago

Papers

• How Black Parents Use School Creation to Move Beyond Diversity - Jennifer Etienne, University of Chicago

• Working with Race to Pursue Equity: Chicago’s Proposal for a (Chinatown?) High School - Andrew Frangos, University of Chicago

• Integration through School Consolidation: Diversity, Democracy, and Lessons for Educational Justice - Maximilian X. Cuddy, University of Chicago

Discussant

• David O. Stovall, University of Illinois at Chicago