Struggles for Black Space and Specificity in Public Education

• In Event: It Was Never Just About the Grant: The Befores, Durings, and Afters of Educational Justice Work in Times of Grant Cancellation

Abstract

Objective

After decades of advocacy, Black Evanston residents won a commitment from the city and school board to rebuild and reopen a returned school - Foster School - to the 5th ward by August 2026. Yet, disagreements persist around the school’s curriculum and intended student population. Central to these debates is the African-Centered Curriculum (ACC), currently taught in Evanston’s 8th Ward. A 2023 community survey led by a member of our team revealed that over half of 5th Ward respondents wanted ACC at Foster School, even though 61% of respondents did not know what it was. This demonstrates the community’s belief in and support for a curriculum that centers Black students.

Amid growing attacks on Black educational specificity (Neal-Stanley et al., 2024), we examined how Black community advocates organized for ACC in response to shifting policies and enduring racialized harm. We examine how current Black Evanstonians are carrying forth the work of educational justice before and after the grant, in both enduring and transforming ways. In this paper, we ask:

How do community members conceptualize the meaning and significance of ACC at the school and district level?

How do Black Evanstonians strategize around ACC as educational justice?

How does an RCPP support educational justice for Black Evanston during and after a federal funding?



Theoretical Framework and Methods

We draw from BlackCrit (Dumas & ross, 2016), a theoretical framework that posits anti-blackness as a unique structural violence that works to disrupt Black living in education and beyond. Methodologically, this work is grounded in a research-community practice partnership (RCPP) (Ishimaru et al., 2022), a collaborative structuring of research and community support that centers the values and knowledge of racially marginalized communities (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016). Before the cancellation, we were engaged in a two year ethnography that included interviews with ACC educators, district administrators, several ACC parents, Black community advocates. Data sources also include fieldnotes from community meetings, school board sessions, and advisory groups, and artifacts. We used multiple coding cycles, beginning with descriptive codes to construct an event timeline and trace shifting community strategies across multiple groups.



Findings
The fight for ACC in Evanston is for curricular, spatial, and political educational freedom. Community members used relationships, political knowledge, and shared values to launch the program. As local politics shifted post-pandemic, so too have strategies for securing ACC at the new Foster School. ACC represents a way to reclaim space for Black students and affirm Black presence in public education. While Black community advocates differed on their understandings of how to push forward, those divergences served as points of friction and as mechanisms to ensure the work continued. Lastly, we find that the work persisted after the grant’s cancellation because many of the relationships and infrastructures of the RCPP had been established prior and had been built on community trust.



Significance

This paper highlights how Black communities struggle and advocate for Black specificity amidst local restraints and anti-DEI national policy, offering critical insight into how community-led curriculum advocacy persists.

Authors

• Brande M. Otis, Northwestern

• kihana miraya ross, Northwestern University