What is Taught and What is Learned: Lessons from an Antiracist Middle School

• In Event: Controversial Issues Policies, Power, and Practices: How Educators Navigate Hostile and Divisive Political Climates

Abstract

Purpose
This paper examines a middle school’s efforts to develop an antiracist, integrated community within the context of a school district’s market-based, neoliberal approaches to educational policy. Drawing on decades of research on school integration, I consider the possibilities and constraints involved in the school’s approach.

Theoretical Framework
An extensive research base shows that integration has costs, as well as benefits. Multiracial schools have the potential to increase children’s cultural flexibility and can dramatically improve students’ academic outcomes (Schneider, 2012; Wells et al., 2009). However, they often fail to do so. Scholarship also demonstrates that White and Asian American students in racially and socioeconomically diverse schools generally take more advanced classes and maintain higher GPAs than their Black and Latine classmates. In contrast, Black and Latine students are more likely to be suspended and expelled (Diamond & Lewis, 2015; Tyson, 2011). I draw on theories of the grammar of schooling (Mehta, 2022; Tyack and Tobin,1994) and racialized organizations (Ray, 2019) to identify central lessons the school offers.

Methods, Data Sources, and Evidence
The data for this study includes fieldnotes from 65 days of participant-observation and 26 semi-structured interviews with administrators, teachers, and students. I incorporated data analysis into my fieldwork by transforming observational jottings into daily field notes (Emerson et al., 2011). During interviews, I frequently asked participants about my observations, creating a generative space for participants to share their own analyses. I used Dedoose qualitative software to code the entire dataset, which I used to identify three central lessons the school intentionally and unintentionally taught students.

Findings
I find that sixth-graders learned that: (a) schools and students can counter racism; (b) extracurricular spaces, rather than classrooms, are the appropriate places to talk about race; and (c) it is difficult for Black children to excel academically, although they can be leaders in antiracist struggles. I argue that school’s efforts to counter racial inequality were limited by a need to remain legible in a choice-based marketplace, which included maintaining the appearance of doing “real school” (Metz, 1979). As the principal told me, “It’s limited, what our hopes and desires and even conscious effort can do, you know, in any one particular school.”

Significance
The persistence of status quo approaches to school and classroom practice in the context of the principal’s transformative objectives should push us to reconsider the ends and means of struggles to create antiracist schools. M.S. 917 aspired to be different from other schools and reached toward a transformative vision of integration. However, classroom practices and school routines frequently reinscribed narratives of individual merit and collective deficit. Although teachers strove to shift racialized patterns, their efforts were invisibly structured by the neoliberal, anti-­ Black grammar of school. The stubborn persistence of these practices and outcomes in a school explicitly dedicated to fighting racism—­ a school that took many significant steps toward racial justice—­ offers us important lessons in both the limits and opportunities that school integration offers as a strategy for racial justice.

Author

• Alexandra J. Freidus, University of Connecticut