Neighborhood Schools: Contradictory Spaces of Disenfranchisement and Hope

• In Event: 73.027 - Race, Discourse, and Justice: Making Intelligible the Unconscious of Structural White Supremacy in Education

Abstract

In a post-Brown era, the discourse(s) surrounding neighborhood schools typically dichotomizes segregation and desegregation in ways that characterize desegregation as a fundamental reform in U.S. society. This reform has held particular relevance for public schools in that they became working spaces for the Civil Rights Movement and for subsequent efforts to ensure equitable learning opportunities for all students. As working spaces for societal reform, schools facilitated change at the same time that their structures, processes, and resources perpetuated the disparities that plagued a segregated U.S. society. Exploring neighborhood schools as part of a larger reform movement thus requires us to take an historical look at such schools, the policies that framed them, and the discourses that currently extend them as integral community centers.

Litwak and Meyer (1972) connected the demise of community to the rise of neighborhood schools—schools which symbolized a resurrection of the importance of communities to schools. They argued, “Other problems have arisen because of the concept of neighborhood school, which also had a laudable objective at one time but now results in total separation of the slum and suburban child from one another” (p. 21). But, for marginalized groups, schools might also be seen as “the only place in many parts of the country to which local community people can turn when they are deprived” (p. 50). In this content, a neighborhood school evokes two parallel sets of expectations that come from two different frames. The first expectation stems from a hope that the school can be a space of redress, reconciliation, and healing. It is more typically connected to broader arguments of schooling as a social good and a collective responsibility. The second expectation comes from a belief that community control will protect and advance the interests and values of the families it serves. It is often loosely grounded in freedom of choice as a democratic principle and success as a universal right (de los Reyes & Gozemba, 2002).

Debates to define public schools as a collective good narrowed in the aftermath of the Brown decision. Race mattered. Desegregation would, therefore, later be criticized for the ways in which it disrupted African American communities, delegitimized the expertise of African American educators, and disconnected African American students from extended kinship networks of support (Anderson, 2010; Baker, 2006; Siddle-Walker, 1996). Decades of practice in desegregation has led to several clear outcomes for the majority of African American students in urban districts. Urban districts have been largely abandoned by middle class whites (and some African Americans) since the late 1960s (Boustan, 2010). These schools are disproportionately staffed with the least experienced teachers (Anyon, 2005; Darling-Hammond, 2010; Delpit, 2012). Given these outcomes, many question the success of school de-segregation. This paper will examine the historical evolution of neighborhood schools, the place-based racialized discourses of such schools, and the community control ideology which runs antithetical to the principles of the Brown Decision even as it simultaneously gives hope to disenfranchised African American communities.

Author

• Donyell Lakishka Roseboro, University of North Carolina - Wilmington