Segregation, Diversity, and Pathology: Stakeholder Views of School Quality in Gentrifying New York

• In Event: Good Schools, Bad Schools: Racialized Perceptions of School Quality

Abstract

Objectives:
In this paper, I examine contemporary debates over school segregation in gentrifying areas of New York. I use ethnographic data to examine stakeholders’ assumptions about the relationship between student demographics and school quality. In doing so, I explore the role that braided discourses of diversity and racialized pathology play in public perceptions of diversifying schools.

Theoretical Framework, Data, and Methods:
When the Supreme Court ordered the desegregation of public schools in Brown v. Board of Education, they argued that racial segregation does irreparable damage to Black children, both academically and psychologically. This decision, together with Coleman Report’s emphasis on “peer effects” a decade later, deepened associations between segregated schools and pathology (Aggarwal, 2016; Lipman, 2008). Advocates of school integration often offer increased racial and socioeconomic diversity as the solution to this problem (Kahlenberg, 2001; Petrilli, 2012). In this study, I explore the coproduction of discourses of idealized diversity and racialized pathology, closely examining constructions of school quality in gentrifying areas of a “progressive” city. My data are drawn from a two-year, multi-sited ethnography of diversifying schools in New York, including observations of 34 public meetings; interviews with 30 stakeholders; and analysis of local media coverage.

Findings:
Stakeholders generally agreed that diversity was a desirable goal, a “shared symbol” that the community could agree upon as a marker of school quality (Posey-Maddox, 2014, p. 86). However, this aspiration of idealized diversity was often intertwined with the discourse of racialized pathology. In public and private conversations, white community members frequently described segregated schools as troubled or unhealthy – not because they provided unequal access to educational resources, but simply because they included large numbers of low-income children of color. Some observers noted that the segregated schools which so concerned advantaged parents frequently had smaller student-teacher ratios, more classroom space, and access to resources through Title I funds that many New York schools lacked. However, district and school administrators feared that white, professional families might never feel comfortable in a school attended primarily by children who lived in public housing. Public discussions of diversifying schools revealed that these two discourses were frequently intertwined; many stakeholders considered a “diverse” school ideal because such a school would not include an “overwhelming” number of poor students of color.

Significance:
Advocates of integration frequently hoped that changes to school demographics would improve schools, but often failed to explain why. As they linked definitions of school quality to student demographics, stakeholders’ arguments about a school’s lack of “diversity” reflected perceptions of “deficits” among children of color. By looking closely at perceived relationships between school demographics and school quality, I illuminate the ways in which liberal discourses of racial diversity all too frequently reinscribe, rather than oppose, discourses of racial pathology.

Author

• Alexandra J. Freidus, University of Connecticut