The Last Black Public High School: School Dissolution

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session 6
  In Roundtable Session: Dismantling Anti-Blackness in Educational Research and Practice (Table 27)

Abstract

Despite encouragement to use education as an avenue toward personal and collective uplift, schools have continued to further entrench Black instability in the United States. The combining forces of anti-Blackness, white supremacy, and top-down policy decisions have and continue to bring majority African American schools to the brink of and into extinction. For marginalized populations relying on schools for social services, as well as have developed feelings of ownership over them, the status of a school ripples out into the larger surrounding community. This paper focuses on how the people who are most impacted by a majority African American school’s dissolving (due to gentrification, mismanaged district decisions, and negative anti-Black mythologies) make sense of their own precarity, limitations, and possibilities.

Author

• Danielle Greene, Stanford University