The Complexity and Contradictions of School Integration Organizing in a Market-Oriented School District

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Saturday 9:50 am Four Seasons Ballroom 4
  In Roundtable Session: Integration Efforts in School Choice Systems (Table 12)

Abstract

This paper describes how the every-day-acts of organizing as a collective group of middle- and upper-middle-class parents across various racial groups, Parents for Equity (PFE), provided for moments of learning where these parents contested commonsense racialized ideologies around school quality and notions of equity in education to rearticulate discourse and visions for the possibilities of what public schools can and should be. Decades of research have illustrated how white, middle- and upper-middle-class parents construct “status ideologies” of school quality based on the racial demographic of the students (Holme, 2002; Wells et al., 2016; Freidus, 2019; 2020). While many middle- and upper-middle-class parents continue to choose majority white schools, other parents have “gone against the grain” to choose schools with majority low-income students of color to stake out a claim as a parent who values diversity and multiculturalism (Crozier et al., 2008; Oria et al., 2007; Reay et al., 2007). However, some scholars have illustrated how choosing a racially diverse schools fits within neoliberal framing of diversity and multiculturalism rather than within an analysis of redistribution of materials, rules, and resources (Dumas, 2009). The contradictions in the literature of middle- and upper-middle-class parents organizing for desegregation and school equity leaves questions around how parents currently organizing for school equity engage with these contradictions and how they navigate these tensions within a market-oriented school district.

I expand on the current research about the complicated nature of middle- and upper-middle-class parents organizing for school integration. I do so by considering how parents have to contend with Oakland Unified School District’s (OUSD) neoconservative deployment of race evasive adaptations of “equality of opportunity”. Race-evasive school choice policies reduce civil rights protections and are often utilized as misguided strategies to deploy civil rights discourse to justify the advancement of privatization in education (Scott, 2011). Over the course of a four-year ethnographic study, I conducted ethnographic observations of PFE’s monthly meetings, PFE’s public community events, PFE’s conversation with their allied organizations, and conducted semi-structured interviews with each PFE member. To triangulate my data, I also conducted document analysis where I reviewed PFE’s private slack channel, surveys, letters, policy proposal PowerPoints, websites, and OUSD’s education policies, proposals, and public discourse around educational equity.

The first finding of this study captures the complexities of PFE organizing for school integration by highlighting how PFE, at times, engaged in framing the benefits of school integration through a discourse of diversity as a commodity (Mayorga-Gallo, 2019) and at other times, were able to rearticulate a vision of public schools that counters neoliberal framings of austerity. The second finding illustrates how two middle-class parents of color made sense of their own anti-Blackness and social-class bias and publicly shared how they learned to contest anti-Blackness and social-class bias through varied pathways. The final finding reveals how PFE engaged in an effective organizing strategy of politicizing other middle- and upper-middle-class parents to learn about the racialized inequities in OUSD and subsequently engaged these parents to organize against these inequities.

Author

• Talia S. Leibovitz, University of California - Berkeley