Set Up To Fail: A Case Study of Teachers Organizing for School Integration

• In Event: Spinning in Circles or Driving Change: The Possibilities and Constraints of Racialized Change and Learning

Abstract

Purpose

Decades after the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, subsequent Supreme Court rulings have shaped the legality of including race as a factor in school desegregation efforts and have also set a tone for what policies school districts perceive as feasible or litigious (Donnor, 2011; Frankenberg et al., 2017). As a result of the lack of enforcement and oversight of racial desegregation, parents, teachers, school leaders, youth, and activists have begun to organize for equitable school integration across multiple cities while having to navigate the socio-political context shaped by the rollback of Brown. This study examines how teachers make sense of, reify, disrupt, and/or reproduce racism, and the social construction of good schools in the context of their school integration organizing efforts.
Theoretical Framework

To understand how teachers organize for integration and the tensions and contradictions they navigate in the process, we draw on Ishimaru and Galloway’s (2013) work on organizational leadership for equity. This framework shifts the focus from individuals to organizational capacity and distributed leadership (Spillane et al., 2004). The authors articulate three key drivers for the meaningful enactment of equitable practices. These include: (1) how (in)equity is framed and enacted, (2) how leadership is constructed (traditional hierarchies or inclusive collaboration), and (3) how inquiry is integrated.

Methods

This qualitative case study analyzes teachers’ organizing for integration at Cedar Secondary School (CSS) in Oakland, California as part of a larger research project conducted by the first author. Through in-depth interviews, observations, and document analysis of the teacher organizing group and community forums with majority white and/or privileged parents, we examine the relationship between ideologies, assumptions, and concerns that participants bring to and navigate around school choice enrollment plans. We utilize a flexible coding approach (Deterding & Waters, 2018) consisting of index and analytic codes and analytic memos.

Preliminary Results

Findings suggest that ideologies around school choice and race at the individual and interactional levels informed educators’ school equity efforts and discourse and that their group discourse shifted over time and settings. We found that educators’ sensemaking of race, power, and identity was informed by structural ideologies around educational austerity, neoliberal sensemaking of diversity, and the need to appease those with power —neighborhood white families. Initially, educators tried to critically engage with white and/or middle-class parents regarding their power and access to schools. However, dominant ideologies around neighborhood access to schools and structures of power ultimately shaped the public language that the educators chose to use and whom they aimed to appease.

Significance

Bringing the focus to the political organizing of teacher leaders, this study expands the scope of studies on school choice, school equity efforts, and distributed organizational leadership. Given teachers’ unique positions within schools and school communities, this study offers new analytical insight into how teachers navigate the current socio-political landscape when organizing for school integration. Furthermore, we reveal how teachers operate as constrained actors within our current education policy conjuncture where race-evasiveness is not only the norm but is also legally mandated.

Authors

• Talia S. Leibovitz, University of California - Berkeley

• Joy Esboldt, University of Delaware