School Segregation as Social-Structural Injustice: Our Political Responsibility for New York City Public Schools

• In Event: Why New York City School Desegregation Requires Systemic Thinking: A Transdisciplinary Conversation

Abstract

Systems thinking in education is an analytic tool often used by leadership in order to better understand and respond to persistent problems at the school or district level (Shaked & Schechter, 2017). However, it can also help us better understand the broader social systems that shape the educational landscape to begin with.

The objective of this paper is to provide a theoretical analysis using the moral concepts of structural injustice, complicity, and responsibility in relation to school segregation. Incorporating moral philosophy into this transdisciplinary panel on school segregation opens up possibilities for better responding to the complex social processes that sustain and resist segregation in NYC public schools.

I begin with a review of the contemporary literature in moral philosophy, specifically regarding the concepts of complicity and moral responsibility. I focus on two competing theories. Christopher Kutz develops a theory of complicity by expanding a standard theory of individual accountability, rooted in individual intentional action (Kutz, 2000). This theory hinges on the idea of participatory accountability, which is rooted in a collection of individuals and their respective participatory intentions. In other words, accountability remains grounded in an individual’s intention. Iris Marion Young, on the other hand, argues that social-structural injustices are of a different kind, not merely of a different degree, than interpersonal moral wrongs or injustices (Young, 2011). On her account, liability models of responsibility, like Kutz’s, connect individual moral responsibility to blame and guilt. They are therefore not appropriate for addressing structural injustice. The political, she suggests, is a more effective realm for theorizing about social-structural injustice. As such, she elaborates a theory that distinguishes moral guilt from a forward-looking political responsibility for addressing social-structural injustices.

While neither of these theorists consider the specific question of school segregation, I argue that school segregation constitutes a social-structural injustice and that Young’s forward-looking political responsibility is a framework that is well-suited for responding to this systemic issue.

To develop this argument, I look specifically at school segregation in NYC and incorporate the historical and sociological data presented by my co-panelists. The historian’s archival analysis along with the sociologist’s survey data serve to illustrate that school segregation is a social-structural injustice, in Young’s terms. In other words, school segregation is a complex social phenomenon. Individual and institutional agents act in various ways that are often uncoordinated, yet collectively serve to maintain or resist school segregation. These actors include individual parents, school boards, zoning commissions, parent groups, student groups, teachers, administrators, homeowners, teacher’s unions, and district administrators.

Systems thinking encourages us not to analyze these actors in isolation, but together as a part of a system. This paper contributes to the study of school segregation by suggesting that Young’s moral framework is a form of systems thinking. I argue that it helps us diagnose school segregation as a social-structural injustice and that Young’s notion of forward-looking political responsibility is a moral category that all community members and institutions can incorporate, collectively, in order to respond to this systemic injustice.

Author

• Stephanie Mota Thurston, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign