How We Show Up
Our intention is to promote integration, however, those of us who have been educated in and who have existed in predominantly White spaces bring assumptions that are steeped in Whiteness. These resources expand our awareness of how those norms impact how we show up in integrating schools, help us examine our cultural assumptions, and give us a framework for becoming, with continual practice, better integrating parents and caregivers.
The Integrated Schools Movement: How We Show Up (part 1)
Despite the Best Intentions: How Racial Inequality Thrives in Good Schools
Lewis, Amanda & John Diamond (2015). Diamond and Lewis situate their research in a school located in the suburb of a large Midwestern city, and look at what factors within the school itself could be causing academic disparities.
The authors challenge many common explanations of the “racial achievement gap,” exploring what race actually means in the school context and how it matters. An in-depth study with far-reaching consequences, Despite the Best Intentions revolutionizes our understanding of both the knotty problem of academic disparities and the larger question of the color line in American society.
You can also listen to IS’ May 2019 podcast with Dr. Lewis.
When Middle-Class Parents Choose Urban Schools: Class, Race, and the Challenge of Equity in Public Education
Posey-Maddox, Linn (2014). When middle-class parents engage in urban school communities, they can bring a host of positive benefits, including new educational opportunities and greater diversity. But their involvement can also unintentionally marginalize less-affluent parents and diminish low-income students’ access to the improvements at the improving schools. Posey-Maddox argues that such efforts, which usually equate improvement with rising test scores and increased enrollment, need to have more equity-focused policies to ensure that low-income families also benefit from—and participate in—school change.
School Colors Podcast (Nov 2019). Gentrification is reshaping cities all over the country: more affluent people, often but not always White, are moving into historically Black and Brown neighborhoods like Bedford-Stuyvesant. A lot of people moving into the neighborhood either don’t have kids, or send their kids to school outside the district.
In this episode, a group of parents who are new to Bed-Stuy try to organize their peers to enroll and invest in local schools, only to find that what looks like investment to some feels like colonization to others. The entire series is worth a listen.
Roda, Allison (2015). Inequality in Gifted and Talented Programs examines the relationship between gifted and talented (G&T) education, school choice, and racialized tracking within New York City elementary schools. Roda examines parental attitudes around placing their children in a racially diverse elementary school with segregated G&T and General Education programs.
For a summary of the implications of Dr. Roda’s work, read this Chalkbeat interview.
You can also listen to our interview with Dr. Roda from March of 2019.
A Great School Benefits Us All: Advantaged Parents and the Gentrification of an Urban Public School
Freidus, Alexandra (2016). Middle-class, professional, and White families in gentrifying cities are increasingly choosing neighborhood public schools and yet, Freidus finds that as they worked to make their local public school “great,” advantaged parents performed the role of careful investors, defined themselves as the source of the school’s potential value, and marginalized low-income families and families of color. These findings raise important questions about educational equity for both educational researchers and urban school and district leaders.
McKenna, Laura (2016). While this article doesn’t speak directly to school integration, it outlines some of the many ways that economically advantaged families contribute to deep inequities in our public school system.
Perils and Promises: Middle-Class Parental Involvement in Urban Schools
Cucchiara, Maia Bloomfield and Erin McNamara Horvat (2009). This academic article shows how middle-class parents can bring resources to urban schools and be catalysts for change. However, the relationship between parental involvement and widespread benefit was mediated by parents’ own goals and perspectives as well as by the larger social context. The authors find that a collective orientation (rather than individualistic) is more sustainable and has greater potential for benefiting all children in the school.