Confronting Suburban School Resegregation in California. Clayton A. Hurd
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education as well as liberation from corrupt, unruly school district bureaucracies that fail to prioritize their specific needs and desires.
More difficult to ascertain, from a democratic point of view, is how proponents of school district secessionism find it possible to cast and imagine themselves as fair players despite often compelling empirical evidence that suggests high levels of negative fiscal and educational impact on communities from which they seek separation—communities that, in many cases, are made up of working-class immigrants and people of color. One manner of accounting for such political behavior, as Andrew Barlowe (2003) has argued, is to see it as reflective of contemporary forms of neoliberal, corporate capitalist development and their influence on current social, political, cultural, and economic relationships in the United States. Barlowe’s analysis looks at how a set of neoliberal economic developments in the United States since the 1970s—which have resulted in an acceleration of an income disparity between the rich and the poor; the expansion of nonunionized, parttime, and temporary jobs that provide lower wages and little security; the increased privatization of basic resources like education, health care. and retirement; and the production of a recurring series of economic recessions, including the most recent financial industry bailout—have served to undermine the security of the nation’s middle class (see also Comaroff, Comaroff, and Weller 2001; Harvey 2007, 1991).11 Downward pressures on much of the middle class have provided a context in which the “haves” have taken on an increasingly defensive posture, viewing claims of the “have-nots” on social resources with outright hostility and fear. Moreover, it has allowed a fertile ground for intensification of racism, as middle-class people feel the need to mobilize any and all privileges available to them, including racial privileges, even if they might not recognize them as such, in order to buffer themselves against the fear of downward mobility (Barlowe 2003: 22). In other words, a “fear of falling” has generated a defensive mentality among middle-class citizens, compelling them to exercise social entitlements in ways that increasingly exploit race, class, and national privileges.
While seeking empirical evidence to validate or refute claims about the influence of recent neoliberal economic developments on social, political, and economic behavior is not a central focus of this study, I believe these broader shifts deserve mention for the role they play in providing a political opportunity structure that has facilitated the growth of suburban school secessionism and lent credibility to suburban citizens’ assertions of rights to a separate education rooted in residentially based “local control,” even when the expected outcomes may be unequal access to public resources across lines of both class and race.
Strengths and Limitations of Material-Historical Accounts of the “Failure” of School Integration
The explanatory framework outlined above, with its careful attention to the macro-level demographic, political, and judicial shifts that have limited school integration efforts and normalized privatization over time, proves a useful lens for interpreting the attitudes of entitlement and privilege that some affluent White suburbanites may feel toward their own segregation—an entitlement they have historically achieved in housing but struggle to sustain in schooling, particularly in light of significant growth of ethnoracial diversity in U.S. suburban areas (Frankenberg and Debray 2011; M. Orfield and Luce 2012). Such felt-entitlements can be considered key components of what Stephen Gregory (following W. E. B. Du Bois) has called “wages of whiteness,” a [middle] class struggle through which Whites “evaluate and experience class identity and mobility” as well as engage in a form of antistate and antiminority politics of deserved segregation (1998: 80). In this case, local resistance to integration is rarely voiced in terms of racial or class interests but rather as a (White, middle-class) fear of losing “local control” over the schooling process.
In the present study of the Pleasanton Valley of California, the White resistance/deserved segregation framework proves valuable in accounting for the discourses and behaviors that have come to surround school resegregation efforts. As the extended case studies in the following chapters will attest, parent and civic leaders from the White residential community who have spent nearly a decade pushing for more locally operated (and racially separate) schooling arrangements have framed their struggles primarily as ones meant to sustain the quality of schools, to protect community resources (particularly financial ones), and to maintain local ways of managing their affairs and finances. In this manner, they have achieved significant success in persuading the school board to accept their positions. However, these same residents have also repeatedly mobilized to resist state policies mandating legal rights to Latino children and their families under desegregation laws as well as the forms of social activism, often led by local Mexican-descent citizens, that have attempted to secure those rights (see Chapters 2 and 3). This has included strong opposition to school programs, structures, and practices designed to accommodate Latinos’ native language skills, and to incorporate cultural elements in ways that might make the schools more equally accessible to Latino students and their families (see Chapters 5 and 6). At the same time, local school district board members and senior school site administrators—positions held overwhelmingly by White residents—have continually dismissed allegations that racial, class, and cultural concerns impact how they manage issues of equity and diversity in the district, yet they have nevertheless repeatedly failed to provide leadership in efforts to integrate students and to assure the provision of state-mandated services and resources designed to ensure equal opportunity and services to Latino youth (see Chapter 2). Ultimately, the entitlement that White suburbanites in Pleasanton Valley have felt to their own “quality schools” has meant excluding minority students. In this sense, struggles for segregated schooling conditions in Pleasanton Valley have truly been, in Gregory’s words, a “struggle over what it meant to be white and middle class in postwar, racially segregated American society” (1998: 81).
Yet, even as the White resistance/deserved segregation framework offers essential insights into the macrohistorical conditions that have fueled a retreat from school integration and advanced the growth of suburban school resegregation in the United States, it remains limited as an explanatory model for a number of reasons. One reason is that it fails, in broad terms, to adequately account for the importance of (often hard-fought) “on-the-ground” efforts to develop and institute integration plans at the district and school levels, and how the trajectory of such activities can play a significant role in determining citizens’, parents’, and educators’ attitudes about the viability and desirability of shared schooling. In other words, macro-level accounts tend not to include qualitative and comparative attention to the relative challenges of instituting integration on a school-by-school basis as it relates to curricular and pedagogical development and efforts to facilitate relational cultures and strong partnerships between educators, parents, and school administrators to assure commitment and accountability to educational models that can successfully engage student across racial, class, and linguistic difference (see, for example, strategies highlighted in Warren 2005 and Warren, Mapp, and the Community Organizing School Reform Project 2011).
Another limitation of the dominant White resistance/deserved segregation explanatory framework is that, by privileging processes of White racism and entitlement claims, it tends to obscure the various ways in which historically oppressed racial minority populations have responded to such treatment, denying them any agency outside of victim. Due to this largely unidirectional historical lens, a deep consideration of what school desegregation initiatives have historically expected of racial minority populations has too often been overlooked. As well, little analytical space is given to an exploration of the ways in which racial minority populations may be internally differentiated by various forms of racial, class, and gender-based discrimination, and the consequences of such differentiation on political agency and engagement at local, regional, and national levels (Gilroy 1987; Gregory 1998). Put another way, the explanatory approach, taken alone, fails in broad terms to adequately account for what school desegregation efforts have required of minority groups, and how such expectations have generated conflicts and spawned political subjectivities that have shaped the very terrain on which integration politics, and equity-based school reform debates more broadly, have taken place at local, regional, and national levels.
Normative Whiteness and the Limits of