Confronting Suburban School Resegregation in California. Clayton A. Hurd
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these documented successes, it bears recognizing that the mobilization of Latino populations to actively participate in the contentious fight for equal education comes with unique challenges, particularly when it involves immigrant, migrant, and undocumented residents for whom a sense of entitlement to society’s resources may not be easily rooted in national or legal citizenship status. The willingness of Latino (im-)migrant parents and youth to speak up against educational institutions from which they may feel disconnected or alienated can be restricted by a lack of a sense of a “right to have rights” to such basic entitlements as exercising a critical voice in local schooling politics. It is for these reasons that successful campaigns to politically empower U.S. Latinos—particularly Mexican immigrants—have often been rooted in assertions to “cultural citizenship,” that is, rights to belong in the U.S. contingent not on formal citizenship status but on essential human rights to dignity, well-being, and respect (Flores and Benmayor 1997; Rosaldo, Flores, and Silvestrini 1994). Such organizing strategies necessarily engage cultural struggle and power as key elements in the community mobilization process, given the need for strong and collective moral support against ongoing, popular campaigns of exclusion, marginalization, and disenfranchisement (Trueba et al. 1993).18 The importance of organizing around cultural experience and struggle is the context it provides for developing a sense of resiliency and mutual support to collectively navigate cultural, linguistic, and institutional borders in ways that allow residents to participate in community politics with a sense of power and in ways that sustained them as cultural beings (Dyrness 2011).
Educational ethnographers, in partic u lar, have emphasized the importance of such strategies for empowering immigrant Latina/o parents to become active participants in schooling politics, including the need to create spaces for parents to tell their stories and engage in a political process of “becoming and belonging,” which allows them to meet their own goals of self-realization and transformation rather than expecting them to simply “get involved” in existing school site activities that may be perceived as hostile or alienating (Dyrness 2008: 193; see also Delgado-Gaitan 1996; Villenas 2001; Villenas and Deyhle 1999). The availability of such relatively segregated “safe spaces”19— often favorably located outside formal institutional settings where normative forces of class/race privilege and entitlement can limit critical conversations—allows a context for socially and politically marginalized citizens to engage in a process of mutual dialogue that may include examining experiences of oppression, cultivating a critical awareness of the larger political system in which their lives are located along with the skills and voice to participate in it, and developing new leadership skills, knowledge, and aspirations, “as well as norms of collective deliberation that enable communities to mobilize social capital for shared goals” (Mediratta, Shah, and McAlister 2009: 140). As organizing contexts, such spaces allow room for Latino participants to understand power, learn public speaking and organizing skills, and “collectively create counter-hegemonic narratives of dignity and cultural pride” that contest the normative societal discourses of deficiency and lack by which their communities and children are often defined (Villenas and Deyhle 1999: 437; Foley 1997),20 and permit a questioning and reframing of the prevalent logics of educational merit and entitlement that have tended historically to distribute high-quality schooling experiences and opportunities differentially and unequally along lines of race, class, and culture.
Challenges to School Reform Or ganizing for Integrated Education
A distinct challenge for organizing efforts aimed specifically at protecting high-quality integrated education is that even with substantial capacity building and mobilization of residents from within working-class Latino communities, success is unlikely without support from a significant cross-section of residents from White middle-class communities as well. The prospect of enlisting significant support from White middle-class residents relies on the existence of widely shared convictions about the usefulness and viability of integrated schooling, including a belief among parents that they are not being asked to choose between “diversity” and “excellence” because there are compelling academic and social benefits associated with integrated education (Orfield, Frankenberg, and Siegel-Hawley 2010). From a grassroots mobilization perspective, it requires the ability to craft a collective action frame broad enough to permit a shared understanding of high-quality, integrated education as both a desirable option (rather than a threatening imposition) and a moral imperative (Oakes and Lipton 2002), so as to attract a critical mass of middle-class White parents as well.
Yet the task of establishing and then sustaining such a social movement frame is difficult when conflict, contention, and cultural struggle are taken as important crucibles for building power and civic capacity for educational change (as they have been with Latino school reform organizing efforts), and when the focus of activity is to challenge normative logics that have long favored affluent White suburbanites. Despite such obstacles, however, organizing in support of shared, high-quality schooling is possible, as Chapter 7 will explore. Here, Latino-led groups in Pleasanton Valley successfully built a broad-based collective action frame that portrayed high-quality integrated education as a fundamental right for all citizens, suggesting there is still some hope for establishing a level of political will sufficient to support integrated schools. Whether or not such popular will can be sustained and translated into structural change at the district and school site levels—against existent political and normative forces of resistance and in a way that sustains a critical mass of supporters from the White residential community—remains to be seen.
Summary
In this chapter, I have tried to account for how processes of school resegregation are occurring despite the nation’s commitment in principle to racial and socioeconomic justice, equal citizenship, and equal opportunity in the educational realm. Ultimately, school segregation remains a significant barrier to equal educational opportunity not because of some intangible psychological burden, but because of the way in which it isolates whole communities of color in “schools of concentrated disadvantage” for which even campaigns to equalize school funding and enhance teacher training can be expected to have limited impact. Nevertheless, there is a clear divestment in school integration as an equity-based reform measure in the United States, due in significant part to the sustained influence of a particular set of normative assumptions about the “nature” of educational problems in public schools and how they should best be resolved. These assumptions fail, in general, to appreciate the importance of social, economic, and political contexts on students’ learning process; instead, they portray “multicultural” schools in the United States as largely neutral institutions that provide equal opportunity for all through a technical, skills-based literacy program that assesses student performance based on very specific (and limited) understandings of what constitutes—and indeed, permits—educational success for diverse learners. The hegemonic assumptions underlying current schooling policy and practice have served to further condone a refusal to view linguistic, cultural, and class experiences as important resources to be engaged in the educational process, reducing them instead to explanations of why students fail.
The retreat from integration and the growth of school resegregation in U.S. suburban areas is not, of course, a simple product of shifting educational discourses; there are clear material interests at play. The ability of White, middle-class suburban residents to renegotiate the terms and possibilities of shared schooling has been made increasingly possible by the prevalent neoliberalism and the growth of an increasingly suburbanized and privatized nation-state.
I would argue, nevertheless, that there is some reason for hope about the future of shared, high-quality education, but only if equity-based school reform efforts can move beyond a primary focus on technical innovations within schools and classrooms—for example, the creation of new, more inclusive educational curricular programs and enhancements of teacher training—to encompass more popular efforts to “confront the non-technical (social, political, cultural) dimensions of change that must occur within our schools and across society before the promise of Brown can be fulfilled” (Rogers and Oakes 2005: 2195). To this end, social movement activism provides a promising route, particularly when organizing energy and network building is put toward developing and articulating alternative visions of entitlement to “quality education” that challenge the highly normative assumptions and processes that make