Confronting Suburban School Resegregation in California. Clayton A. Hurd
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citizens and elected school board collaborators whose proclaimed interests are to reorganize school districts in ways that best meet the alleged “needs” of all children. School district reorganization campaigns in which resegregation has become a significant factor have proliferated across the country—most notably in California, but also in Arizona, Illinois, Kansas, Maine, Massachusetts, Missouri, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Wisconsin, and Washington (Murray 2009). In California alone since the 1990s, public school district reorganization campaigns in which White/Latino racial resegregation has become a politicized issue include those in Alta Dena (Pasadena), Aptos (Santa Cruz County), Fremont (San Francisco Bay Area), Grand Terrace (near Riverside), Lakewood (Long Beach), Lomita (Los Angeles County), Marina (Monterey County), Pleasanton Valley (Ventura), Rio Linda (North Sacramento), San Rafael (Marin County), and Santa Clarita Valley (Los Angeles County), to name a few. The proliferation of these campaigns has gone hand in hand with a string of U.S. Supreme Court decisions that suggest a growing legal and political interest in abandoning the goal of integrating children and moving (back) toward the idea of the “neighborhood school” and arrangements favoring “parental choice.”3 While this tendency of federal courts to support residential level control of schooling can be potentially liberating for both majority and minority populations in some areas of the country, it has provided, in others, tacit support for the efforts of affluent White populations to resegregate on the basis of class-based interests.
Many of these suburban school resegregation movements—including the one that will be highlighted in this study—take the form of grassroots district reorganization campaigns led predominantly by White, middle-class residential communities whose residents justify their actions as anything other than racially, culturally, or socioeconomically motivated. These citizen movements, and the policy decisions their activism inspires, are typically couched in language such as promoting quality education, meeting the linguistic and academic needs of diverse students, holding all students accountable to basic educational standards, bridging the achievement gap, exercising local control, or assuring the integrity and benefits derived from “neighborhood schools.” Despite the avowed good intentions and clear democratic appeals, the outcomes of these efforts are often the increased isolation of Latino students in high-poverty schools with fewer resources, less-experienced teachers, and fewer social networks that cross lines of racial, class, and ethnic differences (Orfield and Lee 2005, 2006, 2007).4
Central Questions and Arguments of the Book
The purpose of this book is to examine the political and educational processes that are contributing to active White/Latino school resegregation in suburban areas of the United States. Rather than focusing primarily on shifts in legal discourse and educational policy at the state and federal levels, the book investigates school resegregation processes through a grounded ethnographic study of a suburban school district on California’s central coast where a predominantly White residential community has undertaken an active, decade-long campaign to “secede” from what has become an increasingly Latino school district. Based on five years of extensive school and community-based ethnographic research, the analysis pays close attention to the local, regional, and national politics that have shaped the direction of debates, decisions, and patterns of action and response regarding school resegregation, as well as to the justifications to “reorganize” the school district in ways that accomplish resegregation. The book’s analytical focus on “cultural politics” is meant to situate local interactions within and around schools in relation to larger macro-level discourses regarding race and class entitlement, as well as current conceptions of what constitutes “quality education” and equality of educational opportunity.
A growing body of academic literature is focusing on public school resegregation processes in the United States, including the expansive research associated with the Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles at UCLA.5 This work has focused primarily on quantitative analyses of shifting societal attitudes, aggregate demographic data, and changing court orders, decisions, deliberations, and legal proceedings. While these approaches are valuable in assessing what kinds of resegregation are happening, and to some extent how they are happening, but they provide less insight into why resegregation is occurring and how it is being justified, particularly given the paradoxical reality that U.S. citizens appear to value integrated schooling as much now as (if not more than) ever.6 This book intends to help fill the existing gap in qualitative research by providing a micro/macro account of White/Latino suburban school resegregation processes that moves beyond quantitative data analysis to delve more deeply into the explanations, justifications, and community-level processes through which increasing school segregation is being accomplished, in what appears in the case at hand to be a very active fashion.
The theoretical and ethnographic analysis in the book is informed by three related interests. The first is a desire to analyze and understand the core issues at the root of campaigns to reorganize suburban school districts in ways that accomplish Latino/White resegregation. Why are these efforts being pursued despite the existence of state laws that prohibit reorganization on such terms, and how is such activity being justified? To what extent are racism and/or classism a significant factor? A second area of interest relates to the different visions of entitlement to “quality education” that characterize battles between students, school officials, and citizen groups who occupy various sides of the school district secession debate. What differential visions of “quality education” exist, and how do they inform the perspectives of policymakers, community activists, parents, and school officials, as well as the academic and social engagement of students in racially diverse school settings? Third, this study seeks to examine some of the diverse ways Mexican-descent7 populations—from migrant residents to later generation Mexican American youth and their families—are experiencing and responding to the school district secession campaign and efforts to exclude them from low-poverty, middle-class schools and the potential benefits derived from them. Of particular interest are forms and expressions of resistance that are being mobilized against school resegregation campaigns. From what angles have these potent citizen initiatives been resisted, particularly from those within the working-class Latino community, and to what effect? Correspondingly, what alternative visions for developing successful, integrated, and equitable suburban schools are being imagined and articulated, and to what extent might such visions inform broader, equitybased school reform efforts aimed at establishing high-quality, integrated education as a fundamental right for all U.S. citizens? A deeper conceptual engagement with this set of questions is undertaken in the first chapter of this book.
Beyond these foundational concerns, this study seeks to address a practical set of questions regarding the challenges and prospects for developing successful models of high-quality, integrated education, particularly in bimodal (White/Mexican-descent), socioeconomically diverse school settings. For example, what obstacles do administrators, teachers, and students in such settings face in their efforts to facilitate educational transformation toward equity and broad inclusiveness, particularly in areas historically opposed to changes in schooling status quo? How and why do teachers and school administrators who are committed to improving learning environments and facilitating access to resources for Latino children and their families—even in well-resourced schools—face such difficult challenges achieving these goals? For what complex reasons do some people oppose types of educational reform and policies that are specifically designed to transform schooling conditions to include and better serve working-class Mexican-descent students?
To pursue these diverse concerns, the book offers a kind of contrapuntal narrative. In one line of inquiry, it examines a school district reorganization process, initiated by concerned citizen groups rather than local teachers or school officials, to establish separate schooling systems between two residential communities in central California that have long shared a common school district. One community, which I call Allenstown,8 is a predominantly White, middle-to upper-class professional suburb; the other, Farmingville, is a largely Mexican-descent working-class town. In a related line of analysis, the study looks closely at the struggles of a well-resourced desegregated high school in the district’s White residential community to establish an inclusive, integrated schooling environment capable of promoting the broad-based success and academic achievement of