the most modest attempts to promote multicultural educational practices that value and validate the cultural and linguistic heritage of Mexican-descent students.
Chapter 7 shifts attention back to the school district secession battle, highlighting the mid-2000s appearance of a broad-based, Latino-led coalition of engaged citizens, community leaders, and civic groups that set out to delegitimize the well-established district secession movement and provide an alternative vision for high-quality, shared schooling in the district. The chapter looks closely at the process and outcomes of civic capacity building among Mexican-descent youth and adult citizens, demonstrating how and why they were drawn powerfully into local politics for school improvement despite conditions of concentrated poverty that can often serve to stifle such mobilization. The analysis focuses specifically on two Latino-led collectivities that served as central organizing contexts for opposition to school resegregation, addressing how each group provided a unique social, cultural, and political space from which formerly marginalized youth and adults could engage in critical conversations about the role and purpose of public schooling, speak out against unjust educational conditions, and articulate counter-narratives stressing the importance of racial justice and a fundamental entitlement to shared, high-quality education. I also explore some of the specific strategies developed by local Latino activists to consolidate cross-class coalitions sympathetic to the cause of equal educational opportunity. The article ends with a discussion of the challenges inherent in translating grassroots activism into broader educational reform efforts aimed at establishing high-quality integrated education as a fundamental right.
The concluding chapter uses a recent controversy over the naming of a newly constructed high school after civil rights leader Cesar Chavez to bring together several of the central arguments developed in the book. The book concludes with a more personal discussion of the importance of integrated schooling in a twenty-first-century context, putting in perspective both the inherent challenges to such efforts, and the strategies that would be necessary to sustain public school environments in ways that might more equally serve all students across class, racial, ethnic, and cultural difference.
The story I tell about Pleasanton Valley, its school district, and Allenstown High in particular, cannot be generalized as the “normal” experience of all bimodal (predominantly White/Latino) school systems in the United States, nor is it necessarily a proper representation of the challenges other multiracial schools and school systems may face. However, what became clear to me in the course of my fieldwork is that increasing White/Latino public school segregation, while national in scope, is locally produced. This realization is significant in that it obligates school personnel at both the district and school site levels—as well as officials at the level of regional government—to acknowledge and come to an informed understanding of their own role in perpetuating and reproducing inequity in education and blocking equal access to important academic and social resources for Mexican-descent students. What has been a crux of the problem in Pleasanton Valley are agencies, administrators, and teachers who are, at worst, unwilling to challenge status quo schooling practices that generate racial segregation and unequal access to educational resources and, at best, lacking the ability, resources, and knowledge to maintain the kind of resolve necessary to transform them.
PART I
Contextualizing Educational Inequality
CHAPTER 1
White/Latino School Resegregation, the Deprioritization of School Integration, and Prospects for a Future of Shared, High-Quality Education
Latino School Segregation as a Twenty-First-Century Problem
Why, from an equal educational opportunity perspective, should there be any significant concern about the school segregation of Latino youth? What does racial balance have to do with effective, equity-based schooling practice? To understand how Latino school segregation constitutes such a potent challenge to equal educational opportunity in the United States, it is imperative to view the situation beyond a simple “racial balance” issue. In reality, Latino school segregation is systematically linked to other forms of isolation including segregation by socioeconomic status, residential location, and increasingly by language. What has been much less politicized in the integration debate is the class component of segregated schools, that is, the socioeconomic injustice that segregated schools tend to perpetuate, based on the concentrated poverty that is so strongly associated with race in the United States. Unfortunately, Latino segregation almost always involves double or triple segregation, including conditions of concentrated poverty and linguistic separation.
Research statistics from the Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechas Civiles at UCLA provide dimension to the problem. Nationally, Latinos are three times more likely than Whites to be in high-poverty schools and twelve times as likely to be in schools where almost everyone is poor (Orfield and Lee 2006). In the western United States, Latinos make up 55 percent of students attending high-poverty schools (defined as schools with 50–100 percent poor students) and 76 percent of those in extreme-poverty schools (defined as 90–100 percent poor students). This is in stark contrast to White students, who represent 26 percent of those in high-poverty schools and only 7 percent of those in extreme-poverty schools. Put another way, 82 percent of White students and only 7 percent of Latinos attend low-poverty schools (20).
In these terms, the problem of Latino school segregation is not a simple psychological burden of racial isolation but a larger syndrome of inequalities related to the double and triple segregation Latino students face in racially isolated schools.1 Latino youth segregated in high-poverty schools—what Orfield and Lee have called “institutions of concentrated disadvantage”—face a host of challenges that impede their access to high-quality K-12 education as well as to college. Students in such schools often face linguistic isolation, with large numbers of native Spanish speakers and few fluent speakers of academic English, which severely limits their opportunities to practice and acquire English, an element considered essential for success in high school, higher education, and beyond (Gándara and Hopkins 2009; Gifford and Valdes 2006). Other significant disadvantages include less contact with teachers credentialed in the subjects they are teaching, a more limited curriculum often taught at less challenging levels, less availability of advanced placement courses that prepare (and sometimes qualify) students for college admission, generally lower levels of parental education, less access to pro-academic peer groups, violence in the form of crime and gangs, dropout problems, lower college-going rates, and lack of proper nutrition and other untreated health problems (Balfanz and Legters 2004; Clotfelter, Ladd, and Vigdor 2005).
In other words, Latino students in racially segregated, high-poverty schools face isolation not only from the White community, but from middle-class schools and the potential benefits derived from them. Low-poverty schools tend to offer stronger academic competition, the ability to attract and hold more qualified instructors teaching in their subject areas, the availability of more accelerated and academically demanding courses, more active involvement of parents, stronger relationships with colleges, better campus facilities and equipment, greater access to pro-academic peer groups, greater access to social networks and experiences that can lead to increased educational and job opportunities, and higher graduation and college-going rates (Betts, Rueben, and Danenberg 2000; Haycock 1998; Orfield 2001).
Beyond the obstacles that confront working-class Latino youth and their families in segregated schooling contexts are the extreme challenges faced by the urban and suburban school systems that serve them. Besides often severe inequalities in school finance due to differential property tax bases, such schools are burdened by added instructional costs related to language training and some forms of special education, constant retraining and supervision of new teachers due to high turnover, frequent student movement and midyear transfers that lead to instability in school enrollments (which also affects consistency
