(quoted in Reich 1991:187).10
Suburban School District “Secessionism” and the Politics of Deserved Segregation
The school district reorganization campaign that is the focus of this study, emerging as it did in the mid-1990s, became immediately known by its opponents as the “Allenstown school district secession campaign.” In my own analysis of the decade-long initiative, I have elected to retain the politicized language of secession because I believe that this campaign—and other citizen-led, suburban school district “reorganization” efforts like it—can be related to other, largely middle-class movements to “secede from responsibility” in a political opportunity structure made possible by the reigning influence of economic neoliberalism, the increase of suburban privatization, and the combined role they have played in reshaping U.S. political and economic life (Boudreau and Keil 2001). Suburban school secession movements, I argue, should be viewed in relation to similar kinds of phenomena emerging not just in the United States, but on a global scale, including territorial secession efforts (like those in Los Angeles in the 1990s) and the increased construction of gated communities and walled cities about which there is an interesting and growing body of ethnographic literature (Caldeira 2000; Lowe 2003; Rivera-Bonilla 1999). What suburban school secession campaigns share with these territorial and community-fortification counterparts is their status as mostly class-based and strongly racialized movements of social separation couched in political terms, that is, articulated in a language of civil rights and liberalism (Boudreau and Keil 2001: 1702). In other words, they tend to use a common set of arguments to justify their actions, including an expressed desire for local control, an expectation of greater return on tax dollars locally, a fear of bureaucracy and big government, and a sense that they, as privileged members of the suburban middle class, are not getting a fair share of what they deserve. Moreover, citizen groups see themselves as fair players, claiming that they—as well as the regions from which they seek separation—will be better off in a “divorce” (1718–19). The populist appeal of citizen-led school district secession campaigns, much like that of their territorial counterparts, is predicated on their ability to frame their arguments in a rhetoric of efficiency and boosterism in ways that effectively capture the imagination of middle-class residents (1723). In the case of school district secessionism, this is done primarily through the promise of an elite, high-quality 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
