Stanton-Salazar, Vásquez, and Mehan 2000).
Hope for a Future of Effective, High-Quality Integrated Education in U.S. Public Schools?
Given the combined reality of rapidly resegregating schools, the deprioritization of integration as an equity-based education reform measure, an escalating desire among affluent residential communities to establish schooling arrangements on their own terms, and the ubiquity of normative practices within desegregated schools that can limit students’ engagement across difference, there would appear to be little room for envisioning how to sustain equitable, high-quality educational environments that could be shared across socioeconomic and racial difference. Yet addressing this challenge would seem all the more timely and critical in light of the rapidly increasing rates of racial and socioeconomic diversity in U.S. suburban areas (M. Orfield and Luce 2012) and the educational injustices that we can expect will be perpetuated if the differential production of low- and high-poverty, racially isolated schools is allowed to continue at pace. Is it feasible, or even possible, to imagine a way to generate the political will to protect and sustain integrated public school contexts and the shared, high-quality, and equitable learning environments they have the potential to provide? If so, from where might such an impetus be likely to come?
In recent writings on equity-based school reform, educational scholar Jeannie Oakes and her colleagues have explored the extent to which grassroots political organizing and activism, led primarily by low-income populations of color, might play a catalytic role in equity-based educational reform in the United States (Oakes et al. 2008; Oakes and Lipton 2002; Rogers and Oakes 2005). Their scholarly project reflects a deeper interest in the possibilities of social movement activism to “win” better schools for working-class Latino and African American communities that have long been the most disadvantaged in terms of access to educational resources, opportunities, and school achievement. Their particular interest in social activism “led primarily by working class communities of color operating largely outside of the educational system” reflects a specific understanding of the primary obstacles to equal educational opportunity in U.S. public schools. This view is that the historical failure to establish high-quality, equitable education in U.S. public schools—despite decades of substantial investment in well-intentioned interventions—is largely the consequence of a long-misguided emphasis in educational reform policy on generating consensus-based, technical solutions to what are primarily normative and political impediments to educational equity (see also Nygreen 2006). In other words, what has long impeded the effectiveness of conventional school reform policy is investment in the faulty assumption that educational problems—including those related to differential achievement—are primarily the consequence of a lack of sufficient knowledge about how to design and implement high-impact teaching practices for diverse learners in ways that support standards-based competencies. As a result, the preferred path of reform has been to focus on programmatic innovations to improve teaching practice and create evidence-based “replicable” programs that, when competently applied, support high-quality learning for all students across (or often in spite of) lines of social difference. Yet decades of educational policy reform in this vein have done remarkably little to disrupt the all-too-familiar patterns of school success and failure across lines of politicized race, class, ethnicity, and gender difference in U.S. schools.
This intractability, Oakes and her colleagues suggest, is better understood as the consequence of normative forces that have long fueled aggressive political opposition to a broad range of equalization efforts designed to improve resources, opportunities, and outcomes on behalf of low-income students of color. These normative forces take the guise of a set of dominant “logics” that define the nation’s thinking about public education (Oakes et al. 2008) and include assumptions about resource scarcity (that the financial resources to support high-quality education are in limited supply); meritocratic privilege (that such limited educational resources ought to be competed for and provided in a privileged manner to those students who are most deserving based on their ability level and preparation, often cast erroneously as their “potential”); and a belief in the existence of unalterable deficits (that low-income students of color face cultural, situational, and individual deficits that schools cannot be expected to alter).
Taken together, these popular logics portray public schooling as a zero-sum game in which opportunities for sought-after high-quality education are in small supply and should be competed for by students, families, and residential communities. When middle-class populations affirm these normative logics, calls for funding to remediate educational inequalities become viewed as an illegitimate redistribution of resources that allegedly “takes away” from the more deserving middle class, provoking fierce resistance to a perceived attack on their “earned” right to transfer educational and socioeconomic opportunities intergenerationally to their children.
A prime example of these normative logics powerfully at play is in the hard-fought (but still largely unfulfilled) effort to institute high-quality integrated education in U.S. public schools. Despite more than fifty years of technical development of effective, evidence-based models for high-quality integrated education, attempts to institutionalize the vision of Brown v. Board of Education have brought “retrogressive action and inertia by elites, anger among nonelite Whites who see themselves as losers in such reform, and disillusionment among excluded groups themselves about the possibility of racial equality and the desirability of racial integration” (Oakes et al. 2008: 2185). The Brown court, by viewing the solution to segregated schools in largely technical terms, failed to fully appreciate the broader socioeconomic conditions, power relations and cultural norms of race, merit, and deficit that have sustained structures of segregation and inequality within public schools and made segregated conditions seem so sensible to those who are privileged by them.
Social Movement Activism as a Potential Subterfuge for Resegregating Schools
This Brown miscalculation, as Derrick Bell (2004: 170) has noted, offers important lessons to advocates of racial justice and equal educational opportunity, suggesting they “rely less on judicial decisions and more on tactics, actions and even attitudes that challenge the continuing assumptions of white dominance.” In Bell’s terms, effective equity-based school reform requires a direct challenge to the dominant cultural norms that have framed debates over “quality education” and the need for advocacy strategies that aim to transform schools away from normative models that have long favored the more affluent, monolingual White middle-class and justified White dominance in educational contexts.
In this sense, social movement activism—particularly when rooted in assertions to high-quality education as a social priority and fundamental right to which all citizens should have an equal entitlement—may have an important role to play (Oakes 1995: 9). Such activism has the potential to succeed where technical, consensus-based reform has not, by addressing in a direct manner the political and normative obstacles to equity-based school reform through efforts to expose, disrupt, and challenge the prevailing logics of public schooling that make segregated schooling conditions appear so normal and unquestionable. As well, social movement activism, and grassroots organizing in particular, can make available political spaces from which to frame, articulate, and establish alternative visions, or critical counternarratives (Villenas and Deyhle 1999; Yasso and Solórzano 2001), capable of shifting the popular meaning of high-quality education from one in which citizens and residential communities are expected to compete for scarce resources toward the idea that high-quality education is essential to human dignity and the civic/economic health of a community without reference to the socioeconomic, cultural, or ethnic backgrounds of its residents (Oakes 1995: 6).
Of course, such a radical reframing of educational rights would require a broad-based political will to fight for inclusive, equitable, and high-quality education that is difficult to imagine, politically, in the current era (Stone et al. 2001). Indeed, as a number of school reform scholars have recently noted, the extent to which such political resolve is possible depends critically on the involvement, leadership, and mobilization of those who are most marginalized and who have the most to
