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 conditions of segregation so unquestioned within our current educational system. Establishing and sustaining the political will to pursue and put into practice such alternative visions will likely rely heavily on the leadership of working-class communities of color who have the most to lose in the current system and the most to gain in a new one.
The discussion in this chapter, while providing a broad context for understanding the proliferation of citizen-led school secession campaigns, does not fully account for the manner in which such campaigns take root and find justification locally. School resegregation campaigns are, ultimately, local and regional productions that take shape in relation to specific histories of social group encounters, and the impact of these encounters on the development of schooling practices, structures, and patterns of engagement in schooling politics. This local/regional historical process is the focus of the next chapter, as I introduce cultural politics of place and schooling in Pleasanton Valley.
CHAPTER 2
Historicizing Educational Politics in Pleasanton Valley
The Politics of Place and Belonging at Allenstown High School
The first buses appear at the gated entrance of Allenstown High School just before 7 a.m., beginning their winding quarter-mile journey up to the center of the campus. The hilly ascent provides views of well-groomed athletic fields and an expansive, naturally terraced forest of redwood and juniper that rises around the campus on three sides. Passing through a series of staff and visitor parking lots, the bus dips briefly into a canopy of eucalyptus before stopping at the flagpole that decorates the roundabout just short of central campus quadrangle. As the doors swing open, it is mostly brown faces that descend, some having awoken as early as 5:30 a.m. to take the crowded, ten-mile ride from their homes in Farmingville to the Allenstown area high school.
By 7:45 a.m., hundreds more students have arrived on campus, streaming in from the student parking lots rising up along the north side of campus, moving instinctively down toward the central “Quad” area. The Quad is a fishbowl- style courtyard, lined with concrete and dotted with newt trees, that offers an assortment of painted metal picnic tables and wood benches around which students socialize between classes and before and after school. With the exception of the primary entrance from the bus roundabout, the Quad is largely an enclosed area, buffeted on the right side by an elevated cafeteria and on the left by the recessed gymnasium. In the very back of the courtyard is a narrow staircase that leads to a secondary terrace of classroom buildings. Even at this early hour, the Quad is thick with activity as students mingle on benches, gather around tables, sit cross-legged on the concrete ground, or occupy one of the multiple staircases that surround the enclosure on each side.
Student peer groups and networks spread across the Quad in a discernible social matrix that students can map in astounding detail.1 The broad staircase that descends from the cafeteria is reserved as the exclusive domain of the junior and senior male “Jocks.” Below them, in the interior of the courtyard, one finds the “Preps,” a fairly equal mix of fashionably dressed girls and boys who sit in small groups on the ground or congregate around picnic tables to talk, eat, or finish homework assignments. Lounging against a wire fence that stretches around to the back of the gymnasium are the so-called “Dirts,” who, despite their disparaging namesake, are a colorful coalition of coed peers that manages to incorporate a diverse and outwardly eclectic mix of nonconformist, punk, Goth, trench coat, and neo-hippie styles and attitudes. Near the front entrance to the gymnasium, flanking the soda machines, are the male “Surfer” and “Skater” groups, who can often be identified by their Quicksilver sweatshirts, spiked or shaved hair, and occasional skateboard in tow. On the front side of the courtyard and spilling across the driveway into the interior of the bus roundabout are the self-proclaimed “normal girls” who take pride in their tasteful yet understated fashion style and their well-groomed but generally low-maintenance appearance. Students’ social locations in the Quad tend to be remarkably permanent, as most students return to the same spaces before and after school and at nearly every break, some for their entire high school careers.
At first glance, the central Quad area at AHS would seem to provide space for a remarkably diverse cross-section of student identity and status groups at the high school. Yet, among the several hundred students who settle in and mill through the area, one would be hard pressed to ever find more than a very small handful of Mexican-descent students. Even then, they are likely to be individuals or pairs scattered in the larger social groups. Despite making up nearly half the Allenstown High population, Mexican-descent students are almost entirely absent from the Quad area and the central campus region generally. Instead, they can be found dispersed across the more peripheral areas of campus. For example, groupings of primarily English-speaking Latino students congregate on the far sides of the “G” and “H” classroom buildings, two temporary modular units on the front
