remedial education, increased need for counseling/social work support for students experiencing crises related to living in conditions of poverty, and health emergencies that may arise given many working families’ limited access to preventive care (Orfield and Lee 2005). Taking into account these additional costs, it is clear that even liberal educational reforms aimed at equalizing school funding are likely to fall short, as equal dollars simply cannot produce equal opportunities. From an equity-based schooling perspective, the challenge posed by school segregation is not one of simple racial imbalance, but of the clear disadvantages and burdens faced by students isolated in high-poverty schools versus students who enjoy the relative advantages of low-poverty schools.
A critical question is why, given the tangible and damaging consequences of school segregation to Latino youth, so little attention is given to the current crisis. This is particularly perplexing in the United States, where public opinion has become steadily more supportive of desegregated schools. Since the early 1980s, a vast majority of Americans have tended to endorse desegregation in principle, claiming a philosophical preference for racially integrated schools.2 This popular preference is guided by the wisdom that children must learn how to understand and work with others across differences in order to develop the skills for success in cross-cultural and multiracial work and living environments. In fact, recent longitudinal studies on the experiences of youth who have attended integrated primary and secondary schools point to significant long-term social and career benefits to all students, including improved chances of a desegregated future life, higher educational and occupational aspirations, and an increased likelihood of living and working in interracial settings (Wells 1995; Wells et al. 2009; Yun and Kurlaender 2004; Eaton 2001).
Furthermore, a long-held justification among parents for resistance to integrated schooling—that shared educational environments of this kind cannot be made conducive to high-quality learning for all students—has been challenged by an increasingly rich body of scholarly research identifying a broad range of evidence-based practices that promote effective, shared learning in socioeconomically and racially mixed school settings. This includes development of a variety of curricular models for engaging students in academic learning across politicized social difference (Burris and Welner 2007; Landsman and Lewis 2006; Nieto 2010; Oakes 2005; Pollock 2008) and strategies for socially organizing students within the school and classroom to promote more equal status and engagement in curricular and co-curricular activities (Fine, Weis, and Powel 1997; González, Moll, and Amanti 2005; Hawley 2007; Phelan, Davidson, and Yu 1993; Slavin 1995). Within this literature is a growing body of research that specifically addresses the opportunities and challenges that arise in schooling contexts that bring together working-class Latino populations with middle-class Whites (Cammarota 2007; Conchas 2001; Espinoza- Herold 2003; Gándara 2002; González and Moll 2002; Grady 2002; Mehan et al. 1996; Reyes and Laliberty 1992; Slavin et al. 1996).
If an increasing number of U.S. citizens believe in the potential virtues of integrated schooling—and there are tested, evidence-based models to facilitate learning in such settings—why is school integration in such retreat, and how is it being justified? It would seem important to get at the root of this paradox.
Retreat from Integration and Advancement of School Resegregation in the United States
To date, a broad range of scholarly research has sought to explain the sociohistorical, economic, political, and legal factors that have marred the institutionalization of racial integration as an equity-based school reform strategy in the United States since Brown v. Board of Education. For the purposes of my analysis, I wish to identify and discuss two dominant lines of this inquiry.3 One approach, which I will call the White resistance/deserved segregation framework, relies heavily on macrohistorical analyses of shifting material conditions, race-and class-related interests, and federal court decisions in the twentieth century that have shaped public policy, citizenship narratives, and legal-discursive regimes in manners that have undermined or weakened mandates for school integration and justified a return to more “separate but equal” public schooling conditions. The second, which I will call the normative whiteness/subtractive assimilation framework, pays closer attention to the impact of local-level forces, intergroup relations, and racialization processes and the ways in which they combine to generate the social and institutional conditions that limit school integration efforts on the ground. My discussion here is meant not only to identify how each framework contributes significantly to our understanding of continuing processes of school segregation but also to consider how, by integrating insights from each approach, it may be possible to imagine what a democratic countertendency capable of challenging school resegregation processes might look like. In the final section of this chapter, I draw on the work of Jeannie Oakes and her colleagues to consider how a broad rearticulation of values of fairness and inclusion in the schooling process— spread widely through mobilizations and social movement activism led primarily by working-class communities of color—may have the potential to disarm resegregation campaigns by promoting the idea of shared, high-quality public schooling as a fundamental right of all citizens in the United States. While seemingly far-fetched, such a rearticulation of values and norms was accomplished, on a smaller scale, in a series of Latino-led citizen mobilizations against a ten-year campaign to resegregate local schools in the Pleasanton Valley region of central California, and it is worth considering how such a feat was accomplished and what might be learned from it (the extended case study is offered in Chapter 7).
Suburban Development, White Entitlement and Shifting Discourses of Citizenship in the United States
The White resistance/deserved segregation explanatory approach to the retreat from public school desegregation is perhaps best exemplified in the work of educational scholar Gary Orfield and sociologist George Lipsitz. Each, in separate lines of research, has looked deeply into the political and material histories of race and class in twentieth-century United States that have fueled a process of “refusal, resistance, and renegotiation” (in Lipsitz’s 1998 terms) on the part of residents in predominantly White, middle-class residential communities to avoid a host of federal and state desegregation mandates meant to secure equal access to educational resources and to offer minority students opportunities they have historically been denied (see also Orfield and Eaton 1996). Rather than portraying such political strategies of resistance as predicated on openly racist beliefs, Lipsitz identifies what he calls a “possessive investment in whiteness” whereby “white supremacy is usually less a matter of direct, referential, and snarling contempt than a system for protecting the privileges of whites” (1998: viii) by denying communities of color opportunities for such things as asset accumulation, upward mobility, and—in this case—high-quality integrated education.
To account for the construction of White entitlement in these terms, Lipsitz and others (see, for example, Omi and Winant 1994; Brodkin 1998) have pointed to a key set of twentieth-century politico-historical developments in the United States that have fundamentally reshaped the country’s race/class demographics, political identities, and notions of citizenship in the post-civil rights era. Chief among these developments was the creation and expansion of U.S. residential suburbs from the early twentieth century to the late 1960s as “expressedly racist and exclusionary housing markets” (Lipsitz and Oliver 2010) whose occupation was facilitated, in large part, by federal government-sponsored home loan and mortgage assistantship programs that actively and systematically promoted racial segregation (see also Massey and Denton 1998; Mahoney 1997; Jackson 1985). By condoning racial covenants on the purchase of suburban properties, refusing to lend money to people of color, and colluding with private citizens and local real estate agents in an array of associated discriminatory practices that included racial zoning, redlining, steering, and block busting, the U.S. federal government assured that 98 percent of Federal Housing Act loans disbursed between 1934 and 1968 were provided exclusively to Whites (Lipsitz and Oliver 2010; Roithmayr 2007). Further safeguarding suburban areas as reserved largely for White, middle-class settlement was the prioritized allocation of federal funds for highway construction to the suburbs and the associated financing of urban renewal programs that tended to displace urban minority residents into further racially and socioeconomically
