Confronting Suburban School Resegregation in California. Clayton A. Hurd
1, I provide an overarching discussion of the theoretical frameworks that I deploy to explain the political, material, and normative forces that have contributed to the deprioritization of racial integration as a means of promoting equity-based public school reform in the United States. Here, I focus special attention on the cultural norms of race, merit, and citizenship that have driven and, to a great extent limited, the scope of equity-based educational reform in U.S. schools. The chapter ends with a discussion about the relative promise of grassroots social activism, led primarily by working-class Latino populations, to help generate the political will to protect and sustain shared schooling environments and to establish high-quality integration as a fundamental right in the United States.
Chapter 2 begins with an ethnographic introduction to students’ social worlds at Allenstown High, with specific attention to the highly essentialized understandings of racial and cultural difference that characterize students’ narratives and help generate students’ experiences of sociospatial segregation on the campus. I explore how students’ particular understandings of social difference limit their social interactions in ways that impact the relative levels of academic and social engagement experienced by Mexican-descent and White students at the school. In order to make sense of the extreme levels of student segregation, I offer a wider analysis of the economic, political, social, and cultural realities that have shaped the political exercise of community in the larger Pleasanton Valley region, arguing that this history helps explain the racially oppositional politics of identity that has come to shape not only student interactions at the high school but also broader patterns of parent and citizen involvement in the schooling process. The chapter ends with a historical overview of the highly politicized battles over school desegregation that marked schooling politics in Pleasanton Valley from the 1970s to the early 1990s, with particular attention to how conditions of racial polarization in school and community have long served to hinder efforts to establish educational equity and opportunity between White and Mexican-descent populations in the region. This historical analysis of desegregation politics provides what I believe to be essential background for the more recent effort of a citizen group in Allenstown to “secede” from the increasingly Latino school district.
Chapters 3 and 4 chronicle a series of events that led up to the Allenstown school district secession campaign. Because the events in these chapters took place in the mid-1990s—several years before I began ethnographic fieldwork in the area—I take great care to reconstruct the events, relying heavily on narratives from individual and group interviews with parents, educators, community activists, and former students as well as archival sources that include local and student media press accounts, internal school memos and personal notes shared by former school staff and teachers, and school- and district-level meeting notes and transcripts. Chapter 3 focuses on the remarkable set of events that followed the election of two first-generation Mexican immigrant students to top leadership positions in student government at Allenstown High School. Here, I document and analyze the manner in which student leaders and their supporters challenged the status quo of local schooling practices that had historically failed to prioritize the integration of students and to assure equal access and participation for Mexican-descent students at the high school. Despite a series of thoughtful and sincere attempts by students and their adult mentors to create conditions for unity and mutual respect at the school, the efforts ultimately failed to generate any significant transformations in schooling structures and practices. A more detailed analysis demonstrates how students’ efforts were undermined by adults at many different levels of the schooling process. Because of the contentious nature of events that transpired during this time, and the painful impact they had on some of those who experienced them, it is important to note that two of the central participants who acted as my informants—Diego Omán and Luis Sandoval— requested that I not quote them directly or reveal the level of information they provided during the course of our interactions. For this reason, I provide a second-hand account of their experiences in this chapter.
Chapter 4 shifts the focus of analysis from the high school to the larger community, chronicling a series of district-sponsored parent fora that were convened to resolve conflicts surrounding the political empowerment of Latino students at Allenstown High. Despite courageous efforts by a group of Mexican migrant parents from Farmingville to have their voices heard, the parent meetings ultimately dissolved before significant action could be taken. As the meetings began to break down, a group of White parents from Allenstown met separately to discuss a plan to separate from the larger PVUSD and create their own Allenstown School District, a plan they made public several weeks later. In proposing their plan for district reorganization—which became widely known as the “Allenstown secession campaign”—the parent group denied that race was an issue, arguing instead that their interests were to create smaller schools, less bureaucracy, and higher-quality education. I analyze the competing notions of entitlement that shaped the convictions of those supporting and opposing the Allenstown secession movement, as well as the role of local discourses of place and community in arguments for and against secession. From either side of this debate, questions about “deservedness”—who deserves what and why, based on entitlements proper to one’s racial, class, and residential status—are central to understanding how particular claims about the nature of educational “problems” are constructed, and how these claims acquire wider acceptance by framing debates about how school reform should best be pursued.
Chapter 5 pursues a more in-depth analysis of Allenstown’s school secession movement. I consider whether the significance of race was overdetermined in the conflict, and I explore the ways its supporters use discourses proposing its “overdetermined” nature to dismiss the racial dimensions of their own rhetoric and political action. While I warn against collapsing the movement into a simple narrative of White racism, I highlight the ways in which the Allenstown secession effort has resonated with strategies historically employed by local Whites to defend their neighborhoods against racial and class Others.
Chapter 6 shifts to more contemporary conditions at Allenstown High School, where I draw from three years of site-based, participant-observation research to analyze the well-intended, institutional effort at Allenstown High to create a more welcoming and inclusive environment for Mexican-descent students on the campus. I then narrow my focus to one particular effort in this regard: the promotion of “cultural celebrations,” including those commemorating Mexican holidays. I argue that the conflicts that have accompanied these events reveal the complex challenges teachers and students face in even 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