Confronting Suburban School Resegregation in California
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The school-aged population of the United States has become more racially and ethnically diverse in recent decades, but its public schools have become significantly less integrated. In California, nearly half of the state's Latino youth attend intensely-segregated minority schools. Apart from shifts in law and educational policy at the federal level, this gradual resegregation is propelled in part by grassroots efforts led predominantly by white, middle-class residential communities that campaign to reorganize districts and establish ethnically separate neighborhood schools. Despite protests that such campaigns are not racially, culturally, or socioeconomically motivated, the outcomes of these efforts are often the increased isolation of Latino students in high-poverty schools with fewer resources, less experienced teachers, and fewer social networks that cross lines of racial, class, and ethnic difference. Confronting Suburban School Resegregation in California investigates the struggles in a central California school district, where a predominantly white residential community recently undertook a decade-long campaign to «secede» from an increasingly Latino-attended school district. Drawing on years of ethnographic research, Clayton A. Hurd explores the core issues at stake in resegregation campaigns as well as the resistance against them mobilized by the working-class Latino community. From the emotionally charged narratives of local students, parents, teachers, school administrators, and community activists emerges a compelling portrait of competing visions for equitable and quality education, shared control, and social and racial justice.
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Confronting Suburban School Resegregation in California
Kirin Narayan and Alma Gottlieb, Series Editors
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Early in my research experience at Allenstown High, it became clear to me that the decade-and-a-half of racial togetherness at the school had not led, as one might hope, to the progressive academic and social integration of students. Instead, it had produced what was essentially two high schools—one “White” and one “Mexican”—mirroring the two separate communities in the region. This segregation was apparent in both the formal and informal spatial separation of students on campus and their differential participation in co-and extracurricular activities. School tracking practices and student classifications further reinforced segregation. Where segregation was perhaps most clearly and powerfully exhibited was in the aggregate patterns of academic performance, where White students outperformed Mexican-descent students by nearly every method of academic assessment.
The high degree of social and academic marginalization Mexican-descent students experienced at Allenstown High, despite how well resourced the school was financially, was troubling and seemed to defy any simple explanation. My curiosity was raised in the second year of my research when a social studies teacher mentioned, in passing, that just a few years earlier, two first-generation Mexican immigrant students—running on a platform to “end racism” and improve the status of Latino students at Allenstown High—were elected president and vice president of the school’s Associated Student Body (ASB). He explained how the student leaders, supported by a handful of Euro- American student allies and the mentorship of a Latino social studies teacher of Cuban descent, undertook a bold campaign to promote racial integration on the campus through strategies that included a series of social mixing and intercultural awareness activities, the design of a multicultural mural for the school gymnasium, and a controversial demand to institute an elective course on Chicano studies (this full campaign is explored in detail in Chapter 3).
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