Abstract
This is Our School! Race and Community Resistance to School Reform, by Hava Rachel Gordon, is a multi-sited qualitative study of the complex relationship between urban school reform and community movements, based in Denver, Colorado. Gordon uses ethnography, interviews, critical participatory action research (CPAR), and focus groups to argue that the educational justice movement is shaped in myriad ways by intra-movement dynamics that are expressions of deeply entrenched race and class inequalities.
Gordon’s research is impressively (and instructively) inductive. While conducting comparative ethnographic research on teen activists in Portland, Oregon and Oakland, California—resulting in Gordon's (2009) book We Fight to Win: Inequalities and the Politics of Youth Activism—she found that education reform shapes young activists’ lives and organizing strategies. When she moved to start a job at the University of Denver, Gordon shifted her field site and continued to study youth activism. Specifically, she focused her analysis on a coalition of students opposing the recent closure and redesign of Central High (the subject of Chapters 1 to 3).
During 2007 and 2008, Gordon and her colleague Nancy Wadsworth interviewed Central's staff and community members to investigate the types of community support the school needed to thrive. During this research, Gordon met Black neighborhood school activists, mainly community organizers from the African American Parent Project (AAPP).
As Gordon learned about the critiques of reforms at Central mounted by students, youth activists, parents, and community organizers, her research questions shifted. She began to wonder about the reforms themselves, who carried them out, what groups were able to participate in conversations and decision-making, and what groups were excluded from those conversations. These research questions were the inception of an ethnographic project lasting five years (2008 to 2013), drawn from informal community networks of mostly Black and Latinx activists. Gordon and members of the AAPP developed an in-depth interview guide that sought to elucidate Black parents’ perspectives on school reform. Then Gordon and AAPP organizers facilitated focus groups with community members, exploring Black residents’ perceptions of, and experiences with, education reform.
Throughout this research Gordon identified key architects of local reform policy. Through snowball sampling, she interviewed self-described reformers. These participants were White, middle-class professional educators, politicians, and journalists.
As Gordon studied the polarization between Black community activists and White education reformers, she found there were other relevant groups affecting reform policy, schools, and activism, namely nonprofit social justice organizations and affluent (White) neighborhood school activists.
Gordon found that while reformers were fairly unwilling to listen to Black community activists, they did sometimes partner with nonprofit organizations with similar racial justice aims as the activists. This raises some questions: why do reformers partner with some stakeholders and not others, and what are the dynamics of these liaisons and exclusions? Through interviews and participant observation with nonprofits, Gordon saw how nonprofits sometimes clashed with White neighborhood school activists, so she began ethnographic and interview research with these constituents as well.
Gordon’s extensive data collection enables the development of complex analysis of the coalitions, discourses, strategies, and tactics that emerge as heterogeneous actors struggle with and against each other for power over schools (or at least a seat at the table).
The primary strength of Gordon's bottom-up (and multiply so, “bottoms-up” perhaps) approach to studying how neoliberal education policy extends beyond the demonstration of the localized, everyday life of the policies to the mapping the diversity of collectives resisting market-driven reform. Her work exposes the intra-movement dynamics among and within various grassroots movements (especially how these dynamics are shaped by class and race struggles). Furthermore, Gordon evaluates the relative success and failure of these movements in reshaping local education policy and reclaiming public education.
One fascinating contribution is Gordon's discussion of White hegemony across opposing movement contexts, which she renders in more complex ways than previous scholarship. She describes and discusses a group she alternately calls “White neighborhood activists” and “the White gentry.” These are White middle-class professionals who move into communities of color (thus participating in gentrification), send their children to historically Black and Latinx public schools, and find themselves in the crosshairs of struggle over school policy.
The White gentry possess characteristics and views simultaneously in line with both the (White) reformers and the (Black and Latinx) community activists. Like the reformers, the gentry have a paternalistic conception of themselves and a deficit model of the community. They feel obligated to share their privileged perspectives and view themselves and their children as gifts to the community and schools. Their benevolent vision of themselves allows the gentry to ignore or minimize their role in community dispossession.
At the same time, the White gentry, like many Black and Latinx neighborhood school activists, are deeply distrustful of the neoliberal reform movement and politically oppose it. They are concerned about the state of the schools in their neighborhoods but know they can rely on their social and cultural capital, as well as their White privilege, if they need to buttress their children's education with extra tutoring or other types of support.
The White gentry does not understand their participation in gentrification as connected to Black and Latinx community dispossession. Instead, they frame gentrification as a passive process that is inevitable and mysteriously removed from their own agency and understand their presence and various forms of capital as assets that will benefit everyone in the community. They are eager to participate in local struggles against neoliberal policy and are perplexed by community members’ disinterest in their participation.
This Is Our School! is an important contribution both to the sociology of education and to the literature on social movements and dynamics. It is also exemplary in qualitative methodology. I recommend it to scholars working in these fields and professors teaching (upper-division) undergraduate and graduate students.