When Middle-Class Parents Choose Urban Schools

Class, Race, and the Challenge of Equity in Public Education

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Contents

Middle-Class Parents andCity School Transformation

Mr. Foster and I were sitting together in Morningside Elementary's courtyard,talking about the large number of people he expected to attend theOpen House for prospective kindergartner families that was scheduled forthat night. Blooming flowers and colorful student artwork surrounded us.Mr. Foster, a veteran teacher at Morningside, described the positive attentionthat the school had received in recent years—attention that was uncommongiven the historically bad press and low status associated withmany schools in Woodbury Unified School District. He remarked thatthe district superintendent and several administrators from a neighboringdistrict had just visited the school, and he exclaimed, "Since when doesthe superintendent and [neighboring] school district come to check out aWoodbury public school?" Morningside, a small public elementary schoolin a large urban district in Northern California, was now on the radar ofmany middle-class parents and community members in Woodbury andwas described on one regional parent website as "an urban jewel."

Mr. Foster had witnessed considerable changes at the school over the pastdecade. When he started teaching at Morningside in the mid-1990s, Morningside'sdemographics did not match those of the predominantly whitemiddle- and upper-middle-class neighborhood surrounding the school.Many neighborhood parents sought out other schooling options or left theneighborhood altogether rather than enroll their children in the predominantlyAfrican American, Title I school. This was despite the fact that Morningside'stest scores were historically higher than those of other schools inthe state with similar student demographics, and the school had a small butcommitted group of parents and school staff working to strengthen and expandthe school's academic and enrichment programs.

Yet when I spoke with Mr. Foster that day, Morningside was challengedto find space to accommodate the large number of students from boththe neighborhood and other parts of the city who sought admittance. Theschool had a waiting list of students for its kindergarten classes, and thestudent demographics had steadily shifted as increased numbers of whiteand mixed-race middle- and upper-middle-class children enrolled in theschool. Morningside's academic and enrichment programs had expandedto include integrated art and gardening programs, Spanish for all students,a salad-bar lunch program, and extensive community partnerships—allfunded in large part from parent and teacher grant writing and a parent-teacherorganization budget of well over $100,000. The school was highlightedin local media and parent websites, with its recent transformationattributed in large part to Morningside's active parent community.

For those concerned with segregation and inequality in public schooling,Morningside is an intriguing case. Here were middle- and upper-middleclassparents—and white parents in particular—voluntarily enrolling theirchildren in a Title I city school with a majority of students of color, absenta district mandate or desegregation program. And many of these parentswere not just enrolling their children in Morningside but also contributingtheir time and financial resources to the school. These trends run counterto dominant patterns of white and middle-class flight to more elite cityor suburban schools. Given the erosion of and resistance to desegregationprograms in many US districts, the enrollment, organizing, and investmentsof middle- and upper-middle-class parents at Morningside andelsewhere can be viewed as a new and promising avenue for urban schoolchange. Indeed, laudatory accounts of the movement of the middle classinto predominantly low-income or socioeconomically mixed city schoolsare increasingly common, with these parents praised for their volunteerismand efforts to integrate and improve their local public schools (see,e.g., Edelberg and Kurland 2011; Graham 2010; Petrilli 2012). As MichaelPetrilli, author of The Diverse Schools Dilemma, remarked in an article aboutmiddle-class parents and city schools, "All we can say at this point is thatthis provides the best opportunity in a generation for us to integrate oururban schools" (Toppo 2012).

Yet, as I illustrate in this book, there are significant costs to relying uponmiddle-class parents as major drivers of urban school transformation. Aschool reform strategy that depends upon middle-class parents—withoutpolicies and efforts to ensure that low-income families also participate inand benefit from school change—is bad practice for two reasons. First,middle-class engagement, when unfettered, is likely to create new patternsof educational inequality and exclusion in districts and schools, often despitethe best intentions of individual parents. Second, focusing on parentvolunteerism and investments in urban education unfairly shifts theonus of responsibility for high-quality schooling from the government toindividuals, with parents compelled to fill budgetary and resource gaps inorder to ensure that things like art, music, and physical education are a partof their children's education.

To be clear, I am not saying that middle-class volunteerism and engagementare inherently bad. Indeed, as I show in the following chapters, therewere middle-class parents who devoted countless hours of their time tosupport Morningside's collective student body and who helped to bringnew and important educational resources and opportunities to the school.Rather, what I'm arguing is that the individual choices and engagement ofparents (and of middle-class parents in particular) should not be treated asa substitute for the more structural reforms necessary to improve city publicschools—reforms I discuss in the concluding chapter.

The arguments I make here are based upon more than two years of ethnographicresearch in and around Morningside Elementary, a small publicschool in Northern California impacted by significant demographicchange. In my study of Morningside, I examine the role of middle-classparents—and particularly, but not exclusively, white middle-class parents—inurban school change efforts. Specifically, I examine the followingquestions: What motivates middle- and upper-middle-class parents toconsider the school? How do parents and teachers in the school communityunderstand and respond to these parents' engagement? What are theequity implications of middle-class parents' efforts to support and invest inurban schooling?

Most studies of urban education have focused on low-income studentsof color, examining underresourced schools and "underperforming"students. Yet many urban areas, and urban schools, are changing dueto demographic and economic shifts in cities and metropolitan regions,prompting the need for more nuanced conceptions of "urban" educationalissues. Whereas changes like those occurring at Morningside were oncean anomaly in the landscape of urban schooling, recent examples suggestthat they are becoming increasingly common in cities across the nationas greater numbers of middle- and upper-middle-class families considersending their children to local public elementary schools (Billingham andKimelberg 2013; Cucchiara 2013b; Edelberg and Kurland 2011; Jan 2006;Rogers 2009; Smith 2009; Stillman 2012). Examining the role of middleclassparents in urban school change is thus both important and timely,as many civic and educational leaders seek to attract and retain middleclass families (and white families in particular) in central cities and theirpublic schools (CEOs for Cities, n.d.; Cucchiara 2013b; Lipman 2011). Fordistricts and schools facing dramatic budget cuts, the engagement and investmentsof middle-class parents are increasingly relied upon in publicschool reform—with funds raised by parents used for teacher salaries andacademic programs in some districts (Calvert 2011; Koumpilova 2011). Indepthexaminations of middle-class parental engagement in city schoolsare needed to uncover the consequences of using middle-class parental engagementas a reform strategy in urban education.

This book is a story about resource gaps in urban education and thelimitations of relying upon middle-class parents to fill these gaps. Middleclassparents helped to garner or sustain many academic and extracurricularprograms and resources at Morningside, and many of these resourcesbenefited the collective student body. Yet these parents' fund-raising, volunteerism,and outreach to families of similar race and class backgroundsalso contributed to the marginalization and exclusion of low-income andworking- class families. The increased professionalization of the MorningsideParent-Teacher Organization helped to garner more funds for theschool; however, the creation of positions requiring specialized skills andthe expansion of fund-raising efforts changed the norms and structure ofthe organization in ways that privileged middle-class forms of parentalengagement.

The following chapters demonstrate the limitations of relying on middleclassparents to fill the resource gaps left by state and local governments.When teacher salaries and curricular programs like Spanish and music aresupported in large part by individual parent donations and fund-raising,parents who solicit or provide these funds may wield greater decision-makingpower within our public schools. The extant research on middleclassparental engagement in urban public schooling suggests that middleclassparents often intervene in ways that benefit their own children ratherthan the low-income and working-class students and their families in aparticular school or classroom context (see, e.g., Cucchiara 2013b; McGheeHassrick and Schneider 2009; Sieber 1982). This is not always the case, assome parents may have a "collective," rather than an individualistic, orientation(Cucchiara and Horvat 2009), and school staff or school policystructures may mediate parental efforts to secure advantages for their ownchildren at the expense of others (I discuss this further in chapter 5). Yetdepending upon parental fund-raising and volunteerism to support coreschool programs may create new avenues for middle-class parents to influenceresource allocation decisions in school settings.

As I mentioned above, relying on the middle class to fill gaps in publicdollars for education also unfairly positions parents as the primary driversof school improvement. Rather than making changes in state and federaleducation policy that would reflect a greater commitment to public education,emphasis is placed on parents and teachers to provide the educationalopportunities and material resources necessary to create and sustainhigh-quality educational experiences for students. This is a dangerous shift,as it works to absolve state and local governments of their responsibility tonot only provide adequate funding for schools but also to ensure that educationalfunds and resources are distributed equitably in ways that do notdisproportionately benefit the already advantaged.

Yet the story of change at Morningside is not simply about parentalengagement and volunteerism: it is also a case through which to explorebroader issues related to racial and economic integration and diversity inurban education. The majority of public school students in the UnitedStates attend racially and socioeconomically segregated schools, owingto a reversal of the gains in racial desegregation made after the Brown v.Board of Education decision (Orfield and Eaton 1996; Orfield, Kucsera, andSiegel-Hawley 2012). White students in particular are the most raciallyisolated group of public school students, with the typical white studentattending a school in which three-quarters of his or her peers are white(Orfield, Kucsera, and Siegel-Hawley 2012). Resegregation post-Brown isparticularly troubling, as school racial and socioeconomic demographicsare commonly related to other indicators of school quality such as teacherexperience and retention, facilities, and curricular materials (Orfield andLee 2005). Creating racially and economically integrated schools is thusnot simply about providing students with the opportunity to socializeand learn from peers from different racial and economic backgrounds; itis about demolishing entrenched patterns of advantage and disadvantagein public education. District desegregation policies alone do not guaranteefull integration, as classes and student social groupings are often segregatedwithin schools due to institutionalized systems of sorting and stratification(see, e.g., Noguera 2003; Olsen 1997; Tyson 2011). Producing fully integratedschools—rather than simply "diverse" or desegregated ones—is thusmuch more difficult, as racial integration requires group interactions onterms of equality and the full inclusion and participation of all races in alldomains (Anderson 2010).

As I discuss in the following chapter, districts seeking to counter patternsof segregation in their local schools face significant challenges fromrecent legal decisions that make it difficult to use a student's race in schoolassignment plans. Although many districts have reverted to policies ofneighborhood schooling or adopted unrestricted-choice plans, a growingnumber of districts concerned with the segregation of their schools haveadopted economic integration plans as a more feasible strategy for schoolimprovement in our current political and legal climate. At the time of thiswriting, eighty-three school districts and charter operators now employ studentsocioeconomic status as a factor in school assignment (Kahlenberg2012). For many proponents of economic integration, the increased enrollmentof middle-class students and the engagement of middle-class parentsin city public schools are viewed as a positive turn in urban educationon the basis of the assumption that middle-class parents bring with themvarious forms of capital that can benefit schools with low-income studentpopulations. As Richard Kahlenberg, a prominent advocate for economicintegration argues, "the economic integration strategy helps create in allschools the single most powerful predictor of a good education: the presenceof a core of middle-class families who will insist upon, and get, aquality school for their children" (2001b, 1). For districts and schools pressuredto raise test scores, creating middle-class schools is also seen as a wayto promote student achievement and ensure school success under district,state, and federal accountability systems (Kahlenberg 2006).

I was intrigued by Morningside because it arguably represents a best-casescenario in the quest for integrated schools: it had a growing, raciallymixed cadre of self-described progressive and liberal middle-class parentswho not only donated their time and money to the school but also voicedcommitments to diversity and to working for changes that would benefitthe collective student body. Many of the white middle-class parents andteachers at the school voluntarily sought out Morningside because it wasnot a "suburban" school or one of the more elite and less socioeconomicallydiverse public schools in the district. Morningside was also a schoolthat had low teacher turnover, strong administrative leadership, and a historyof successfully educating African American and low-income students.Morningside thus provided an opportunity to explore a relatively new andless-studied process of economic integration: an integration driven in largepart by middle- and upper-middle-class parents rather than district enrollmentpolicies and practices.

Yet my data show that middle-class parents' efforts to support and improveMorningside ultimately threatened the racial and socioeconomicdiversity that many of them desired in a school for their children andcontributed to a process of school gentrification rather than a stable andsustainable integration. The school quickly gained in popularity amongother middle-class families in the neighborhood and broader district, resultingin a boom in kindergarten enrollment. Within a span of five years,it became more and more difficult for children residing outside the largelymiddle-class neighborhood school attendance zone to enroll in Morningside,due to limited space and the priority that neighborhood families receivedin the district enrollment plan.