Student Responses to Practices of Normative Whiteness in Schools
Institutional practices of normative whiteness do not, of course, go unchallenged in schools. A long line of student-centered ethnographic research in U.S. public schools has examined the ways in which working-class racial minority youth (including African American, Mexican American, Puerto Rican, and Native American) have employed diverse forms of cultural practice to produce a sense of belonging and solidarity against the White middle-class norms required in the school context (see, for example, Davidson 1996; Foley 1996; Gitlin et al. 2003; Philips 1983). In many cases, such practices take the form of willed resistance against the acquisition of school-valued knowledge, but this is not necessarily the case. Angela Valenzuela (1999), in her study of Mexican American students in a South Texas high school, demonstrates that what would appear to be students’ posture of resistance or “not caring” about school, is actually experienced by them as a sense of ambivalence—a feeling of being caught between a desire to succeed in school, and a level of resignation to the dominant attitudes that marginalize their cultural and linguistic heritage, which they experience as a key element of their group social status (for related analyses, see Davidson 1996; Gibson and Bejínez 2002; Gibson, Gándara, and Koyama 2004; Gitlin et al. 2003; Zentella 1997). In each of these cases, what may appear to be student resistance or academic disengagement may have less to do with an ability or motivation to succeed academically in school than with a desire, as a member of a stigmatized social group, to find a space of equal status among others and to “construct a positive self within and economic and political context which relegates its members to static and disparaged ethnic, racial and class identities” (Zentella 1997: 13).
Collectively, these studies focus on the ways in which unexamined norms of Whiteness and commitments to color-blindness may serve not only to reproduce the school success of middle-class White students in racially mixed school settings but also to actively promote the marginalization of working-class Latino students and discourage their involvement in school contexts that are known to facilitate students’ social integration and academic success, including high-impact co- and extracurricular activities (Davidson 1996; Gibson and Bejínez 2002; Stanton-Salazar, Vásquez, and Mehan 2000). It is in this sense that White normativity can pose a significant and often unacknowledged limit on the effectiveness of educational programs in White/Latino desegregated schooling environments, particularly when student success depends on deep engagement, equal participation, and collaborative learning across what may be significant lines of politicized racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, or gender differences (Fine, Weis, and Powell 1997).
By identifying challenges posed by institutional practices of normative whiteness in racially and socioeconomically diverse school settings, I do not mean to suggest that effective integration is impossible. Instead, I mean to emphasize that the co-location of students in a desegregated setting may do more harm than good if there is not also a strong understanding of, and willingness to address, a broader set of sociocultural and contextual factors—powerfully at play within schools—that mediate student learning, motivation, engagement, and academic success. Ultimately, student learning is a social and political process influenced not only by the school’s formal curriculum and the experiences that students bring into school with them but also by students’ interactions within the school, both with peers and with the staff who organize opportunities for student learning and participation based often on their own (classed, raced, and gendered) assumptions, orientations, and belief systems that often go unacknowledged (Bartolomé and Trueba 2000). In a reframing that challenges popular educational reform logic, Ray McDermott suggests that “instead of asking what individuals learn in school, we should be asking what learning is made possible by social arrangements [within schools] . . . and see differential patterns of academic success along racial lines as an institutionalized, social event rather than a one-by-one failure in psychological development” (1997: 120). McDermott’s admonishment suggests a reimaging of the pursuit for “quality education” from one that seeks to promote a near-exclusive focus on improving classroom instruction to one that seeks to address how schools, as whole institutions, may structure success and failure for particular groups of students (see also Stanton-Salazar, Vásquez, and Mehan 2000).
Hope for a Future of Effective, High-Quality Integrated Education in U.S. Public Schools?
Given the combined reality of rapidly resegregating schools, the deprioritization of integration as an equity-based education reform measure, an escalating desire among affluent residential communities to establish schooling arrangements on their own terms, and the ubiquity of normative practices within desegregated schools that can limit students’ engagement across difference, there would appear to be little room for envisioning how to sustain equitable, high-quality educational environments that could be shared across socioeconomic and racial difference. Yet addressing this challenge would seem all the more timely and critical in light of the rapidly increasing rates of racial and socioeconomic diversity in U.S. suburban areas (M. Orfield and Luce 2012) and the educational injustices that we can expect will be perpetuated if the differential production of low- and high-poverty, racially isolated schools is allowed to continue at pace. Is it feasible, or even possible, to imagine a way to generate the political will to protect and sustain integrated public school contexts and the shared, high-quality, and equitable learning environments they have the potential to provide? If so, from where might such an impetus be likely to come?
In recent writings on equity-based school reform, educational scholar Jeannie Oakes and her colleagues have explored the extent to which grassroots political organizing and activism, led primarily by low-income populations of color, might play a catalytic role in equity-based educational reform in the United States (Oakes et al. 2008; Oakes and Lipton 2002; Rogers and Oakes 2005). Their scholarly project reflects a deeper interest in the possibilities of social movement activism to “win” better schools for working-class Latino and African American communities that have long been the most disadvantaged in terms of access to educational resources, opportunities, and school achievement. Their particular interest in social activism “led primarily by working class communities of color operating largely outside of the educational system” reflects a specific understanding of the primary obstacles to equal educational opportunity in U.S. public schools. This view is that the historical failure to establish high-quality, equitable education in U.S. public schools—despite decades of substantial investment in well-intentioned interventions—is largely the consequence of a long-misguided emphasis in educational reform policy on generating consensus-based, technical solutions to what are primarily normative and political impediments to educational equity (see also Nygreen 2006). In other words, what has long impeded the effectiveness of conventional school reform policy is investment in the faulty assumption that educational problems—including those related to differential achievement—are primarily the consequence of a lack of sufficient knowledge about how to design