This intractability, Oakes and her colleagues suggest, is better understood as the consequence of normative forces that have long fueled aggressive political opposition to a broad range of equalization efforts designed to improve resources, opportunities, and outcomes on behalf of low-income students of color. These normative forces take the guise of a set of dominant “logics” that define the nation’s thinking about public education (Oakes et al. 2008) and include assumptions about resource scarcity (that the financial resources to support high-quality education are in limited supply); meritocratic privilege (that such limited educational resources ought to be competed for and provided in a privileged manner to those students who are most deserving based on their ability level and preparation, often cast erroneously as their “potential”); and a belief in the existence of unalterable deficits (that low-income students of color face cultural, situational, and individual deficits that schools cannot be expected to alter).
Taken together, these popular logics portray public schooling as a zero-sum game in which opportunities for sought-after high-quality education are in small supply and should be competed for by students, families, and residential communities. When middle-class populations affirm these normative logics, calls for funding to remediate educational inequalities become viewed as an illegitimate redistribution of resources that allegedly “takes away” from the more deserving middle class, provoking fierce resistance to a perceived attack on their “earned” right to transfer educational and socioeconomic opportunities intergenerationally to their children.
A prime example of these normative logics powerfully at play is in the hard-fought (but still largely unfulfilled) effort to institute high-quality integrated education in U.S. public schools. Despite more than fifty years of technical development of effective, evidence-based models for high-quality integrated education, attempts to institutionalize the vision of Brown v. Board of Education have brought “retrogressive action and inertia by elites, anger among nonelite Whites who see themselves as losers in such reform, and disillusionment among excluded groups themselves about the possibility of racial equality and the desirability of racial integration” (Oakes et al. 2008: 2185). The Brown court, by viewing the solution to segregated schools in largely technical terms, failed to fully appreciate the broader socioeconomic conditions, power relations and cultural norms of race, merit, and deficit that have sustained structures of segregation and inequality within public schools and made segregated conditions seem so sensible to those who are privileged by them.
Social Movement Activism as a Potential Subterfuge for Resegregating Schools
This Brown miscalculation, as Derrick Bell (2004: 170) has noted, offers important lessons to advocates of racial justice and equal educational opportunity, suggesting they “rely less on judicial decisions and more on tactics, actions and even attitudes that challenge the continuing assumptions of white dominance.” In Bell’s terms, effective equity-based school reform requires a direct challenge to the dominant cultural norms that have framed debates over “quality education” and the need for advocacy strategies that aim to transform schools away from normative models that have long favored the more affluent, monolingual White middle-class and justified White dominance in educational contexts.
In this sense, social movement activism—particularly when rooted in assertions to high-quality education as a social priority and fundamental right to which all citizens should have an equal entitlement—may have an important role to play (Oakes 1995: 9). Such activism has the potential to succeed where technical, consensus-based reform has not, by addressing in a direct manner the political and normative obstacles to equity-based school reform through efforts to expose, disrupt, and challenge the prevailing logics of public schooling that make segregated schooling conditions appear so normal and unquestionable. As well, social movement activism, and grassroots organizing in particular, can make available political spaces from which to frame, articulate, and establish alternative visions, or critical counternarratives (Villenas and Deyhle 1999; Yasso and Solórzano 2001), capable of shifting the popular meaning of high-quality education from one in which citizens and residential communities are expected to compete for scarce resources toward the idea that high-quality education is essential to human dignity and the civic/economic health of a community without reference to the socioeconomic, cultural, or ethnic backgrounds of its residents (Oakes 1995: 6).
Of course, such a radical reframing of educational rights would require a broad-based political will to fight for inclusive, equitable, and high-quality education that is difficult to imagine, politically, in the current era (Stone et al. 2001). Indeed, as a number of school reform scholars have recently noted, the extent to which such political resolve is possible depends critically on the involvement, leadership, and mobilization of those who are most marginalized and who have the most to lose in the current system and the most to gain in a new one (Fennimore 2004; Noguera 2004; Orfield and Lee 2006).
Such leadership is not unthinkable, however, particularly in light of the increasingly well- documented successes of low-income communities of color to effectively mobilize for stronger school accountability, even in contexts where educational systems have long been controlled by White, middle-class residents and their privilege-protecting interests (see, for example, Noguera 2004; Mediratta, Shaw, and McAlister 2009; Shirley 2002; Warren 2005; and Chapter 7 of this book).
The Mobilization of Latino Communities for Equal Schooling
While relatively little research has been done on the more recent struggles of Mexican American communities to sustain or protect desegregated schools,14 there is a burgeoning literature on Latino political mobilization for school improvement and increased school accountability that is of relevance here. Much of this research has attempted to understand the relative success of Latino mobilizations for school reform in terms of the conceptual framework of social capital (see, for example, Noguera 2004; Shirley 2002; Warren 2005).15 In this work, attention has generally been given to two primary and distinction forms of community capacity-building activities—those related to the creation of bonding, or horizontal social capital—described as the strong and meaningful ties among local, working-class residents of color that can serve as the basis for solidarity and collective, grassroots action—and bridging, or intersectoral social capital, defined as relationships of cooperation and strategic coalition-building between distinct groups, sometimes across lines of significant social difference, where less enfranchised groups are connected to institutions and individuals with access to political influence and money (Fox 1996; Noguera 2004). Examples of positive outcomes associated with bonding social capital have included the mobilization of working-class Latino parents and youth, through intentional processes of leadership development and political education, to serve as school-community liaisons and strong advocates for equal access to such resources as high-quality instruction, fair disciplinary practices and a culturally relevant curricula (see, for example, Delgado-Gaitan 1996; Warren et al. 2011). Successful outcomes associated with bridging or intersectoral social capital building have included such things as the establishment of expansive coalitions linking emergent Latino parent/youth leadership groups with broader civic organizations (e.g., gender, labor, civil, and human rights groups) with a common commitment to issues of equity, fairness, and justice and who collectively undertake school-by-school outreach campaigns to promote and implement more justice-driven, school-based models, programs, and commitments (see Shirley 2002; Warren et al. 2011).16 In each of these cases the process of building power has tended to operate through “organizing groups” that sponsor intentional relationship-building activities, leadership development, political education, and public engagement opportunities in a manner that combines confrontational tactics with strategic efforts at collaboration and institutional development (Warren 2005: