Suddenly Diverse

How School Districts Manage Race and Inequality

Erica O. Turner

• Editorial: University of Chicago Press
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780226675534
• Categoría: Bildung
• Categoría: Bildung Allgemein

For the past five years, American public schools have enrolled more students identified as Black, Latinx, American Indian, and Asian than white. At the same time, more than half of US school children now qualify for federally subsidized meals, a marker of poverty. The makeup of schools is rapidly changing, and many districts and school boards are at a loss as to how they can effectively and equitably handle these shifts.
Suddenly Diverse is an ethnographic account of two school districts in the Midwest responding to rapidly changing demographics at their schools. It is based on observations and in-depth interviews with school board members and superintendents, as well as staff, community members, and other stakeholders in each district: one serving "Lakeside, " a predominately working class, conservative community and the other serving "Fairview, " a more affluent, liberal community. Erica O. Turner looks at district leaders' adoption of business-inspired policy tools and the ultimate successes and failures of such responses. Turner's findings demonstrate that, despite their intentions to promote "diversity" or eliminate "achievement gaps, " district leaders adopted policies and practices that ultimately perpetuated existing inequalities and advanced new forms of racism.
While suggesting some ways forward, Suddenly Diverse shows that, without changes to these managerial policies and practices and larger transformations to the whole system, even district leaders' best efforts will continue to undermine the promise of educational equity and the realization of more robust public schools.

CHAPTER ONE

Globalization in the “Heartland”: Changing Contexts of US School Districts

The Menominee and Winnebago were the first inhabitants of what would one day become the working-class and politically conservative city of Milltown (Bieder 1995). Their lives were violently upended over almost two hundred years of war, disease, and famine as well as cultural and land loss brought on by conflict with other indigenous groups, with European colonizers, and eventually with the US government and “American” settlers (Bieder 1995; Loew 2013). In the mid- to late-1800s, Milltown grew as Czech, Dutch, German, and many other European immigrants arrived. Today the city is dotted with mostly modest homes, libraries, schools, and factories. Those European immigrants’ descendants, who make up the city majority, attend the “German church” or the “Belgian church” on Sundays, and serve their immigrant ancestors’ dishes at the fund-raisers held for a family’s unexpected health expense or a school choir’s travel abroad.

As people have come from Mexico, Somalia, Southeast Asia, the Southwestern United States, or elsewhere in the Midwest, they too are making their mark on Milltown. Just beyond the downtown churches built by earlier European immigrants lie the neighborhoods around the meat processing plants where many of these recent arrivals, mostly Latinx immigrants, now live and work. Some have migrated from other parts of the United States, while others were recruited directly from Mexico by corporate managers of local industry. These immigrants have since built communities. Signs in Spanish advertise the groceries, restaurants, car lots, and other small businesses they have established to serve their neighbors. Just across the river, some Hmong families have started buying homes. In between, an African American church has moved into a former Episcopal church, a bigger building for a growing congregation and community.

Over the last thirty years, migration, immigration, and refugee resettlement have dramatically changed Milltown and other places in the American “heartland.” A geographic area roughly synonymous with the Midwest, the word “heartland” evokes a set of ideas about the core or heart of “authentic” America. From the farms to the factories, that place is often imagined to be working-class or middle-class and, perhaps more importantly, white. But globalization has come to the heartland, and like many other parts of the United States, the heartland has been transformed. Milltown and Fairview now educate students from five racialized groups, who encompass numerous ethnic backgrounds and religions as well as various class distinctions and legal statuses, and who speak more than thirty-five home languages. The shifts affecting these cities and their school systems are not just demographic, but economic and political as well.

Three major shifts unfolded across much of the country in the late 1960s and 1970s, and have heightened in the 1990s and 2000s in many places, including Milltown and Fairview. Demographically, the populations have become more racially and ethnically diverse, and are more likely to be struggling in poverty. The economy has shifted, too. Once a robust manufacturing economy, the United States is now part of a technology- and financial-services-dominated global economy that supports fewer middle-class jobs and contributes to greater economic inequality. Finally, major political changes have unfolded, including the delegitimization and weakening of the social safety net, labor unions, and public institutions. Each development has been linked to the others and each has been fundamentally entwined with inequities tied to race, class, and age. These shifts have provoked concern, fear, and a substantial sense of dislocation among educators (Boyd 2003). Perhaps this is unsurprising, given the complex and evolving challenges with which public employees, schools, and a democratic society must contend.

This chapter provides an overview of these social, economic, and political shifts in the heartland cities of Milltown and Fairview and in the United States, and how they are intertwined with race and class inequities. It details how they have contributed to the current contexts of public schools and heightened the contradictions that confront school district leaders at nearly every step. In particular, I locate Milltown and Fairview and their schools in these broader developments and show how these broader shifts materialized and contributed to heightened contradictions in the two sites. In painting this broader macro-picture, I am arguing that the circumstances that prompted district leaders to adopt color-blind managerialism were deeply rooted in social, political, and economic shifts that were not of district leaders’ or families’ making, and that these conditions were not at all unique to these two places. Fairview and Milltown represent a microcosm of shifts in the “heartland” region of the United States, and color-blind managerialism was a response in Milltown and Fairview to these shifts and the heightened contradictions that they wrought. But these shifts—detailed below—also reflect a broader transnational movement of people, jobs, capital, and policy ideas. This, then, is a truly significant national and global story.

The Demographic Shifts: Migration, Immigration, and Increasing Racial and Ethnic Diversity

The first of these shifts, the rapid growth of racial “minority” groups in the country, was ignited in the mid-1960s and 1970s when a number of factors, including a series of immigration policies with unintended consequences, converged to lead to a dramatic increase in US immigration and migrant settlement by people from the Global South, predominantly Asia and Latin America. In 1965 Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act, also known as the Hart-Cellar Act. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 abolished quotas that favored immigrants from Northern European countries, and set off unprecedented immigration from Asia—and, to a lesser extent, Africa and the Middle East—to the United States.1 The act also established preferences for professionals and those with special skills, and prioritized immigration of family members.

For Asian immigrants, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 overturned the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the National Origins Act of 1924, both of which had prohibited immigration to the United States from Asian countries. Subsequent immigration from those countries has intersected with global developments and home-country characteristics to contribute to distinct backgrounds, arrival patterns, reception into the United States, and a bifurcated class pattern. After passage of the 1965 law, Asian immigration ballooned, buffeted by preferences for family reunification and professionals in US law, as well as by US demand for workers in science, technology, and health care fields—but also by immigrant professionals escaping political instability and limited opportunities for advancement, and by some Asian countries exporting medical professionals as an economic development strategy (Ngai 2004). As a result, since the passage of the 1965 law, immigrants arriving from East and South Asian countries have had higher levels of education and economic resources than those they left behind, and higher than those of many other immigrant groups arriving in the United States. These factors have likely contributed to their children’s relative economic and educational success in US schools.

US involvement in Southeast Asia and the end of the Vietnam War also brought Asian refugees and asylum seekers to the United States. In the 1980s, for instance, this included Hmong people who had allied with the United States during the Vietnam War and fled political persecution in Laos, or who had otherwise been displaced by war and had arrived as refugees, primarily in California, Minnesota, and Wisconsin (Zaniewski and Rosen 1998). Additional Hmong came in the 1990s when refugee camps in Thailand were closed, and between 2004 and 2006 when a last group of refugees who had been displaced from the 1990s camp closing arrived in the United States (Ngo and Lee 2007). Early waves of these refugees were often sponsored by churches; once the families were resettled, however, they were able to sponsor other family members to come. The most recent Hmong arrivals have resettled in the United States after much political advocacy and activism from within Hmong American communities. Those who came were often from modest rural backgrounds and were relatively uneducated, factors that seem to have contributed to more limited school and economic success in the United States.

While the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 expanded Asian immigration to the United States, it placed limits on legal immigration from within the Western Hemisphere where no limits had previously existed. Just a year earlier, in 1964, the US Congress ended the bracero program, which for twenty-two years had provided Mexicans with temporary visas to fill US farmers’ demand for flexible, low-paid agricultural workers.2 Despite these dramatic limitations, the demand for inexpensive, unskilled labor did not wane, and immigration from Latin America, predominantly by Mexicans, continued and even accelerated. The decline in legal migration options simply meant that migrants now entered the United States without legal authorization.

While traditional immigrant-receiving cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York still have large numbers of new arrivals, many Latinx immigrants began in the late 1980s to settle in new destinations. These new destinations were located in metropolitan outskirts, smaller cities, and in parts of the South, Mountain West, and Midwest that had little recent experience with immigration, particularly with these “new immigrants” (Marrow 2005; Massey 2008; Wortham et al. 2002). The rising cost of living in coastal gateway cities, the shifting job market conditions in those places, and anti-immigrant sentiment in traditional immigrant gateway regions all contributed to migrants’ decisions to leave these locales for new US destinations like Milltown and Fairview (Light 2006). Meanwhile, changes to immigration law in 1986 legalized some 2.3 million undocumented immigrants, making it easier for these individuals to move to other parts of the US for new opportunities (Massey, Durand, and Malone 2002). Other changes to this law led to the militarization of the Mexican-US border in the Southwest, causing migrants to cross the US-Mexico border at points further east, where border enforcement was weaker, or to establish their families in the United States rather than risk continued border crossings (Massey et al. 2002; Massey and Pren 2012). In their new destinations, migrants and immigrants found job opportunities and a lower cost of living. Agriculture, food processing, and other industries have also played a role in this movement through their strategies of recruiting among minoritized groups from across the country, especially in Latinx communities, to fill their low-wage jobs (Fink 1998). With resettlement, migration, or immigration underway, people have followed ethnic networks that provide links to jobs, community, and life among friends and family (Frey 2014).

In a process that began in the 1970s and accelerated in the 1990s, African Americans have also been leaving large cities such as Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York, mostly for the cities and suburbs of the metropolitan “New South” (Frey 2014; Lacy 2016) and rural South (Stack 1996). They have migrated in search of better jobs, more affordable living in growing metropolitan areas, greater racial acceptance or tolerance, and the “call of home” and family (Stack 1996). These moves, then, have reflected shifting economic processes, including a fall in manufacturing jobs in the Northeast and Midwest, racial oppression and disillusionment in Northern cities, personal and cultural ties to the South, growth in the Black middle class, and the desire for a better quality of life that has characterized the movement of Americans across time (Frey 2014; Lacy 2016). This research does not directly indicate why African Americans might have been moving to Midwestern cities like Milltown and Fairview, but it does suggest some of the reasons why they were leaving major cities in the North and West more generally.

In Wisconsin, as in other Midwestern states, these demographic shifts have mostly converged in the 1990s and 2000s to create a new demographic picture, a local version of what demographer William Frey (2014) has called the nation’s “diversity explosion.” The first nations of Wisconsin—Menominee, Winneabego, Oneida, Potawatomi, Stockbridge-Munsee, and Brothertown, as well as the Lac Courte Orielles Band, Red Cliff Band, Fond du Lac Band, Bad River Band, Mole Lake Band, and Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa—are most concentrated in a few rural counties and a few of the state’s cities. This is in part the effect of the massive history of colonization and violence that forced them to establish their communities on reservations. While some Native Americans moved to cities for greater opportunities, there is now a migration back to reservations as gaming brings greater economic opportunities to some Native communities. Up until recently, this predominantly white state has been home to relatively small populations of African Americans and Latinx people, most of whom lived in the Milwaukee area (Clark-Pujara 2017; Zaniewski and Rosen 1998). However, Asian, Latinx, and Black populations have been growing (Applied Population Lab 2007). The Hmong have been the largest group of the state’s Asian population. Their numbers have grown through refugee resettlement, births, and migration from other states. Latinx families have been in Wisconsin since the 1960s, but the population of Latinx residents, both native-born and immigrant, increased rapidly in the late 1980s and early 1990s as predominantly Mexican immigrants arrived to fill farm labor positions, mainly in the dairy industry, and wage-labor positions in the service and manufacturing industries (Applied Population Lab 2007; Harrison and Lloyd 2013). Between 1990 and 2000, that population doubled (Zaniewski 2004).

Milltown

Milltown, home to a longtime Native American population, is a predominantly white city, but that has been changing along with the rest of the country. Milltown has been a refugee resettlement site. Hmong arrived there from the 1980s onward, through resettlement, family reunification, and migration from other states. Hmong are by far the largest and most visible refugee population in Milltown, though the city has also been home to refugee communities from Somalia, Sudan, Iraq, Laos, and Ukraine, among other countries (Refugee Processing Center 2018; Wisconsin Department of Children and Families 2016). The city’s Latinx population, mostly Mexican immigrants, began growing in the late 1980s as meatpacking companies began to recruit workers from Mexico (Fink 1998), as previously noted. In the early 1980s, the Latinx population was virtually nonexistent, but it climbed to more than seven thousand people in 2000 and almost double that in 2010. In Milltown the Black population has been much smaller; African Americans began migrating there around 2000 and the population was just under four thousand in 2010. These individuals, many of whom were described as lower-income by Milltown district staff, joined a small number of African American engineers and other highly skilled African Americans who had been recruited to well-paying Milltown jobs.

Fairview

Although Fairview remains predominantly white, it has also become substantially more racially and ethnically diverse through the migration patterns just described. In contrast to Milltown, it has a longer history of African American, Latinx, and Asian residents, but a relatively small and heterogeneous Native American population. African Americans, in particular, have had a well-established community in the city since at least 1902, when the city’s first Black church was founded, though African Americans had been counted amongst the city’s population since 1839. The African American population in Fairview county began a period of rapid growth in the 1970s and again in the 1990s, by which time it had tripled. In 1990, more than 70 percent of African Americans reported having lived in a different Wisconsin county five years earlier, according to a 1995 community study. Local lore, rife with racist undertones about Black dependency and Black families being outsiders not from Wisconsin, held that this increase was due to African American families coming from the south side of Chicago for welfare benefits. But research evidence does not support the claim that Wisconsin was a “welfare magnet” (Corbett 1991), or that low-income African Americans migrated to Wisconsin (or anywhere else) as a result of the closing of public housing there in 2000 (Livingston and Porter 2014).3 Furthermore, US Census data collected between 2006 and 2011 suggests that most African Americans migrating to Fairview County were coming from states other than Wisconsin or Illinois (a combined 65 percent; US Census Bureau 2011). As a whole, Fairview’s African American population includes an established and economically comfortable group as well as a sizeable, economically struggling population, and shows evidence of economic strain across classes.

Fairview has also been the landing place for a large number of refugees, including Central Americans fleeing political instability in the 1980s and, since the 2000s, refugees from Sudan, Iraq, Liberia, and Bhutan (Refugee Processing Center 2018; Wisconsin Department of Children and Families 2016). Hmong, who were resettled in Milltown in the 1980s and again in 2006 from Laos via long-standing refugee camps in Thailand, are by far the largest refugee population in Fairview. They are also the largest Asian population in Fairview. East Asian families, immigrant or not, were not common in Milltown, but their arrival in Fairview has been particularly connected to local science and technology-related fields, as well as to the city’s university.

In the 1990s, young low-income Mexican families from the Southwestern United States and from Mexico began arriving in Fairview, and they are now the largest Latinx population in the city, according to a 2006 community study. This group has joined Central American refugees, an earlier group of families who settled in the city, and a smaller group of Latinx residents who have arrived in Fairview for professional or educational opportunities. Taken together, the city is now home to a rapidly growing Latinx community of more than fifteen thousand people that includes longer-term residents with advanced education, stable careers, strong English proficiency, and no immigration status problem, as well as a more recent group of predominantly Mexican immigrants who tend to be younger, who have lower levels of education and English language proficiency, and are more likely to lack immigration papers.

Inevitably, as Milltown school board member Susan Leahy noted in the bagel shop, public schools have been first to reflect the growing diversity in Milltown and Fairview. Each school district saw dramatic increases in the number of students whose primary language was not English, the majority of whom were Hmong or Spanish speakers. In 1998, fewer than 10 percent of Milltown and Fairview students were designated as English learners (ELLs). Ten years later, ELLs were 20 percent of Milltown students and 17 percent of Fairview students. In that same time period, students identifying as Native American, Asian, Black, or Latinx grew to almost 40 percent of students in Milltown and almost half of Fairview students. In both districts, these changes primarily reflected an increase in Latinx students, though the percentage of Black students was also growing, and Blacks were the largest minoritized group in Fairview. In each city there also was an increase from 2000 to 2009 in the percentage of students living in poverty—from an already high one-third of Milltown students in 2000 to more than half of Milltown students in 2009, and from about a quarter of Fairview students in 2000 to almost half of Fairview students in 2009.

While student racial diversity was growing in Milltown and Fairview, teachers in both schools have remained overwhelmingly white. This discrepancy between teacher and student demographics mirrors national trends: about 50 percent of students in the nation are students of color, while 83 percent of teachers are white, a number that has changed little since 1999 (Kober 2012; Maxwell 2014; US Department of Education 2013). In Milltown, almost 97 percent of teachers identified as white, and just 3 percent were teachers of color. In Fairview almost 90 percent of teachers identified as white, and just 10 percent identified as people of color.

In the cities of Milltown and Fairview, more than 75 percent of city residents were also identified as white—much larger percentages than in the schools. This difference between school-aged populations and the residents as a whole reflects migration and immigration, but also an aging white population, a declining birthrate among whites, and an increasing birthrate among groups of color (Curtis and Lessem 2014). This data mirrors broader patterns across the country and nationally, where the child-aged population is more racially and ethnically diverse than the elderly population, even as ...