Jennifer B. Ayscue

Promising or Potentially Harmful? Suburban School Responses to Racial Change

Over the last several decades, suburban schools have become increasingly more diverse and now must respond to racial change, so that they can successfully educate an increasingly more diverse and multiracial student body. This article analyzes interview responses of administrators, teachers, and staff at 19 schools in six diversifying suburban school districts across the United States to explore how they adapt their policies and practices in response to racial change. Findings indicate that school responses are mixed, with each school adapting some policies that demonstrate promise for creating inclusive, enriching, and academically rigorous environments and other responses that are potentially harmful. Promising responses include facilitating diverse student groupings, modifying curriculum and instruction, developing an inclusive school climate, and implementing diversity efforts with teachers and staff. Potentially harmful responses include isolating English Language Learners, narrowing curriculum to focus on test preparation, developing an exclusionary school climate, and failing to respond at all. Schools with the greatest degree of racial change, strong school leadership, and district support often adopt the most promising responses.

Diversifying High Schools in Racially Changing Suburban Districts: Expanding Opportunity, Creating Barriers?

Although demographic change is happening more rapidly at the elementary school level, the intersection of these demographic trends with the changing mission of high schools may offer the opportunity to reduce some of the persistent racial gaps in educational attainment. At the same time, when schools became diverse as desegregation took place, stratification within schools occurred, leading to inequality within diverse schools. Thus, this article seeks to examine whether high schools can help to expand opportunity for low-income students and students of color as suburban racial change occurs. To answer this question, this article draws on school-level interviews in six public high schools in racially changing suburban districts in some of the nations largest metropolitan areas. High schools in this study focused on ways to provide access to diverse students through structural reforms and information dissemination, yet they also saw academic programs as a way to compete for certain students to shape their student body composition and maintain enrollment.

Perpetuating Separate and Unequal Worlds of Educational Opportunity Through District Lines: School Segregation by Race and Poverty

School segregation has serious consequences for educational opportunity and success. Using data from the National Center for Education Statistics, Common Core of Data, this study explores the relationship between fragmentation—the degree to which metropolitan areas are split into many separate school districts—and segregation. Three measures of segregation—exposure, concentration, and evenness—are employed to analyze state- and metropolitan-level data between 1989 and 2010 in four states with different school district structures. Findings in this exploratory study indicate that states and metropolitan areas with more fragmented district structures are associated with higher levels of segregation. In comparison to the less fragmented states of North Carolina and Virginia, in the highly fragmented states of New York and New Jersey, the typical black and Latino student are exposed to smaller shares of white students, the typical white student is more isolated with other white peers, there are greater disparities in exposure to low-income students by race, the share of non-white segregated schools is substantially larger, and levels of multiracial unevenness are higher. Highly fragmented states and metropolitan areas cannot confront segregation by exclusively focusing their efforts within districts; instead, regional strategies could be used to make progress in desegregating schools across school district lines.

School Segregation and Resegregation in Charlotte and Raleigh, 1989-2010:

Desegregated schools are linked to educational and social advantages whereas myriad harms are connected to segregated schools, yet the emphasis on school desegregation has recently receded in two North Carolina city-suburban school districts historically touted for their far-reaching efforts: Charlotte and Raleigh. In this article, we use cross-case analysis to explore segregation outcomes associated with policy changes by analyzing enrollment and segregation trends from 1989 to 2010 in metro Charlotte and metro Raleigh. Both Charlotte-Mecklenburg and Wake County school systems are experiencing a growing share of intensely segregated schools, decreasing exposure of Black and Latino students to White students, disproportionately large exposure of Black and Latino students to poor students, and an increase in segregated charters. Segregation in the districts surrounding Charlotte-Mecklenburg and Wake County is less extreme. An understanding of how policies have contributed to segregation patterns in both metros informs future education reform efforts.

When Choice Fosters Inequality: Can Research Help?.

The Civil Rights Project was hired to identify barriers to equitable access in Buffalo (N.Y.) Public Schools’ criteria schools and propose solutions, which, if accepted by both parties, could resolve the civil rights violations and create more equitable access to those schools. The researchers found that students of color, low-income students, and English language learners faced barriers in four areas: information, preparation, admission criteria, and availability of choices. Researchers crafted recommendations about how to make Buffalo’s choice system fair. The school system accepted many proposed changes in its outreach and recruitment process but refused to end its reliance on test scores or expand the supply of high-achieving schools.

Race and Place: How Suburban Schools Respond to Increasing Racial Diversity

The era of mass suburbanization in the mid-20th century led to “a metropolitan America composed of an urban core and essentially homogenous suburbs” (Hanlon, Vicino, & Short, 2006, p. 2129). Suburban communities are economically and socially integrated with the cities they encircle, but strategically separated by key political boundaries—in particular, the school district. Scholars and advocates concerned about educational equity have long bemoaned this urban–suburban divide that denied students of color concentrated in high-poverty, underresourced urban schools access to the superior educational opportunities that white, middle-class students experienced in suburban schools (e.g., Kozol, 2006; Orfield & Lee, 2005). Over the last four decades, the suburbs have witnessed dramatic increases in racial/ethnic and socioeconomic diversity (Frey, 2014). At the same time, suburban school districts have experienced dramatic increases in enrollment (Frankenberg, Lee, & Orfield, 2003); today, suburban districts educate 38% of the nation’s public school students (Fry, 2009). According to the Pew Hispanic Center, “virtually all of this increase [in suburban public school enrollment] (99%) has been due to the enrollment of new Latino, black and Asian students” (Fry, 2009, p. i). Although greater diversity presents a unique opportunity for greater integration in some cases, different suburbs are undergoing different patterns of change (Frankenberg & Ayscue, 2013). Many inner-ring suburbs, for example, are facing economic and social problems that are more similar to ones found in adjacent cities than in neighboring suburban communities (Hudnut, 2003). Suburban diversification, then, may actually perpetuate inequality between suburbs (Farrell, 2008). For instance, black and Latino residents of suburbia are much more likely than whites to live in low-income suburbs with high poverty rates (Harris, 1999). Moreover, suburban diversification may extend the geographic scale of the resegregation of public schools (Frankenberg & Orfield, 2012). Already, in the largest metropolitan areas, “Black and Latino students living in the suburbs are in schools that are more than 70% non-white, on average”; by contrast, white students in the suburbs of large metro areas attend schools that are nearly 70% white (Orfield & Frankenberg, 2014, p. 14). As the suburbs continue to diversify, it is critical to understand