Syllabus

2019 Syllabus

Required Texts

  1. Debs, M. (2019) Diverse Families, Desirable Schools: Public Montessori in the Era of School Choice. (available 3/13) $33
  2. Delmont, M. (2016). When Busing Failed: Race, Media and the National Resistance to School Desegregation. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. $30
  3. Lewis, A. & J. Diamond, J. (2015). Despite the Best Intentions: How Racial Inequality Thrives in Good Schools. Oxford: Oxford University Press. $20
  4. Warren, M. R., & Goodman, D. (2018). Lift Us Up, Don’t Push Us Out!: Voices from the Front Lines of the Educational Justice Movement. $17

Optional Texts:

  • Rothstein, R. (2017). The Color of the Law: A Forgotten History of How our Government Segregated America.
  • Hagerman, M. (2018) White Kids: Growing up with privilege in a racially divided America. New York: NYU Press.

Course Schedule

Week 1 (1.17): Introduction

  • (Recommended) Minow, M. (2010). In Brown’s wake: Legacies of America’s educational landmark. New York: Oxford University Press. Ch. 1: pp. 5-32.
  • (Recommended) Orfield, G., G. Siegel-Hawley (2016) “Brown at 62: School Segregation by Race, Poverty and State.” Civil Rights Project White Paper. Los Angeles, CA, UCLA Civil Rights Project.

Week 2 (1.24): Is integration the goal? White and Black Backlash to Desegregation 1960s-today

—- Part 1: The Suburbs —-

Week 3 (1.31): The Rise of Suburbia and Schools

How did public policy support the expansion of the suburbs? Who was left out of this opportunity? How do parent choices around schooling influence residential patterns in cities and suburbs past and present?

  • Rothstein, R. (2017). The Color of the Law: A Forgotten History of How our Government Segregated America. Preface-Ch 3. New York: WW Norton.
  • Cohen, Lizabeth. 2003. A Consumers’ Republic. The Politics of Mass Communication in Postwar America: New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Ch 5, p. 194-256.
  • Holme, J.J. 2002. “Buying homes, buying schools: School choice and the social construction of school quality.” Harvard Educational Review 72(2):177-206.

Week 4 (2.7): The changing suburbs today & case study of Hamden, CT

Week 5 (2.14) Hamden Contd./Interviewing

  • Hill, Colin (2019) “We all have to answer to our kids: Parental advocacy in suburban school district consolidation”
  • Emerson, Robert, Fretz, Rachel and Linda Shaw. 2011. Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes. 2nd Ch. 3 “Writing Fieldnotes 1: At the Desk, Creating Scenes on a Page”
  • Seidman, “Analyzing, Interpreting and Sharing Interview Material” Interviewing as Qualitative Research” 4th New York: Teacher’s College Press, Ch 8.

Week 6 (2.21): Uncomfortable integration in the new inner-ring suburbs

How are suburbs today integrating and not integrating? How are tracking and gifted programs impacted by parents’ social and cultural capital?

  • Lewis, A. and J. Diamond. (2015). Despite the Best Intentions: How Racial Inequality Thrives in Good Schools. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Hagerman, M. (2018) White Kids: Growing up with privilege in a racially divided America. New York: NYU Press. Ch. 1 “Race doesn’t really matter anymore”
  • Onstad, K. (October 9, 2018) “Who Gets to be Gifted?” The Walrus. 

—— Part 2: The City —–

Week 7 Private School Choice/Qualitative Coding

Why do families choose elite private schools? How is the choice process motivated by similar/different causes than public school choice?

  • Khan, S. (2011) Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ch 3. “The Ease of Privilege.”
  • Hagerman, M. (2018) White Kids, Ch. 3 “’We’re not a racial school’: Being a private school kid”
  • Jack, Anthony Abraham. 2014. “Culture Shock Revisited: The Social and Cultural Contingencies to Class Marginality.” Sociological Forum 29(2):453-75.
  • Read Hamden Consolidation Interviews to prepare for coding
  • Guest speaker: Dean Ferentz Lafargue

Week 8 (3.7): Parents, Schools & Urban Gentrification

How is the phenomenon of urban gentrification and a new wave of middle-class parents embracing public education impacting city schools?

Week 9: The impact of urban school choice in NYC

How does an application choice system like the one in New York City impact families of different racial & socioeconomic backgrounds? How does the system allow for opportunity hoarding?

Week 10 (4.4) School choice and the myth of a good fit

 Week 11 : Student final project presentations in progress

* Required talk: Walter Stern, Race and Education in New Orleans*

Week 12 : Case Study: Black Mothers & School Choice in Atlanta

Week 13: Student and parental activism

How are district leaders, students and parents involved in current attempts to reform urban choice systems?

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