Public Education Under Siege

Chapter 11 "I Want the White People Here!": The Dark Side of an Urban School Renaissance

Chapter 11 “I Want the White People Here!”: The Dark Side of an Urban School Renaissance Maia Cucchiara Grant Elementary, part of Philadelphia’s beleaguered public school system, stands among rows of historic townhouses in Philadelphia’s revitalized downtown (all school, neighborhood, and individual names in this chapter are pseudonyms). Beginning in 2004, Grant was the focus of an aggressive campaign by parents, school district administrators, and local civic leaders to market this and other downtown schools to the middle- and upper-middleclass professionals living in the area. Many Philadelphians, concerned about both the quality of the schools and ongoing middle-class flight, supported the campaign. This is understandable. After all, an influx of middle-class parents in Philadelphia’s schools could generate additional resources and higher standards in these schools—no small thing in a city littered with failed reform efforts. And the middle- and upper-middle-class parents who came to Grant as a result of this campaign did improve the school in many ways. Yet the story this chapter tells—the story of an urban school “renaissance”—is more complicated than those involved at Grant might have expected. The effort to attract a particular constituency to the school had a number of inequitable consequences, most notably the marginalization and exclusion of low-income and minority families. Thus, while the marketing of Grant did result in enhanced programming and facilities at the school, it also made the public schools complicit in the larger project of reshaping urban public institutions so that they disproportionately serve the interests of the middle- and upper-middle classes. “I Want the White People Here!” 113 This pattern is being repeated in cities across the country, as, rather than fleeing for the suburbs, urban middle-class families join together to make dramatic improvements to their local schools. Their efforts are generally celebrated in the local and national media, with middle- and uppermiddle -class parents called “pioneers” or “reformers” and lauded for their donations of time, money, and other resources. In Chicago, for example, the effort to transform one neighborhood school (Nettelhorst Elementary) generated national publicity, including a book tour, media appearances, and commendation from public officials. Such a “solution” to the enduring problems of urban education uses the resources of the middle class to try to address what are largely structural challenges: inequitable school funding and the myriad consequences of poverty. Like other reform strategies that are currently popular—such as linking teacher salary to student test scores and alternative teacher certification—middle-class transformations of urban public schools negate the need for difficult conversations about resource distribution and the disenfranchisement of low-income urban communities. Yet, as I learned in my ethnography of Grant, the benefits of recruiting more middle-class families to urban public schools also come at a cost, namely, limited access and diminished status for some low-income and minority families. * * * The area surrounding Grant Elementary School is known as Cobble Square, a prosperous neighborhood in Philadelphia’s downtown. Streets are lined with grand old homes, horse-drawn carriages carry tourists from one site to another , and some of the streets are paved with cobblestones. Though it has been there for decades, the school still does not quite fit into its historic surroundings : it towers over a nearby row of colonial houses, and its playground is bare and utilitarian compared to the lush window boxes and shaded sidewalks in the vicinity. In 2000 Cobble Square was 91 percent white. It was also very expensive: the median residential sale price in 2005 was $679,000, compared to a citywide median of $86,000. The Grant catchment area included Cobble Square and a more diverse set of neighborhoods, including a heavily Asian community . Yet the marketing of Grant focused heavily on Cobble Square and other white and middle- to upper-middle-class neighborhoods in the larger 5:57 GMT) 114 Maia Cucchiara downtown area, which itself had become increasingly affluent over the previous decade. In order to understand how the effort to market a public school to professional families was experienced by parents, I conducted a two-year ethnography (2004–2006) of Grant Elementary’s Parent Teacher Organization (PTO). The year I began my study, Grant served 471 students from kindergarten through eighth grade: 43 percent Asian American, 43 percent African American, and 11 percent white. While Cobble Square residents generally eschewed Grant in favor of one of the local private schools, in 2003 a small group of parents from the community...