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C H A P T E R O N E Interests, Ideas, and Institutions: The Politics of School Reform in Multiethnic Cities IN DENVER, two African American families mulled over the options for their children.1 Ronnie and Judy Young started their sons in Denver Public Schools (DPS) and then moved them to private schools due to overcrowding. But their sons were not doing as well as they had hoped despite the comfortable surroundings. Citing teachers’ inflexibility about teaching methods, they moved their boys back into DPS. “They are in the mix of things at school just as they will be in society,” they wrote. Sherrie and Kermit Queenan’s children also tried public and private schools, but they took the opposite stand. Starting in an African American private school—Union Baptist Excel Institute—the kids did well, but the Queenans sent them to public school when they had difficulty paying tuition. There, the kids lost ground. Thus the Queenans “scraped and scrimped,” and reenrolled Thanes, Kelsianna, and Kershena in Excel. To these parents, the difference between the schools was that Excel teachers valued all children. They asked, “How can a system as large and well-funded as DPS be failing our children?” Their answer is the lack of competition: “As the only game in town, DPS has little incentive to improve.”2 The Queenans wanted to know “How can many private schools educate a child better than DPS for far less money [per student]?” These questions trouble many parents, but they especially affect parents of color. To them, public schools continue to be the last, best hope for their children ’s future. Yet, like the Queenans, many wonder why these schools fail to meet their expectations and to address their concerns. As one headline in the Denver Post put it, “DPS gets passing grade in teaching white children.” (Illescas 1998); the implication being that, unlike white students, Latino, African American, and Asian children remain poorly served by the public school systems in many American cities.3 To many Latino and Asian parents, especially in multiethnic cities like Denver, the apparent success of African Americans in shaping school reform may now seem to be part of the problem. The mobilization and collective action of the civil rights campaigns in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s remain inspirational models for other minority groups in the United States. Ironically, however, these historic political successes can appear as political barriers to other groups seeking access and influence in local education politics. These barriers are not intentional, nor are they permanent. Thus, to begin to understand the politics of school reform in multiethnic cities, we must consider instances in which past reforms privileged certain definitions of school problems and created educational institutions in which school officials initially had few incentives to respond to newly emerging school constituencies. As court-ordered desegregation plans were challenged, relaxed, and eventually lifted in many cities in the 1980s and 1990s, a window of opportunity seemed to open for new, more diverse voices, and for the expression of new ideas about school reform. This “multiethnic moment,” which occurred at different points in each of the cities studied—San Francisco, Boston, Denver, and Los Angeles (see Figure 1.1)—did not lead to greater responsiveness to new multiethnic school constituencies. Indeed, all students of color appear to be doing little better this decade than in the 1990s. This book addresses this puzzle —the difficulties in taking advantage of this historical multiethnic moment to pursue more responsive school reforms—by analyzing the interests, ideas, and institutions in play during this period in the cities studied. Our story about the multiethnic moment emphasizes how these configurations contributed to each city’s lagged responses to new multiethnic school constituencies in the 1990s. We see these dynamics taking place in a larger context of “two-tiered pluralism,” in which historical, socioeconomic, and cultural forces blunt the prospects for responding to racial and ethnic claims. The emergence during this period of national school-reform movements that centered on market mechanisms and emphasized “choice” rather than equity—characterized here as the “new educational populism”—also limited the ability of new multiethnic interests to take advantage of this window of opportunity. The Puzzle of School Reform in Multiethnic Cities All parents share a common interest in the quality of their children’s education. In a survey of eight hundred African American and eight hundred white parents , majorities of both groups agreed on the primacy of basic education needs...

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