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C H A P T E R F I V E Ideas and Education Reform in Multiethnic Cities AS CHAPTER 4 ILLUSTRATES, analyzing the economic and political resources of racial and ethnic groups is a natural starting point for understanding their varying situations in the education arena. For example , factors such as voting rates, group cohesiveness, and socioeconomic status do partially explain why Latinos have less influence on the education system than blacks, even though both groups have an interest in the system. But such analysis falls short of fully explaining why minorities generally have made greater inroads in city politics than in education politics, especially given both their greater representation among school constituencies compared to city constituencies , and also the urgent need to raise their children’s achievement levels in urban school districts. An interest-based analysis also leads us to expect collaboration across minority groups, given this shared stake in improving the education system . In the cities we studied, however, we saw little collaboration of this kind. The insufficiency of an interest-based analysis of education politics in multiethnic cities stems from the absence of a theoretical approach to studying politics that incorporates race in a central, structural way. As we described in Chapter 2, the diverse racial groups present in these cities cannot be treated as “just” other interests. Rather, translating resources into political influence is more problematic for racial and ethnic minorities than it is for traditional interest groups, such as producer groups or large membership organizations. This is so because minority groups are faced with distinctive barriers: their unique historical experiences; their positions within local social, economic, and political structures; and their relationship to the majority group within a two-tiered pluralism structure. We have argued that to better understand the political situation of racial minorities in education politics, we need to look at the roles of ideas and institutions. This chapter proposes that analyzing the role of ideas sheds light on dimensions of urban education politics that a focus on interests alone overlooks. A focus on ideas means acknowledging the socially constructed nature of problems , and the presence of “multiple realities” (Berger and Luckmann 1967; Croucher 1997; Edelman 1988; Rochefort and Cobb 1994; Yanow 1995). That is, groups situated differently within the context of education politics are expected to interpret education issues differently. For example, something one group sees as inefficiency, another may see as promoting fairness, and something one group interprets as a strategy of empowerment, another may see as a strategy of exclusion. In part, the presence of multiple realities reflects the inherent complexity of the social world and of policy problems. Since any policy issue, including education, emerges from a web of causal relationships and interactions, and is connected to a variety of other issues both directly and indirectly, contrasting interpretations of “the problem” will inevitably emerge and can be defended with reference to “the facts.” While some scholars criticize the relativism and indeterminacy of this approach to studying political life, we maintain that the presence of multiple realities and social constructions cannot be eliminated from the analysis, only ignored (Yanow 1995). We prefer to grapple with the difficulties of analyzing these multiple ideas about the reality of education, because doing so brings to light important elements of our puzzle. Our purpose is not to determine which claims about education politics and policy are better or worse, true or false. Our aim is, instead, to investigate the process through which various claims and claimants compete in the education arena, and to determine which claims do and which do not become the basis for educational reform, and why. The analysis in this chapter highlights how members of different racial and ethnic groups define education problems and assess the solutions being promoted or implemented in their cities. It reveals a complex arena of problem definitions and assessments of reform ideas, one so infused with issues of race and ethnicity that groups agreeing on some elements of “the education problem” may be kept apart by their differing interpretations of its racial dimensions. These findings suggest that divergent ideas about education problems and solutions pose barriers to collective action and meaningful education reform in multiethnic cities. The Role of Ideas in Education Politics Attention to the multiple discourses of education reform in multiethnic cities contributes to our larger analysis. Analyzing the ideas that members of different I D E A S A N D E D U C AT I O N R E F...

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