Middle-Class Parents andCity School Transformation

Mr. Foster and I were sitting together in Morningside Elementary's courtyard,talking about the large number of people he expected to attend theOpen House for prospective kindergartner families that was scheduled forthat night. Blooming flowers and colorful student artwork surrounded us.Mr. Foster, a veteran teacher at Morningside, described the positive attentionthat the school had received in recent years—attention that was uncommongiven the historically bad press and low status associated withmany schools in Woodbury Unified School District. He remarked thatthe district superintendent and several administrators from a neighboringdistrict had just visited the school, and he exclaimed, "Since when doesthe superintendent and [neighboring] school district come to check out aWoodbury public school?" Morningside, a small public elementary schoolin a large urban district in Northern California, was now on the radar ofmany middle-class parents and community members in Woodbury andwas described on one regional parent website as "an urban jewel."

Mr. Foster had witnessed considerable changes at the school over the pastdecade. When he started teaching at Morningside in the mid-1990s, Morningside'sdemographics did not match those of the predominantly whitemiddle- and upper-middle-class neighborhood surrounding the school.Many neighborhood parents sought out other schooling options or left theneighborhood altogether rather than enroll their children in the predominantlyAfrican American, Title I school. This was despite the fact that Morningside'stest scores were historically higher than those of other schools inthe state with similar student demographics, and the school had a small butcommitted group of parents and school staff working to strengthen and expandthe school's academic and enrichment programs.

Yet when I spoke with Mr. Foster that day, Morningside was challengedto find space to accommodate the large number of students from boththe neighborhood and other parts of the city who sought admittance. Theschool had a waiting list of students for its kindergarten classes, and thestudent demographics had steadily shifted as increased numbers of whiteand mixed-race middle- and upper-middle-class children enrolled in theschool. Morningside's academic and enrichment programs had expandedto include integrated art and gardening programs, Spanish for all students,a salad-bar lunch program, and extensive community partnerships—allfunded in large part from parent and teacher grant writing and a parent-teacherorganization budget of well over $100,000. The school was highlightedin local media and parent websites, with its recent transformationattributed in large part to Morningside's active parent community.

For those concerned with segregation and inequality in public schooling,Morningside is an intriguing case. Here were middle- and upper-middleclassparents—and white parents in particular—voluntarily enrolling theirchildren in a Title I city school with a majority of students of color, absenta district mandate or desegregation program. And many of these parentswere not just enrolling their children in Morningside but also contributingtheir time and financial resources to the school. These trends run counterto dominant patterns of white and middle-class flight to more elite cityor suburban schools. Given the erosion of and resistance to desegregationprograms in many US districts, the enrollment, organizing, and investmentsof middle- and upper-middle-class parents at Morningside andelsewhere can be viewed as a new and promising avenue for urban schoolchange. Indeed, laudatory accounts of the movement of the middle classinto predominantly low-income or socioeconomically mixed city schoolsare increasingly common, with these parents praised for their volunteerismand efforts to integrate and improve their local public schools (see,e.g., Edelberg and Kurland 2011; Graham 2010; Petrilli 2012). As MichaelPetrilli, author of The Diverse Schools Dilemma, remarked in an article aboutmiddle-class parents and city schools, "All we can say at this point is thatthis provides the best opportunity in a generation for us to integrate oururban schools" (Toppo 2012).

Yet, as I illustrate in this book, there are significant costs to relying uponmiddle-class parents as major drivers of urban school transformation. Aschool reform strategy that depends upon middle-class parents—withoutpolicies and efforts to ensure that low-income families also participate inand benefit from school change—is bad practice for two reasons. First,middle-class engagement, when unfettered, is likely to create new patternsof educational inequality and exclusion in districts and schools, often despitethe best intentions of individual parents. Second, focusing on parentvolunteerism and investments in urban education unfairly shifts theonus of responsibility for high-quality schooling from the government toindividuals, with parents compelled to fill budgetary and resource gaps inorder to ensure that things like art, music, and physical education are a partof their children's education.

To be clear, I am not saying that middle-class volunteerism and engagementare inherently bad. Indeed, as I show in the following chapters, therewere middle-class parents who devoted countless hours of their time tosupport Morningside's collective student body and who helped to bringnew and important educational resources and opportunities to the school.Rather, what I'm arguing is that the individual choices and engagement ofparents (and of middle-class parents in particular) should not be treated asa substitute for the more structural reforms necessary to improve city publicschools—reforms I discuss in the concluding chapter.

The arguments I make here are based upon more than two years of ethnographicresearch in and around Morningside Elementary, a small publicschool in Northern California impacted by significant demographicchange. In my study of Morningside, I examine the role of middle-classparents—and particularly, but not exclusively, white middle-class parents—inurban school change efforts. Specifically, I examine the followingquestions: What motivates middle- and upper-middle-class parents toconsider the school? How do parents and teachers in the school communityunderstand and respond to these parents' engagement?...