Welcome to Rolling Acres

Rolling Acres is a promised land. It is a manicured suburb nestled in the midwestern United States that features a well-run and -resourced school district. Rolling Acres is the type of school district that families move to because of its strong reputation for nurturing student learners. In any given year the district receives national academic accolades by graduating National Merit Scholars and extracurricular praise when its bands are invited to perform on the national stage; its schools showcase their ethnic diversity by hosting "International Nights" to which families bring foods from their ancestral homelands. To most eyes, Rolling Acres and its public schools are what many U.S. schools—both urban and suburban—desire to be. However, this is not the full reality of Rolling Acres and its schools.

In the early 2000s, I attended the commencement ceremony at one of the high schools in the Rolling Acres Public Schools (RAPS) district. During the ceremony I heard white families cheering loudly as the college destinations of the graduates were announced from the dais: they ranged from Harvard to Bates to the University of Michigan. These cheers for white graduating seniors at times drowned out the announcements of their black classmates' next steps. Those included local community colleges, work plans, military service, and less-selective colleges. Just as the cheers served to cover up the divergent lives of black and white youth, many of the mechanisms that breed inequality in Rolling Acres remain concealed. Although considerable attention has been paid to gross inequalities between inner-city and suburban schools, too little research has interrogated inequality in suburban areas. As suburban school districts become more racially and economically diverse, understanding how they respond to diverse families is essential to understanding future paths to equality.

Districts like Rolling Acres are consistently confronted with questions such as: How can we provide a quality education to racially and economically diverse families? If we have ample financial resources, why do we still see educational disparities? What programmatic or policy changes will reduce observable disparities in our students' educational experiences? How do differences in family background relate to observed disparities? And how can we respond to demographic changes in ways that accommodate long-time residents and new arrivals? These questions remain inadequately addressed both by current discussions in education policy and by sociological theorizing about educational inequality. With this book I offer some answers based on a careful ethnography of education in a desegregated suburban setting.

Although Rolling Acres contains many of the resources that are typically associated with positive student achievement, these resources seldom trickle down to the district's economic and racial minorities. Through multiple mechanisms (e.g., social networks, school-to-home communication, teacher beliefs, and others) the resources of Rolling Acres are not only funneled away from minorities; they are leveraged by affluent white families to gain greater educational advantages for their children. By building on and challenging past work on educational inequality, I hope to clarify why the presence or availability of resources does not necessarily mean that those resources are accessible to everyone, and why we must look beyond individual or group orientations and instead look at the relations between groups and within schools. I explore the micro-level interactions between school staff, teachers, parents, and students and link them to broader macro issues such as racial ideologies and the formation of contemporary equal opportunity policies. The result is an intricate web of relations and dynamics that weaves together race and social class and reproduces disparities in student educational experiences in both subtle and overt ways.

SUBURBAN SCHOOL INEQUALITY

While researchers debate whether resources matter and to what extent they influence school achievement, laypeople are at near consensus that resources matter. Over the past forty years, many African-Americans have migrated to suburban locations with the hope of sending their children to higher-quality schools. Historically, suburban schools have been better resourced than their inner-city peers and have become known for their diverse offerings and college preparatory curriculums. All of these features have made districts like Rolling Acres highly desirable among families who want to give their children an early life advantage. Despite these opportunities, gaining access to the educational resources of a district is not always straightforward, particularly for black families.

In Rolling Acres, different social worlds collide, and the puzzle of educational equality remains unsolved. For decades, Rolling Acres has spent increasing amounts of money in the hope of reducing educational inequality and improving the educational experiences of all families; but there remain seemingly intransigent race and social-class gaps. Although RAPS is a land of plenty, Rolling Acres residents engage in stiff competition to get their children the best teachers, sign them up for extracurricular activities, and glean insider information with the goal of creating an idyllic educational experience for them. On its face, the same resources are readily available to all students, but upon closer examination one sees that access to these resources is not equal, particularly for racial and economic minorities. These differences in resource access are not based simply on disparities in provision; access is influenced by differences in family backgrounds, institutional reception (how schools receive families and their requests), and interactions between families.

To illustrate, imagine that a school's science scores on the state standardized test arrive and the scores of black students are lower than those of white students. While the gap in average scores might not be not surprising, the district notes that the gap between black and white students had declined for nearly ten years, but for the past three years that progress has stalled. There are mounting pressures from local, state, and federal authorities to "close the gap." In response, some proactive school district members propose creating a "Saturday Science Academy" that will target both black and white students, with the goal of raising science scores. It will be an extracurricular program designed to increase access to science and technology and provide hands-on instruction in a small-classroom environment. An announcement about the creation of the Saturday Science Academy is then sent to all families in the target school. Parents are invited to sign up online or to mail program attendance requests back to the...