David E. Kirkland 

At the time that I interviewed the parents of the subaltern1, the hidden costs of school choice were, indeed, grave. Yet these costs, which can be traced to the era of segregation, lay hidden in the presumption that schools and communities are not created equally. While there may, in fact, be some truth to this claim (Barret, 2006; De Vos & Suárez-Orozco, 1990; Kozol, 1991; Sleeter & Grant, 1987), its proclamation suggests an overly essentialized view of American schools, where parents seem to submit to the way things are, insisting upon a dull conclusion that does not consider, allow for, or demand change.

For Kara, Gwen, Rachel, and Manuela, school choice had been shaped in the presumption that some things—schools and communities—were essentially better than others. According to Rachel, “That’s just the way it is.” This presumption alone, I argue, challenges any notion of free choice because who would choose the “inferior” option? In making the pivotal choice over what schools to send their children, suburban parents have rarely been required to cross geographic borders (Frankenberg, Lee, & Orfield, 2003). By contrast, city parents—such as Kara, Gwen, Rachel, and Manuela—are frequently compelled to cross borders, both geographic and cultural (Noguera, 2003a). Usually their crossings mean leaving behind a physical and ideational space and conducting a literal and figurative march of treason, where the children of the subaltern are expected to abandon communities and friends, languages and lifestyles (Ogbu, 2003; Smitherman, 2006).

For much of the twentieth century, this march was seen as an upward climb away from the segregated schools that lay nested in the permanent borders of the United States. The goal of this movement, which gained legal backing with Brown, was to provide parents, who are usually poorer and more vulnerable, with greater access to the choices needed to ensure their children the best education possible. However, it is not clear whether or not Brown accomplished this goal. To what degree can these parents make free choices? Such an aporia wraps itself around a larger question—a question that guides this work: Can the parents featured in this study freely choose their child(ren)’s schools?

To address this question, I critically analyze the discourses2 of school choice persistent in my conversations with Kara, Gwen, Rachel, and Manuela. The purpose of my analysis, here, is to reveal the “taken-for-grantedness” of the ideological messages that characterize these parents’ choices over where to send their children to school. In doing so, I treat the parents’ choices as a type of social practice representative
of discursive and ideological systems, and ask: In what ways might the parents have reinforced the ideologies of segregation in their school choices instead of disrupting them? That is, in choosing to leave and sometimes in having to stay in city schools, the parents of the subaltern may have been speaking for another group whose interests they had interpellated for their own. In this process of being passively and unconsciously drawn into dominant assumptions, or dominant discourses (e.g. City schools are bad and suburban schools are good.), the parents of the subaltern may have thought—as the dominant discourses of school choice certainly encourage them to do so—that they had a genuine choice and that somehow this choice expressed their individuality. In propping up dominant discourses, such choices, if analyzed critically, may reveal the relatively small degree of power these parents actually exercised.

From Segregation to Resegregation

Before analyzing the parents’ school choices, it is helpful to review the historical legacy in which these parents’ school choices are embedded. This history reveals sets of movements that at certain points—perhaps long ago— turned on themselves. The national journey away from school segregation, by 1954, seemed to happen “with all deliberate speed” (Siddle Walker, 2001). Brown, the engine for this movement, represented a leap in civil, racial, and human jurisprudence and the power of a nation to take bold and principled steps toward promoting justice even in the face of chronic injustice, social derision, and cultural intimidation (Thomas, Chinn, Perkins, & Carter, 1994). As the country marched past segregation, social mobility was supposed to spread across the country (Labaree, 1997).

However, as U.S. schools moved farther away from Brown, they have arguably moved further away from
its promises. Segregation continues to have a powerful sway in U.S. schooling, denoting a painful legacy of legal and illegal separation of peoples by race and increasingly by class (Ladson- Billings, 2002; Orfield & Yun, 1999; Prendergast, 2002). This practice of forced separation has centralized the values of the social and cultural elite, projecting elite privilege onto mechanisms of social organization and apparatuses of social capital (Coleman, et al., 1966; Noguera, 2003a; Wells & Serna, 1996)—chiefly schools. In turn, schools have displaced non-elite groups, resigning them to marginal postures that limit their social mobility (Fruchter, 2007; Noguera, 2003a; Wells & Serna, 1996). In this way, the non-elite have been compartmentalized to specific sectors of society—reservations and ghettos, poor ethnic districts, and rural communities (Borjas, 1999; Thorne, 1997; Willis, 2002; Wong, 1988).

This division of people into spatial camps can sometimes fog differences experienced by groups. For example, individuals living in cities experienced the consequences of segregation differently than individuals living in other regions of the US. According to Fruchter (2007):

[In many Northern, Midwestern, and Western cities] The threat of integrated schooling, combined with
the process of industrial dispersion, suburban housing development, and highway construction influenced millions of white middle- and working-class families to leave central cities for the neighboring suburbs. Low-cost mortgages, subsidized by the federal government but made available almost entirely to white families only, helped spark this movement. In many cities, blockbusting by the same consortia of realtors that had maintained white-only neighborhoods also helped to swell the exodus and turn the core neighborhoods of central cities into all-black districts (p. 13).

Noguera (2003a) suggests, “Changes in nomenclature [a naming system peculiar to a social group] reflect more than just ideological and political trends” (p. 23). For Noguera:

The association between the term urban and people and places that are poor and non-White is tied to the demographic and economic transformations that occurred in cities throughout the United States during the past 50 years.... In the 1950s. federal policies hastened the decline of cities as new highways were constructed, making it easier for the middle class to move out of cities to obtain a piece of the American dream: a single-family home located in the suburbs (pp. 23-24).

As many cities grew darker following precipitous White Flight, White city school enrollments drastically declined. In cities such as Detroit, this decline has been as much as 90 percent post- Brown (Frankenberg & Orfield, 2007). With jobs and housing moving to suburban regions, many people began to view cities such as Detroit through a deficit lens. By the early 1970s, cities like Detroit were no longer seen as housing the best institutions—schools, jobs, families, etc. Instead, they became associated with crime and violence (Anyon, 1995; Fine & Weis, 1998; McLaughlin, Irby, & Langman, 1994; Wilson, 1987) and “disproportionately comprised of residents who were poor and non-White” (Noguera, 2003a, p. 25).

This deficit view of the city and its poor, non-White residents questioned not only its economy, but also its morality. In this light, cities as vast as New York and as luminous as Las Vegas were better known for drugs, gangs, and sex than for any other alluring qualities they might possess. Further, with the rise of drugs, gangs, and a culture of burlesque, the 1980s would see another dip in the public’s perception of U.S. cities (Wilson, 1987). The resulting image produced a spectacular range of things, chiefly a deteriorating city positioned against an imagined suburb. By many accounts (cf. Baker, 2001; Ladson- Billings, 2004; Orfield & Yun, 1999), this image has given way to discourses of resegregation, which have served to extend segregation’s legacy not simply into separate and unequal classes, but also into a better and worse America.

There is evidence that segregation has not only continued today but has, in fact, increased (Frankenberg & Orfield, 2007; Orfield & Yun, 1999). The modern presence of segregation—what Orfield has termed “resegregation” and what I call neosegregation3—updates the ravages of segregation. For Orfield and his colleagues, desegregation efforts have not fully worked as they are merely positing an idea of change under the illusion of “choice.” Schools, they believe, reproduce many of the abuses of segregation, including high concentrations of capital and resources to a few privileged hands. New trends of segregation are particularly disturbing as student populations become more diverse. According to the U.S. Department of Education (2008), “The percentage of racial/ethnic minority students enrolled in the nation’s public schools increased from 22 percent in 1972 to 31 percent in 1986 to 43 percent in 2006” (p. iv). The most dramatic growth is seen among Latino students, who “represented 20 percent of public school enrollment, up from 6 percent in 1972 and 11 percent in 1986” (p. iv.).

In spite of growing trends in diversity, Latino students, the fastest growing demographic enrolling in American schools, are also the most segregated minority group, with steadily rising segregation since federal data were first collected a third of a century ago (Gándara, 2000; Moll & Ruiz, 2002; Orfield, 1995; M. M. Suárez-Orozco & Páez, 2002). According to Frankenberg, Lee, and Orfield (2003), “Latinos are segregated both by race and poverty, and a pattern of linguistic segregation is also developing” (p. 4). For some scholars, such trends are especially damning because it gives U.S. society one more way to exclude its minority populations (M. M. Suárez-Orozco & Páez, 2002; Suro, 1998).

Neosegregration has affected other American racial groups as well. For example, a growing proportion of Black students, as much as one-in-four in the Northeast and Midwest, attend what Frankenberg et al. calls “apartheid schools,” schools with overwhelming minority populations (99-100%) where “enormous poverty, limited resources, and social and health problems of many types are concentrated” (p. 5). In addition, White students are perhaps the most segregated racial group attending American public schools. According to Frankenberg et al., “they attend schools, on average, where eighty percent of the student body is white” (p. 4). These educational trends demonstrate that while America is an excitingly diverse place made richer by its diversity, it is also a divided nation, troubled by its deep divisions, where trends of poverty and miseducation correlate too well with racial segregation.

While the Brown ruling set forth the course of legal reforms needed to challenge these divisions, it also seemed to strengthen the dominant discourses that, in effect, have reproduced segregation—that White is right, that elite values are most desirable, that cities are slums when compared to suburbs, etc. In effect, Brown, while promoting school desegregation, never set forth a real plan to stimulate school integration (Noguera, 2003a). Such a plan would imply not only the allowance of cultural hybridity where groups take on many of each other’s ways of living and thinking, but also the allowance of free choice where groups are given a liberal set of options that come with few consequences.

Brown’s biggest and perhaps only success has been to promote massive school desegregation particularly through busing programs that forced choices4 onto people who did not necessarily want them. In this way, the Brown solution came in the form of massive appeals garnered by coercion, which brought communities and cultures together in unholy unions, wedding two under-committed partners for better or worse. Indeed, it has been for worse that the discourses of choice that have been internalized and (I argue) have helped to transmit urban educational inferiority. This explains in part why even non-racist White parents (the vast majority of White parents) resist sending their children to most public schools in culturally diverse cities. While it can be argued that such resistance to integration only undermines desegregation, we must also keep in mind that White parents are not the only ones running away from such city schools. As perceptions of schools in U.S. cities grow worse, non-White parents too have increasingly sought educational alternatives for their children within and outside the city limits (Fruchter, 2007; Noguera, 2001, 2003a; Oakes & Lipton, 2002; Willis, 2003).

While parents throughout American cities and suburbs desire the best possible education for their children, questions remain about the role of segregation in American education. Do we remain a set of divided school systems? Do we continue to push for integrated schools? While these questions require much thought and complex solutions, what seems clear is that, as it becomes more diverse, America needs stronger schools capable of unifying its students in order to meet the challenges and capitalize on the promises of its unique blend of people. These schools must be designed to bridge cultural and linguistic differences and educate all youth regardless of ethnic, linguistic, and socio-economic background. As the nation tiptoes farther into the new millennium, a deeper question shall become more pressing: how do we move the nation beyond the petty divisions that have long fractured it into separate and unequal parts?

Postcolonial Stirrings in the Shadow of Brown: Theoretical Considerations

Using postcolonial theories, I view the discourses framing school choice as constructing sets of distinctions, where a hegemony of western cultural norms prevails. Such distinctions have also gained critique in Whiteness studies, which have examined the ways in which dominant social and cultural discourses prop up White privilege (Marx, 2004; Richardson & Villenas, 2000). It is thus through a postcolonial lens that the hegemony of western culture and the privilege of Whites become visible. Once revealed, such visibilities can never again be hidden in objective light. As Fanon (1961) puts it: for non-Whites, “objectivity is always directed against him” (p. 77).

On the other hand, unexamined acts, such as school choice are revealed to be particularly political ones, which intermingle with the cultural vibrations of history, the polity of social space, the articulations of identity, etc. Parents might not recognize all that

is going on when choosing “the best school” for their child(ren). Thus, the question—can the parents of the subaltern choose—raises the specter of how choices can be rendered and received. That is, the choices that one makes can be seen as constructions based on positions of privilege and power, neglect and marginality that— like a colonizing relation—trade on false notions of individuality to sustain prevailing interests that sanction and serve western cultural hegemony and White privilege. Situating school choice in this context challenges our understanding of how choices exist.

It changes choice from something individual to something historical that is buried in a sea of elite discourses.

“Ain’t Nowhere Else to Go”: The Hidden Costs of Choice

Parents who do choose to send their children to what they believe are “inferior” schools seem forced to do so because of a perceived lack of options (Diamond, Wang, & Gomez, 2004; Lareau, 1987). According to Gwen and Manuela, “We have to send our kids

to the neighborhood schools [schools in the City] because we can’t afford to send them anywhere else.” Perhaps a bit more optimistic than Manuela, Gwen admitted, “At least I can send my daughter to [a magnet] school, but even [the magnet school] ain’t good as the one out there [in the suburbs].” Conversely, parents who choose to send their children to what they feel are “superior” schools do so because they feel it is the best option they have.

According to Kara: