The Downtown School’s new space was beautiful, but one of its doors was creating problems. The second academic year had just begun and the school’s reformers and educators had barely finished moving into their new, and hopefully permanent, home. I had heard much about this new space during the previous spring when the school’s designers and leaders scheduled a Parent-Teacher Association (PTA) meeting to discuss the proposed move. The school’s original location on the east side of Manhattan had been temporary and could not accommodate the school as it grew, so the school’s leadership, in partnership with the Department of Education (DOE), had been working diligently to find a new home. What they proposed at the meeting seemed to me, as well as the school’s designers, like a big improvement over their temporary location, which consisted of only half a floor in a fairly rundown building from the 1920s that also happened to be around the corner from several methadone clinics.
According to the school’s leadership, the Downtown School would get portions of at least two floors in a huge prewar building in one of the city’s premier cultural districts on the west side of Manhattan. The new neighborhood was cleaner and wealthier than the current one, and the building included marble-lined hallways, depression-era murals by the Works Progress Administration, cherrywood cabinets, exposed brick walls, an impressive auditorium, and a swimming pool that was soon to be renovated. Additionally, one of the most selective public middle schools in Manhattan was right down the street, and one of the school’s university partners was only a few blocks away. What is more, the DOE was promising the school a large part of the building’s top floor, which had impressively high ceilings and arched brick windows with views of skyscrapers in midtown. That section of the top floor, which was currently being used as a recreational space by other schools in the building, could be used as an experimental space, a representative from the DOE suggested at the meeting. According to the DOE representative, Joel Klein, the chancellor of New York City’s schools, “recognizes that the Downtown School is different . . . that you have a need for space so that you can be innovative.” The space on the top floor could be a “play area,” one of the proponents of the move suggested, “we can build it out and do whatever we want with it!”
Yet despite these apparent advantages, a formidable bloc of both privileged and less-privileged parents nearly derailed the school’s plans to relocate. These parents were concerned, they said, with their children’s safety and security. Interestingly, they were not so much concerned with threats from adults outside the school as with students from other schools that shared the same building. As discussed in the last chapter, in the years leading up to the opening of the Downtown School, New York City educational reformers had promoted marketlike school choice in part by closing large schools and replacing them with numerous small schools. Doing so, they claimed, would promote more intimate and cohesive learning environments as well as more choice for parents and families. The problem was that the DOE’s material infrastructure could not be reconfigured nearly as easily as its organizational architecture. As such, numerous small schools—with different pedagogic philosophies, selection criteria, and hence student populations—were being placed together in buildings that had previously housed much bigger schools. For example, the proposed new home for the Downtown School also housed several other schools, and these schools primarily educated lower-income students, nearly all of whom were also students of color and some of whom were in high school. It was the spatial proximity of these other students that concerned anxious parents. Several parents expressed unease about the proximity of older students, whereas others worried that students from the other schools would resent the Downtown School’s students for their newly renovated space, abundance of high-tech resources, and playful pedagogy. One parent cited reports about gang activity and an incident involving a cell phone being snatched in the neighboring park. No one mentioned racialized class struggles or the school’s professed commitments to inclusivity.
In the end, these anxious parents were unable to prevent the school’s relocation. Their concerns were partially mollified by building officials, who outlined the various ways they planned to keep students from the different schools separated: There would be a carefully orchestrated schedule of movement, there would be different starting and dismissal times for the Downtown School and the other schools, there would be different doors by which Downtown School students would enter and exit the building, there would be constant radio communication for coordination among security personnel as well as with members of the New York City Police Department, there would be a “safe corridor” to the subway, and there would be prevention and “zero-tolerance” policies; finally, the official promised that “if these [other] kids can’t achieve success at their schools, we will redirect them to where they can achieve success.” More optimistically, one of the school’s designers reminded parents that the Downtown School was all about “teaching kids to think like designers and to take charge of their lives.” The designer told parents that she understood their concerns, but she stressed that these were the types of challenges for which they could design solutions.
I remembered these tense discussions when I visited the school’s new home and marveled at its recently renovated space on the building’s top floor: surprisingly fashionable furniture that could be flexibly assembled into clusters for collaborative group projects, curved and multitoned walls, exposed brick, shiny new floors, and enormously tall windows that framed the Empire State Building in the distance. The new space felt more like the offices of a well-funded tech startup than a typical New York City public school.
As I was taking in the impressive new space I happened to notice a small window in a door that led to a gymnasium that students from the other schools in the building also used. Recalling parents’ fears about resentment, I wondered what the students from the other schools in the building thought about the Downtown School’s newly renovated space as they passed this window on their way to the gym. I imagined them peering through the narrow window into an educational environment that, while separated by only a few feet from their own, may have seemed worlds apart. While chatting with one of the leaders of the Downtown School later that day, I shared how uplifting their new space felt and asked if students or educators from the other schools in the building had expressed any resentment. “Funny you should mention that,” the school leader said, before indicating that there had been some unspecified tensions. The next time I visited the Downtown School, the narrow window in the door that led to the shared gym had been papered over from the inside.
Cycles of disruptive fixation recur in part because of the ways that those who debate and design philanthropic interventions imagine and represent space. Through processes of problematization and rendering technical (Li 2007) and with the support and guidance of entrepreneurial reformers (Becker 1963) and other trustees (Li 2007), expert reformers collectively imagine and represent the worlds into which they plan to intervene as if they were amenable to, and controllable with, the remedies they have available. As part of these processes, experts have long imagined and attempted to construct spaces of enclosure—nations, cities, schools, factories, prisons, hospitals, museums, and so forth—that could be observed, measured, analyzed, and governed in seemingly rational ways (Lefebvre 1991; Foucault 1977; Gupta and Ferguson 1992; Scott 1998; Rose 1999, 31–37; Ingold 2011, 145–55). For example, educational reformers have long paid particular attention to how artifacts, the built environment, persons, and activities within the enclosed space of the school can be best configured in order to effectively, fairly, and efficiently administer pedagogical interventions. Yet by focusing on the design and management of spaces of enclosure, these experts also exclude many aspects of the world that impinge upon, and thus help to produce, their carefully designed environments.
Some contemporary experts are aware that the spatial fixations of previous reformers entailed problematic divisions between the enclosed sites they tried to design and manage and the rest of the world, and many recent innovations in reform can be read, in part, as attempts to the fix the limitations of previous reformers’ spatial fixations. For example, in the figured world of educational reform, scholars and reformers in the Learning Sciences, of which some of the founders of the Downtown School were a part, have problematized the boundary between the school and the world as they have attempted to extend the loci and foci of their educational expertise to include both formal (e.g., school) and informal (e.g., nonschool) settings.1 These reformers now render and imagine the geographic contours of their expertise not as schools but as “learning spaces” or “learning environments.”2 For these reformers, a learning environment can be a classroom with a teacher lecturing to thirty students, an educational game in which students role-play the activities of scientists, or even an online course that enrolls hundreds of thousands of people from around the world. The interconnections of these various learning environments are similarly imagined as forming broader “learning networks,” or “learning ecologies,” that involve numerous actors—including state, corporate, and nongovernmental organizations—all of which should share societal responsibilities that have historically fallen primarily on schools.
The experts who designed the Downtown School were at the forefront of these recent trends. As we saw in chapter 2, the founders of the Downtown School imagined that they were designing a model of schooling that was connected to the world in ways that conventional schooling was not. By organizing schooling to be gamelike and by incorporating digital media production practices throughout the curriculum, the school’s designers imagined that they were creating a learning environment that was connected to students’ out-of-school lives and interests as well as to the tech-savvy communities of practice that students would hopefully eventually enter. They also imagined that new information and communication technologies offered unprecedented ways to connect the school to other learning environments, including homes, libraries, various sites for extracurricular activities and numerous online sites—such as YouTube, online fandoms, and Wikipedia—that the school’s founders referred to as “global communities.” While these possibilities for connection were imagined as groundbreaking, they were in fact a rearticulation of a longstanding yearning: that recent breakthroughs in transport and communication technologies—from railroads to television to the Internet—“annihilated space and time” (Marx 1964; Nye 1994; Mosco 2004) and, hence, could overcome the problems of spatial division and allow for the creation of a united democratic polity.3
This chapter explores what the spatial fixations that arose through designers’ processes of problematizing and rendering technical excluded, as well as how they fared in practice. It does so by looking at the production, interconnection, and splintering of social spaces not only from the perspective of the experts who attempt to design and connect them, but also from the perspective of the people who navigate these spaces as part of their everyday lives. By examining how parents and caregivers, in particular, helped produce, divide, and connect spaces for their children in New York City, we can see how the designers’ more expansive imaginings of open and interconnected learning environments remained narrowly fixated. Because reformers tended to render divisions between the school and the world as if they were problems that new media technologies could largely bridge, they also mostly excluded social and political questions at two important and interrelated levels: at the level of the school’s entanglement in, and contribution to, processes that produce and maintain spatialized divisions of age, gender, and racialized social class and at the level of efforts to police the social boundaries of the spaces they helped bring into being. As we will see, these oversights contributed to numerous unforeseen, and often unwanted, consequences for reformers once they launched their intervention into the world, and these consequences helped produce conditions in which reformers and educators tended to remake and reinforce many of the same spatialized social divisions that their intervention had been designed to bridge.
Racialized and Classed Geographies
In New York City, residential real-estate markets mostly determine the sorting of students into different public elementary schools. The New York City DOE prioritizes the assignment of children to public elementary schools based on the property address where the child presumably resides. While DOE officials like to emphasize that there are numerous good schools throughout the city, parents and caregivers perceive substantial differences in school quality and thus seek educational advantages for their children using various real-estate strategies. As I got to know parents, I quickly learned that District Two in Manhattan, the district in which the Downtown School was located, had the most sought-after public schools in New York City. As one of the school’s less-privileged parents, a mother living in Brooklyn, described to me, “District Two schools have the majority of the money. That is why a lot of parents want their kids there.” At first I thought the mother was equating school quality with a school’s budget, but she went on to clarify that perceptions of quality had a lot to do with the sorts of parents who sent their children to District Two schools. She explained that District Two schools “have parents that are very active, and some of the parents there are freelancers, so they have all of this time on their hands so they can participate in school and do their work on the side as well. A lot of them are very well educated and probably went to college and probably have their master’s degree. Compared to the schools here in this district, it is not like that. A lot of the parents are low-income families and not that well educated. That affects the school environment, unfortunately a lot.”
Like other parents that I got to know, this mother’s judgment about school quality was primarily based on social distinctions, a point that the mother admitted with some regret. As other scholars have also observed (Cucchiara 2013; Lareau and Goyette, eds. 2014; Posey-Maddox 2014), one consequence of these perceived variations in school quality is that families in urban areas, and particularly more-privileged families, often compete quite fiercely and creatively for access to schools with high proportions of privileged families; not surprisingly, privileged families are much better equipped in these contests. As such, struggles over admission to schools tend to further reinforce spatialized social divisions, especially racialized social class divisions and, in some cases, gender divisions.
As I learned more about how parents and caregivers tried to navigate New York City’s public schools, I learned that the surest, but also most costly, way for parents to get their children into a District Two elementary school was to live in District Two and particularly in a neighborhood associated with its best schools. Many of these neighborhoods were located in the lower portion of Manhattan. Decades ago, theses neighborhoods—SOHO, Tribeca, the Meatpacking District, the Village, Chelsea—had been fairly run down, and some were still being used for industrial purposes, but as artists and other bohemians moved in and as flows of capital began to return to New York City during the 1980s, these formerly affordable neighborhoods quickly gentrified. By the time the Downtown School opened in 2009, demand for residences in these neighborhoods was among the most competitive in the United States, and exorbitant real estate prices—two-bedroom apartments routinely sold for well over a million dollars—had pushed former renters out of what had become prized inner-city school districts. Ironically, fierce real estate market demand, coupled with state-sponsored redevelopment efforts in lower Manhattan following 9/11, accelerated residential development at a rate that exceeded increases in available seats at the very schools that had helped drive residential demand. These capacity problems led the DOE to occasionally break the taken-for-granted coupling of residential geography with a specific elementary school, and when they did, contentious conflicts erupted between wealthy families and the DOE.4 One consequence of these fights was that privileged families increasingly demanded that the DOE enforce its residence-based admissions policies more stringently.
Even some of the Downtown School’s comparatively privileged families were able to remain in these coveted neighborhoods only because they had lived there for decades. These relative old-timers, who tended to work in the culture industries, often expressed indignation about the influx of more wealthy families into their neighborhoods, although these parents did not tend to volunteer that their own arrival had perhaps helped catalyze the gentrification process. As one parent, a bohemian creative professional, explained to me, “People moved to Tribeca just for the school, then the school got so overcrowded. It was ridiculous. It’s kind of nauseating, because it went from some downtown professionals, but a lot of artists and a real mix, to a really bourgeois, Wall Street, professional, high-strung professional people.” As the parent told me about the transformation, I shared that a similar change was happening in the neighborhood in Brooklyn where I was living while doing my fieldwork. We agreed that the process seemed to be out of control and that the outcomes were disturbing, even for comparatively privileged persons such as ourselves. “The neighborhood is nauseating,” he said, “The amount of money, it’s totally changed the character.”
This swarming of wealthy professional families into neighborhoods with coveted public elementary schools had much more effect on less-privileged families, some of whom, despite their disadvantages, had still found creative, yet precarious, ways to get their children into District Two elementary schools. One family used a relative’s Manhattan address on its application form, another student who lived in one of the other boroughs spent her weeknights at her grandmother’s rent-stabilized apartment in Manhattan, where various family members took turns looking after her, another girl stayed at her aunt’s apartment, a student from the Bronx had an elementary school teacher who introduced her family to the one of the Downtown School’s founders after the teacher and the founder went on a camping trip together, and so on.
Additionally, a large number of the Downtown School’s less-privileged parents and caregivers had gotten official permission from the DOE for their children to attend an elementary school in District Two. Known as a variance, once a student enrolled in an elementary school in District Two, he or she was promised a spot in a District Two middle and high school. As such, enterprising parents who could not afford to live in District Two worked hard to get their children into a District Two school during elementary school. One way to do so was by having their child test into the DOE’s gifted and talented program, in part because doing so made the student attractive to some of District Two’s elementary schools that wanted a more ethnically and economically diverse student body. A sizable portion of the less-privileged students who attended the Downtown School had tested into the city’s gifted and talented program, attended District Two elementary schools, and thus had variances that allowed them stay in District Two for middle and high school, if they chose.
However, I learned from these families that the process of getting a variance was becoming increasingly difficult, thanks to the rapid influx of wealthy families that had moved to District Two over the last decade. As one parent who lived in Brooklyn shared with me, “There were all of these schools in Manhattan that used to feed kids in from Brooklyn. They’d say, ‘If you’re interested in this type of education, come on.’ ” She shared how her daughter, who had attended one of those schools probably would not have been accepted if she applied today, “The Mayor says, ‘We don’t have enough seats. There’s been so much development. There are so many people who are paying a million dollars for an apartment and their kid can’t go to a school. So these kids have to go back to their borough.’ ” The parent seemed distraught by the change, even though her daughter had managed to get into a District Two school before the policy changes had taken place. “All of this is to say that because of that, as my daughter grew up through her elementary school, the diversity left. When she started it was very diverse and we were so excited to be there. But then, by the time she was graduating, it was less and less and less minority children in the school. The school took on this whole other culture.”
These perspectives, strategies, and tactics make it clear that when residential real estate markets mediate access to public schools, parents and caregivers who are seeking educational opportunities and advantages for their children help produce classed and racialized neighborhoods that, by proxy, produce schools that are segregated along the lines of racialized social class. This process reinforces itself so that a few select neighborhoods and schools in the city have become enclaves of privilege surrounded by neighborhoods and schools that are overwhelming attended by students from lower-income families, most of whom are also persons of color. As researchers at UCLA’s Civil Rights Project have observed, New York City now has some of the most segregated public schools in the United Stataes, without even taking into account its network of private schools.5 And as parents clearly understood, New York City’s schools were by no means equal since more privileged parents fundraised, donated resources and time, and brought their high levels of social and cultural capital to the select public schools where they coalesced.
When viewed from this parental perspective, the suturing of elementary schools to residential real estate markets complicates the ways in which educational reformers imagine learning environments as well as the connection of these environments to other settings. When parents’ real estate strategies are taken into account, schools cannot simply be rendered as contained environments that, if designed properly, can equally promote a beneficent process called learning. Rather, when viewed from the perspective of parents and caregivers, schools appear as one of the main mechanisms by which classed and racialized social divisions are materialized geographically for children and the adults who raise them. Clearly such tendencies are not in keeping with democratic ideals about equality of opportunity and a united polity.
To their credit, educational reformers often look for ways to disrupt these divisive dynamics. But when they do so they tend to render spatialized social divisions as if they were problems that cutting-edge educational interventions could fix. For example, one way that educational reformers in New York City have tried to combat the contribution of real estate markets to the production of segregated schools is by introducing marketlike reforms that have become known as “the choice system.” Such reforms have attempted to decouple the close relationship between access to particular schools and residential real estate markets. While well intended, these reforms do not appear to have uprooted the spatialization of entrenched social divisions, especially racialized class divisions. Instead, they appear to have extended the terrain of racialized class struggles beyond clashes over gentrification and into contests among families over who can gain access to, and wield control over, different educational spaces.
The Game of Choice
“It’s just crazy doing this. Most districts have zoned schools, we have the choice system,” a professional mother said to me as we sat in the backyard of her apartment in downtown Manhattan. She repeated the word choice while making air quotes with her hands in apparent derision. As I had come to learn, this mother’s sentiments about the choice system were rather common among the privileged families who had children at the Downtown School. Even though the choice system had been justified as a way to empower all families, families who lived in comparatively wealthy neighborhoods felt that the reforms had made processes of accessing desirable schools more precarious and labor intensive.
In New York City, the choice system begins in sixth grade. For middle and high schools, the DOE does not assign families to a particular school based on residential zones. Instead, families can apply to any middle school in their district and any high school in the city. Each school district covers a much larger geographic area than the elementary school zones and hence includes more economically and ethnically diverse households. Families can apply to any of the small, often thematic, middle schools in their district, and if they do not get into any of these small schools, they are offered a spot in one of the few remaining large “zoned” schools.
In some ways, the privileged mother’s frustration with the choice system can be read as an affirmation that the choice reforms were working as planned. According to those who had advocated for school choice, offering families options would disrupt bureaucratic inertia, increase the power of families by treating them like consumers, and interrupt the feedback loop between residential real estate segregation and school segregation. Instead of concentrating quality schools in a few wealthy neighborhoods, reformers hoped that public schools from across the city would improve and become more diverse as they competed with each other for students. The privileged mother’s frustration with the choice system suggests that this last goal was perhaps working as intended.
Yet the choice reforms had hardly overcome the problem of schooling’s contributions to the spatialization of race and class divisions in New York City. While the choice reforms appeared to have interrupted the ability of wealthier families to use their superior purchasing power as a means of acquiring access to the city’s best public middle and high schools, and while this disruption had contributed to new forms of angst among wealthier parents, the choice reforms had not managed to overcome the divisional dynamics that produced segregated neighborhoods and schools. Rather, they often reconfigured, expanded, and intensified those very dynamics.
While reformers hoped that the choice system would help erode the spatialization of racialized social class divisions and improve school quality more generally, most of District Two’s middle schools remained largely segregated along the lines of social class, race, and ethnicity. Competition for entry into schools with predominantly privileged students was remarkably intense. By and large, professional parents in my study listed the same four or five small and selective District Two public middle schools that they considered desirable and acceptable. These schools had much-higher average test scores than the other middle schools in District Two, which was primarily an artifact of their admissions processes. Most of these selective middle schools used test scores and other criteria such as attendance rates in student admissions, and parents and educators suggested to me that these selection mechanisms were alternative means for producing predominantly segregated schools. Demographically, these “good” schools were largely populated by students who self-identified as white or Asian American on DOE forms, and they had comparatively few students on free or reduced-price lunch—a common measure of lower-income status among American educational researchers. By contrast, most of the rest of the middle schools, which privileged families would not consider, were predominantly populated by students who self-identified as black or Latino(a) on DOE forms and had a much higher percentage of students on free or reduced-price lunch. All these statistics, as well as a school’s test scores, were accessible to families on the DOE Web site, which families were expected to consult as part of the choice process.
In an attempt to uproot these spatialized social divisions, the DOE had recently prohibited newly created small schools, including the Downtown School, from using test scores as part of their admissions criteria. But the DOE had also included a large loophole in these new policies. During admissions, administrators at new schools could indicate whether or not they felt an applicant was making an “informed choice,” a criterion that schools could largely define and that was thus subject to all sorts of internal and external pressures. The DOE then ran an algorithm that matched family and school preferences, purportedly by using a lottery-based system much like the one used to match medical school graduates with residency programs in the United States, although nobody that I met was exactly sure how the process actually worked.6 As we will shortly see, this informed-choice loophole became one of the ways that racialized class struggles were spatialized at the Downtown School.
While marketlike school-choice reforms had ratcheted up competition among schools, as their advocates had hoped, they had done so in a way that both intensified and expanded the terrain of divisive struggles among families. Just as professional parents swarmed to certain urban neighborhoods in order to get their children into to what they perceived to be the best public elementary schools, so too have these families flocked to the selective middle and high schools. In doing so, competition among families for educational advantages has expanded to include strategies for attempting to gain a leg up in middle school admissions contests, and these contests appeared to be incredibly nerve wracking. According to many of the privileged parents of students who attended the Downtown School, the selective middle schools in District Two were terribly competitive to get into, with some schools receiving more than 1,200 applicants for approximately 200 seats.7 Professional parents also shared stories about the nuanced strategies families used in order to improve their chances of gaining access to one of these coveted schools, including test-preparation services, cultivating personal contacts with school officials, and aggressively appealing DOE rejection decisions. Much like the early admissions’ processes for selective United States colleges, several popular middle schools were rumored to accept only students who had the highest marks on their exams and who also listed that school as their top choice on the DOE application.8 If their child was not admitted to one of these coveted schools, parents could attend one of the two large zoned schools that had internal tracks that divided students with higher test scores—referred to as “special progress” students—from everyone else. What these professional parents would not consider were the other small public middle schools, which some referred to as “problem schools” or “magnets for problem kids.” And as the vignette from the opening of this chapter illustrates, sometimes these nondesirable schools were located in the same buildings as the schools they coveted.
Without the mediation of residential real estate markets in the processes that sorted students into different schools, at middle school the wealthiest professional families who lived in District Two mostly left the public school system for private schools—which cost more than $30,000 a year—or they moved to expensive suburbs. As one professional mother told me, “At middle school, rich people peel off for private, totally. They’re out.” The transition to the choice system at middle school thus produced a rupture in the geographic trajectories of children from professional families, and this rupture was largely rooted in differences in professional families’ economic and cultural capital (Bourdieu 1986). Whereas economically and culturally privileged families often shared neighborhoods and elementary schools, at middle school professional families—who would be considered economic elites by national standards, but not necessarily by New York City standards—entered the choice system without their even more economically privileged professional counterparts. The professional parents that stayed in the public system for middle school, and thus had to navigate the choice system, often worked in culture industries—such as academia, publishing, the arts, media production, design, and advertising—although some also worked as doctors, accountants, and other professional occupations. Unless their children had high test scores, these families had little chance of being admitted to one of District Two’s selective middle schools, and even if their children did test well, their odds of being accepted were by no means guaranteed.
Less-privileged families, which generally did not have good local options in their neighborhoods, did not express nearly the same sense of anxiety and injustice with the choice system, but they also did not suggest that the choice system had finally presented them with ample and equitable opportunities. The most selective schools tended to enroll students on free or reduced-priced lunch at much lower rates than their distribution in the general student population, and the lower-income students that they did admit had already distinguished themselves academically from other lower-income students. Privileged and less-privileged parents alike emphasized that it took an exorbitant amount of work in order to do well in the choice system, and even then acceptance to one of the selective schools was highly uncertain.
To navigate the choice system, families were expected to attend numerous open houses at prospective middle schools in the fall of their child’s fifth grade year, rank their top choices, and then wait for several months until they heard from the DOE about their match. On numerous occasions professional parents compared the process of getting into middle school to the college admission’s process, and several suggested that both the process and the behavior it incited were crazy. Several of these parents also shared that they or their friends felt distraught, even devastated, when their eleven-year-old child did not match at their preferred school, a letdown that was even more distressing when friends and families from their elementary schools did get accepted.
It was partially into these competitive worlds of trying to be a parent in New York City—with their precarious, emotionally charged, and high-stakes educational contests—that the planners of the Downtown School intervened. While the reformers who planned the Downtown School imagined an innovative learning environment that would appeal to and benefit students from all backgrounds and while they worked hard to make sure that economically and ethnically diverse families could access their new school, during reformers’ processes of problematization and rendering technical they did not come close to anticipating the aggressive role that parents—whom they could not fully know or control—would play in turning their disruptive intervention into a mechanism that produced and maintained problematic social divisions. During the very months when the school’s designers were excitingly preparing to finally open the school, the seeds of these divisive forces were already being sown.
Choosing a Cutting-Edge Alternative
While not yet proven, factions of professional parents, especially creative professional parents with boys, were intrigued when they learned that a new school would be opening in District Two. According to these parents, the Downtown School sounded like a promising alternative to the uncertainties and intense competitive pressures of the choice system, in large part because they had heard that the school would not be part of the regular choice system in its first year. Some had been told by school leaders that if they attended an open house they would likely be admitted. What is more, and like the school’s designers and backers, the intrigued parents who worked in the culture industries tended to associate the Downtown School with progress and the future while simultaneously associating traditional schools with outmoded and ineffective conventions. In the context of marketlike school choice, these sorts of socially formed consumer tastes (Bourdieu 1984) played a key role in remaking and reinforcing spatialized divisions of gender, race, and class.
“When we went around to all the tours, I was thinking, ‘Where is the school that’s going to prepare these kids for the future?’ They’re all sort of conventional,” a creative professional father shared as we discussed the school in his family’s loft apartment downtown. “To me,” the father continued, “when they opened their mouth at the Downtown School, when they did the open house, it sounded like they were addressing the future. I had been asking, ‘Where is the school going to be? There’s got to be a middle school somewhere.’ And this was the one. I said, ‘Oh, this is it, this is the school.’ ”
The professional parents who sent their children to the Downtown School did not often elaborate how the school’s professed innovations would prepare their children for the future. Instead, they tended to distinguish the school in terms of what it was not, namely, a conventional school driven by normative developmental targets, tightly scripted routes for moving toward those targets, and standardized assessments for differentiating students’ progress along those routes. All these factors contributed to the intense and disciplined competitions that many of these families hoped to escape.
“When I say progressive, it wasn’t about test scores,” a creative professional mother shared, “it was about getting these kids to learn and be creative. That’s what I consider progressive. So the Downtown School was a good match.” As with other realms of consumption, a preference for a seemingly progressive school was integral to how these parents imagined themselves in relation to others. What is more, and perhaps more so than just about any other consumptive act, the act of choosing a particular style of school was integral to how parents imagined the different sorts of persons that their children would become. “A lot of people have an idea of where they want to be in life,” the same mother continued, “where they’re going to send their kids, and go to medical school and everything. The Downtown School wasn’t on that trajectory. The Downtown School was definitely a school that you went to because you really thought, ‘Wow, this must be cool.’ ”
This mother’s sense that progressive schools were a good match for her son begins to illustrate how market logics and a sense of choice can help ease tensions that are generated by having little choice but to participate in competitive and individualizing social systems. On the one hand, the mother’s problematization of conventional schooling suggests that she understood the limitations of how educational systems sort children into labor market and status hierarchies, especially the tendency of these systems to produce excessive competition and individualistic behavior. On the other hand, she made these critiques in part to justify her family’s choice of an alternative within those same systems. I will return to this theme throughout the book, especially in my discussion of what I call sanctioned counterpractices, but it is worth emphasizing now that a seemingly disruptive version of schooling was attractive to both creative professional parents and the school’s designers because it seemed to offer a way to ease dissatisfactions that were being generated by their ensnarement in competitive, domineering, and highly precarious structures, but it did so while leaving the sources of those discontents largely intact.
What is more, while parents typically justified, and likely understood, these choices as an attempt to locate services and resources that were well suited for their children, such institutional matchmaking also produced social distinctions. As scholars have long known, when parenting practices involve navigating consumer markets, which they inevitably do, it is often through acts of consumption that parents attempt to resolve the various tensions inherent in trying to be a good parent, as they understand it, and these tensions are both structured by, and structuring of, more entrenched axes of difference (Seiter 1993; Cook 2004). As parents are increasingly treated like consumers of educational services and not just as consumers of neighborhoods that act as proxies for those services, they face similar issues and dilemmas as they do when trying to make parenting decisions through other consumer markets. In the preceding quote, the mother justified her choice of the Downtown School on the basis of what she considered her son’s distinctive needs, preferences, and sensibilities. But like her definition of progressive schools, the traits that made the school well suited for her son were often distinguished from traits that were figured as well suited for other kids and families. In the preceding quote, the mother contradistinguished her family’s preference for a progressive school against families who guided their children down what she perceived to be congested educational pathways that ended in medical school and, presumably, other high-status but conventional and competitive pathways into adulthood. In valorizing this contradistinction as creative and cool, the mother helped transform her family’s experiences of competition and uncertainty—which pervaded her and her husband’s professional lives, as well as their efforts to raise their children—into a distinguishing virtue.
This valorization of risk and uncertainty is not an individual trait; rather, it is collectively learned through participation in particular cultural environments and, especially, in certain occupational worlds. As Ross (2003) and Neff (2012) demonstrated, this sort of valorization of risk and uncertainty is a common characteristic of the occupational cultures of which these parents were a part, and it appears as if these parents extended similar sensibilities to the ways they collectively navigated a competitive and uncertain educational system. Indeed, similar orientations toward risk and uncertainty helped assemble the band of professional parents that were willing to enroll their children at the untested Downtown School, and their doing so further reinforced their self-images as creative and unconventional risk takers.
“We all got together,” a creative professional mother shared, referring to how this collection of professional parents began to assemble into a coalition before the school even opened. “It was crazy, because it’s a brand new school. It was really the risk takers that took it. We’re totally risk takers, we just didn’t care. It wasn’t like we want to send him to medical school.”
“Jump off a bridge? Where is it? I’ll jump,” her husband added laughing.
“I could see that even though [the school’s founders] were talking about very strange things that I didn’t really comprehend—I don’t know, game design and all this stuff that I didn’t really comprehend—in the end I just thought they sound like very rational people, they sound smart, and whatever they were saying to me sounded right. It wasn’t like they were saying things that were really off the wall. And I think because I’m a creative person, I understood what they were saying. That’s why I just said, ‘I trust my kids with this school.’ ”
This sense of distinction from those who pursued supposedly uncreative, non-risk-taking, and well-worn, but highly competitive, educational routes into comparatively stable and high-paying occupations—such as medical doctors—was sometimes also racialized by white professional parents who drew on Orientalized stereotypes.9 For example, when one of the white professional mothers described to me some of the selective, but more conventional, District Two middle and high schools, she shared, “But honestly, and I know I’m being recorded, but it’s going to be a lot more Asian kids.”
I told her that she could always tell me not to quote parts of our discussion.
“It doesn’t matter,” she replied. “Everybody knows that. At Hunter, and that’s true at Stuyvesant too. The Asian kids are going to do the best testing.”
In another conversation, a more reflexive white professional mother suggested that a lot of the white professional parents in District Two, and especially mothers, anxiously compared themselves to stereotypes about Asian American parents, a perturbation that typically entailed a judgment against supposedly Asian styles of parenting and especially mothering. Later in my study, the same parent noted to me that the publication of Amy Chua’s (2011) polemical book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother—which champions a set of parenting practices that are largely at odds with progressive pedagogic philosophies—exacerbated these anxieties. As we saw in the last chapter, a similarly anxious economic orientalism has pervaded recent public debates about a US educational crises, and injunctions such as “we need to learn how to produce more Tiger Moms” understandably offend parents who do not identify with these stereotypes or the parenting practices they index.
While creative professional parents tended to see their choice of the Downtown School as an expression of their distinctively risk-taking dispositions, it is worth pausing to consider how they understood and attempted to mitigate the risks involved. Importantly, while professional parents tended to portray themselves as risk takers because the school was brand new, they rarely expressed much concern about the school’s seemingly singular pedagogic innovation: the attempt to turn the entire pedagogy into a game. Instead, and in keeping with the ways that parents of various class backgrounds differentiated schools, privileged parents consistently expressed palpable angst about who else might attend the school. As one professional father said to me on the first day of school, “The big unknown is the other students,” before noting that the school had not had time to implement selection criteria, which I later learned was not true. Professional parents were careful about how they described these unknown other students, but it soon became clear that they were primarily concerned about lower-income students of color. In private, some privileged parents were more direct and conceded that professional parents were worried about “the underperforming minority students,” which was ironic given that seventy percent of the students in New York City’s public school system were classified as black and Latino/a in the DOE’s demographic surveys. More typically, these parents coded racialized class divisions in ostensibly objective, and hence culturally neutral, terms such as “performance,” “students with low test scores,” “students who can’t read,” or “not good students,” all of which they often also associated with “behavior problems.”
“You want to go to school with kids who can read,” another professional mother told me when we chatted at her home. “Because kids who can read in general are going to be a higher level at school, and there are going to be less behavior problems. Because in general the behavior problems correlate with kids who are not good students.” Similar concerns were pervasive among the professional parents. As one of the school’s founders said to me in an interview, “Rumors started to spread that we were accepting kids who nobody else wanted.” I had heard similar rumors from privileged parents, and several professional parents even suggested that the DOE was “dumping” unwanted students on the new school. Not only did these coding practices mask more contentious lines of division, such as race and class, but they were also as inaccurate as they were essentializing and condescending. In fact, many of the less-privileged students who had been accepted into the Downtown School had high scores on standardized tests, and few had been automatically placed into, let alone “dumped” on, the school by the DOE. Professional parents also frequently coded contentious race and class divisions using less-contentious, but thinly veiled, geographical categories, most often labels for neighborhoods and boroughs that were outside District Two. This geographic coding was especially powerful because it accurately identified where a lot of the less-privileged families lived as it implicitly implied that families who lived in these neighborhoods were not supposed to be at the Downtown School.
To mitigate this sense of risk—while simultaneously propagating the collective sense that they were risk takers—in the spring and summer before the school opened, privileged parents assembled a coalition mostly of other professional families who agreed to attend the school en masse. This coalition was informal yet was assembled in part so that its members could wield greater power as they interfaced with a formal institution. While the school’s founders did not know it at the time, this coalition had formed several months before the school opened, when one of the professional mothers contacted the guidance counselor at her child’s elite public elementary school in Greenwich Village. She did so in order to find out which other parents from the school were considering the Downtown School. She also contacted guidance counselors at other elite public elementary schools that were located in wealthy Manhattan neighborhoods and asked for a similar list of parents who were considering the Downtown School. She then contacted these parents, started an e-mail thread, and eventually invited the prospective parents and children to meet each other at her family’s home. Many of the professional parents who ended up sending their children to the Downtown School attended this meeting, where they agreed to attend the new school so long as a sizable number of other professional families attended with them. About a month after the school opened, members of this coalition held all the Parent Teacher Association’s leadership positions, and they went on to shape the school in significant ways, as we will see in chapter 6.10
A very different portrait of choice, risk, and spatialized social divisions emerges when we consider how parents and caregivers from less-privileged backgrounds came to choose the Downtown School. Unlike professional families, these families did not tend to differentiate between five or six good District Two middle schools and all the rest, nor did they tend to express a strong preference for a school with a progressive pedagogic philosophy or present themselves to me as pioneers or cutting-edge risk takers. Instead, they often said that they sent their children to the Downtown School in order to mitigate the limited opportunities and heightened risks that they associated with their neighborhoods.
“I realized pretty soon that there are only so many good schools for the amount of kids that want to get into them,” a father from the Bronx whose daughter attended the Downtown School shared with me as we sat in the kitchen of his home. “And basically, we didn’t have much of a choice, being that we live in this neighborhood.” Like the mother from Brooklyn, this father also differentiated school quality primarily in terms of the social composition of its families. “So that’s another big factor for why I chose the Downtown School,” he added, “because it’s down there, and I know that kids are going to come from different backgrounds, different everything, different economic situations. And I wanted her to have that in her life.”
As previously noted, a good portion of the school’s students who came from less-privileged backgrounds lived outside of District Two, and these parents and caregivers tended to see District Two as the main choice to fight for in their children’s education. In a different perspective on choice, one mother from the Bronx told me, “It doesn’t have to be the middle school of your choice. . . . If you are in District Two, basically there are no bad middle schools in District Two.” Parents and caregivers who lived outside of District Two routinely suggested similar sentiments when they explained why they had chosen the Downtown School. As one aunt who looked after her niece told me, “I did not want to put her in the school that everyone was going to. Only because some of those kids—and I’m not judging anyone—but some of those kids come from rough backgrounds.” In another case, a less-privileged mother chose the Downtown School not because it was flush with technology and had a gamelike pedagogy but instead because the school her son had initially been accepted to required him to commute by foot past a public housing complex that had a history of conflicts with kids from their housing complex. “I didn’t want to risk it,” she told me, once again showing the variability in how families conceived of the risks associated with the spatialization of different learning environments.
When less-privileged families explained their rationale for seeking a spot in a District Two school, they also revealed how these strategies, while impressive as individual cases, would be difficult to expand into a more general political strategy and, as such, were beset with dilemmas about one’s relations to families in their neighborhoods who did not or could not attend a District Two middle school. As privileged parents from District Two increasingly patrolled school borders, only a few lucky outsiders were allowed into District Two elementary and middle schools. As such, competition for these limited spots could fuel jealousy, resentment, and division among less-privileged families in their local neighborhoods, communities, and networks. Some less-privileged families seemed quite torn about these dilemmas, as evinced in the preceding quote in which the aunt included the caveat, “I’m not judging anyone,” as she explained her decision to send her niece to the Downtown School, and many of the less-privileged families had strong ties to their local neighborhoods. Yet these parents and caregivers also often worried that the economic and social conditions of their neighborhoods could limit their children’s potential, a concern that often intersected with ethnic and racial distinctions.
“This has been, for a long time, like a working class neighborhood of Puerto Ricans mostly,” a father from the Bronx who had immigrated from South America explained. “I don’t have a problem with the idea of working, doing things, labor. I like it. And that’s so far what I get to do. But when people are,” he paused, seemingly searching for the right word, “I call them doormen. They are living the life, sleeping, not being aware of things because they have too many, too much noise around them. I know that happens in every level, but more so in the working class because they explore less, I guess. So that I don’t like. I don’t like the fact of the economic situation rules your growth.”
Less-privileged parents and caregivers also attempted to resolve this dilemma in part by justifying their acceptance to a District Two school in terms of a mixture of good luck and hard work, both of which were true. “My family and I, we kind of lucked up on the District Two,” a mother from outside of District Two explained. But she had also done a tremendous amount of work trying to get her children seats in a District Two school. All her children had tested into the city’s gifted and talented program, and yet the DOE still tried to place them at a local school, which the mother thought was inadequate. “I had to get a little muscle into it, a little bite, and I had to pull. My baby had to take the test over to get her seat and all these different things. But hey, that’s what we have to do. And so when everybody asks me that question, ‘Well, how did you get your children into that school?’ I say, ‘Excuse me, I worked to get them there.’ ”
There are several important themes that these varied expressions of choice, risk, and dilemma help reveal. The first is that nearly all parents were dissatisfied with, and in some cases even exasperated by, their educational choices. Some privileged families were concerned, if not distraught, with having to subject their children to highly competitive educational races and admissions contests, especially when their children were still so young, and less-privileged families were often concerned about the quality of schools, as well as other perceived risks in their neighborhoods. Second, in distinguishing the Downtown School from conventional schools, parents not only revealed dissatisfaction with the precarious conditions in which they were trying to rear their children, they also suggested a partial critical understanding of how educational systems contributed to this distressing precariousness. While these partial insights and inclinations were perhaps opportunities for deeper critical reflection, broader solidarity, and amplified political clout, the tendency for privileged and less-privileged families alike was to seek alternative ways of improving their family’s chances within the very processes that produced competition and spatialized social division. Third, in making judgments about preferred learning environments within these systems, a key, and arguably primary, criterion of differentiation was the social background of the children and young people that attended these environments, a distinction that was often rooted in racialized class divisions but expressed in less politically contentious terms. Fourth, the increased emphasis on treating families as consumers of public educational resources not only amplified racialized class struggles in admissions contests, but it also made the process of choosing a school yet another occasion for negotiating intersecting dimensions of social identification and division.11 As schools tried to differentiate themselves and as families tried to find a good fit for their children, the resulting matches often remade, and even exacerbated, the most deeply entrenched social divisions. For example, in its first year the Downtown School attracted boys at approximately a three-to-two ratio, an early indication that the school’s disruptive new model might include inherited, but unexamined, cultural biases.12
The important lesson to be taken from this exposition is that outsiders’ calls for disrupting education, as well as reformers’ attempts to imagine and design cutting-edge learning spaces that will fulfill these calls, tend to overlook the often contentious social and political processes by which parents and caregivers help produce learning environments as social spaces. When educational reformers engage in processes of rendering technical, they imagine learning environments as if they were apolitical and culturally neutral spaces that experts can design, manipulate, and ideally replicate; the task for the reformer is to adjust the configuration of elements within and across learning environments—their activities, temporalities, artifacts, spatial arrangements, interconnections, admissions policies, and so forth—in order to create effective and fair mechanisms for transforming children from any background into idealized citizens and workers. It is precisely the possibility of this generalizability that allows reformers to specify learning environments as objects that they can design, manipulate, and connect. Yet these spatial fixations do not anticipate all the other actors who take part in the production of social spaces by way of their spatialized practices (Lefebvre 1991). When we look at how parents and caregivers face learning environments, we see that these are not just spaces of opportunity and affinity but also spaces of division, that is, mechanisms that spatially divide young people from adults and each other.13 Parents’ competitive and divisive contributions to the production of learning environments stand in stark contrast to reformers’ imaginings of spaces of open and connected learning. Reformers’ fixations about space do not incorporate these forces, in large part because the remedies that they have available cannot rectify the political and social conditions that produce such competitive and divisive dynamics, nor do they have the power to fully control parents, especially in the context of the choice system. As we will see, reformers are similarly hamstrung in their ability to construct learning networks that inclusively connect various sites of learning to each other. In order to elaborate these limitations, it is again helpful to look at how what contemporary experts call learning environments are connected to one another not just by reformers and educators but also by parents. As with parents’ divisive competitions over access to and control over schools, reformers’ spatial fixations mostly overlook and distort the ways in which parents and caregivers help produce and connect these nonschool spaces.
Imagining and Producing Connected Space
As numerous scholars have observed (Holloway and Pimlott-Wilson 2014; Snellman et al. 2014), children and young people in wealthy countries like the United States, and especially children and young people from more middle-class families, spend an increasing proportion of their out-of-school lives in spaces that are ostensibly for children and young people but that are designed and managed by non-kin adults.14 While these environments are not typically focused on formal schooling, scholars such as Annette Lareau (2003) have made important and influential arguments about how patterns of engagement in these spaces are rooted in class-based parenting strategies and are thus consequential, but often unexamined, sites in processes of social reproduction.15 While Lareau was mostly critical of what she saw as a middle-class parenting strategy, which she referred to as “concerted cultivation,” concerns about uneven participation in these nonschool activities have increasingly animated calls to extend the foci and loci of educational interventions beyond the settings of classrooms and schools. The founders of the Downtown School were at the forefront of attempts to do so by leveraging the seemingly unprecedented opportunities for connection that recent breakthroughs in information technologies appeared to offer. And yet, as the historian Larry Cuban (1986) has demonstrated, this desire to connect the school to the world has been a recurring longing of techno-reformers since at least the early 1900s.
It is important to recognize that this longing for a more extensive approach to educational intervention is appealing to reformers in large part because it seems to provide a way to finally overcome the spatial limitations of conventional schooling. As such, this imagining of seemingly disruptive remedies entails partial insights into the shortcomings of existing institutions, and these critical insights, coupled with invocations to new technological breakthroughs, help reformers convince themselves and others that their philanthropic intervention will be different from the disappointments of the past.
For the planners and allies of the Downtown School, new digital technologies seemed to offer a powerful new way to overcome the spatial limitations of conventional schooling because (1) new media technologies seemingly supported the proliferation of countless new learning environments that could match a diversity of different student interests, hence escaping the fierce competitions for access to physical schools, as discussed in the previous section; (2) new information and communication technologies seemed to provide a means for connecting learners to these environments, no matter where the learners happened to be located, hence overcoming the problem of geographically entrenched social division; and (3) these same technologies appeared to provide a means for connecting both learners to each other and learning environments to one another, hence transcending the problems of both enclosed educational silos and inherited, and hence unchosen, social division (for a more detailed articulation of this vision, see Ito et al. 2013).
One of the ways that the founders of the Downtown School designed their project in keeping with this more extensive imagining of connected educational spaces was by designing a suite of after-school programs that would allow students from different backgrounds to discover and develop their diverse interests with new media technologies. All the Downtown School’s initial afterschool programs focused on practices that scholars have celebrated as “geeking out” (Ito et al. 2010) with media technologies, including comics, animations, game design, hacking toys, a marketing campaign for a new video game, electronically enhanced fashion items, fan-fiction, and so forth.16 The hope was that these afterschool programs would lead students to participate in various online and offline worlds that were organized around their diverse interests.
During the years when the Downtown School was being designed, all these media practices, as well as the online spaces that they helped produce, had been championed by new media enthusiasts as uplifting examples of ordinary people’s creativity, diversity, and agency in an otherwise corporate political-economy and normative social order (Benkler 2006; Lessig 2008; Shirky 2008). Examples of these “participatory cultures” (Jenkins et al. 2006) or “affinity groups” (Gee 2003), which primarily formed online, included Harry Potter fandoms, online gaming communities, fan-fiction sites, anime subtitling communities, virtual worlds, and so on. According to advocates, these emerging collectives were creating promising new spaces for learning. Unlike schools and locally-sited extracurricular activities, these online learning spaces cut across geographic borders and could theoretically be accessed by anyone with a good Internet connection. Additionally, advocates argued that these learning spaces had low barriers to entry, age-heterogeneous membership, and numerous opportunities for participation and, hence, learning. Finally, social relations within these learning spaces were primarily seen as supportive and cohesive, rather than competitive and divisive. The only real problem was that committed participation in these emerging learning spaces (e.g., geeking out) was uncommon, leading their supporters to warn of an emerging “participation gap” (Jenkins et al. 2006) that should be remediated through expert-designed educational interventions. If educational reformers could use schools and other sites of designed intervention to connect students to these emerging online learning environments, then they could also potentially overcome the spatial limitations that have consistently thwarted past educational reformers.
Such a vision of connecting learning environments directly influenced the founders of the Downtown School. In their planning documents, the school’s designers indexed this spatial reach by referring to these online spaces as “global communities.” In addition to sponsoring numerous after-school opportunities for students to geek out, the founders of the school helped build and implement a Web site that would allow members of the Downtown School to share and discuss their media productions and interests even when they were not collocated. As mentioned earlier, the Web site was funded by one of the philanthropic foundations that had sponsored the design of the Downtown School, and it was initially imagined as an online social network that would help constitute and connect various online learning spaces to each other as well as to various locally situated learning spaces, such as the Downtown School. The long-term plan was that young people from around the United States, if not the world, would eventually use the site to connect with each other around their particular interests in media technology. Importantly, and ironically given reformers’ calls for openness and interconnection, both the after-school programs and the internal social network site were designed as enclosed environments, and only people who had been accepted to affiliated programs were permitted inside.
While the school’s designers anticipated attracting broad, diverse, and enthusiastic participation in these interest-driven learning environments, it quickly became apparent that most students’ interests lay elsewhere. Only a small faction of students regularly attended the school’s after-school programs, almost all the regular participants were boys, and most of them had creative professional parents. Only one girl, whom I’ll call Nita, regularly attended the school’s after-school programs. Similarly, the school’s private online social network site was a flop. Hardly any students used the site except when they were required to do so as part of a class assignment, and the handful that did use the site voluntarily were primarily students who also attended the school’s media-focused after-school programs. The initial launch of the Web site was hamstrung by technical bugs, but even as technology designers smoothed out these problems, student participation remained tepid and eventually fizzled out.
To understand how seemingly innovative learning environments and networks ended up catering to a narrow, and primarily privileged, group of students, it is again helpful to look at the interconnection of learning environments not just from the point of view of those who call for and attempt to design and connect them but also from the perspective of parents and caregivers (this chapter) as well as students (chapter 5). As we will see, both of these perspectives largely escaped outsiders’ calls for educational disruption as well as reformers’ attempts to respond to these calls through processes of problematization and rendering technical. For one, while all the students had fairly extensive histories with digital media outside of school and while some even had experience with media and technology production, most students did not fulfill designers’ stereotypes about a digital generation. Instead, these students spent much of their nonschool time in a variety of organized activities in New York City that did not focus on design, new media, STEM, STEAM, making, hacking, or other recently valorized tech practices. In contrast to some important and well-received arguments (Lareau 2003), I did not find a strong class-based difference in parents’ attempts to locate extracurricular environments, but I did find that less-privileged families were significantly disadvantaged in their attempts to do so and that class differences shaped families’ preferences. According to parents, New York City had a diverse and eclectic assortment of very good extracurricular options to choose from, but most were private and very pricey. Privileged families navigated, and hence helped connect, an eclectic diversity of spaces for their children, including numerous private classes, lessons, and tutoring for learning musical instruments, foreign languages, academic enrichment, horseback riding, ice skating, tennis, dance, martial arts, parkour, skiing and snowboarding, surfing, swimming, religious classes, and working out. Participation in these nonschool activities was also highly gendered, in large part, I believe, because of the salience of these activities in students’ identity negotiations with peers at school, where pressures to participate in gendered peer groups were especially strong (chapter 5).
While privileged children had a fair degree of influence over selecting their extracurricular and leisure activities, privileged parents still played an important, but not always acknowledged, role. Like their choice of schools, the question of who else participated in these learning environments tended to be a key criterion for parents, regardless of their class condition. Just as privileged parents had networked with other privileged parents before applying to the Downtown School, privileged parents also often coordinated with other privileged parents to arrange collocated social activities for their children, to chaperone collective outings, and to enroll their children in the same after-school programs. When their children were younger, these privileged parents attempted to coordinate with other parents to arrange collocated play dates, and as their children aged, they extended these spatialized coordination practices to collective outings and organized after-school involvements. These practices of trying to facilitate and manage their children’s peer relations through the coordination of collocated activities were especially common among parents, and especially mothers, of the privileged female students, suggesting that even parents who self-identified as progressive about gender issues continued to play a prominent role in remaking gender divisions among young people and that child-rearing responsibilities continue to be unevenly gendered in many families.17
According to the privileged parents who spoke with me about the topic, their efforts to shape their children’s collocated participation in out-of-school activities were both pragmatic and strategic. Pragmatically, these parents took turns chaperoning each other’s children as they shuttled them between homes, school, after-school activities, and others settings in the city. Their ability to do so was supported by having some flexibility about when and where they did their professional work as well as their ability to hire help. One professional mother, who often worked from home, had a routine of letting a handful of girls from the Downtown School hang out at her apartment on Wednesdays, a day when school let out early. Another professional mother sponsored a weekly ice-skating trip by paying a chaperone to accompany a group of select girls to and from the rink. While this mother presented the ice-skating service as open to “whoever wants to go,” in practice primarily privileged girls from one clique attended, in part because ice skating was expensive. She offered this service in part so that her child would have something fun to do after school, but she also suggested that it was a way to facilitate her daughter’s peer relations at school.
“Pretty early in the year I realized that I needed to help facilitate her social life more than I anticipated doing,” the mother shared. Again revealing how the classed social boundaries of residential neighborhoods threatened to break down once children reached middle school, she continued, “In elementary school, we walked to school and walked home, and it was easy, and she had friends in the neighborhood. Coming together for all of District Two, where the kids are from all over the place, it’s much harder to manage socializing, and my daughter was a little more lost socially in this place.” As neighborhood boundaries no longer did much of the work of producing spatialized social division, her tactics changed: “So I organized: my babysitter picks them up on Fridays and takes whoever wants to go skating. So usually like ten kids go skating every Friday, it’s fantastic.” The ice skating was indicative of a more general attempt to manage her daughter’s friendships, and it appeared to be paying off at school. “A lot of the girls’ moms coordinate stuff,” she continued, “A lot of the girls eat lunch together. And that definitely helped them feel more comfortable at school. So that’s one of the things they do, that’s just a social activity, but it’s definitely a nice thing for them, that they have a social thing with other kids at school.”
Once again we can see how parents played an active role in producing the actual, as opposed to imagined, social spaces and networks that their children navigated. Moreover, by attempting to shape their children’s participation in various social spaces outside of school—which parents could more easily control and access—they also attempted to manage their children’s peer relations within the school, a space that parents could not as easily access. As this mother rightly recognized, students’ participation in various out-of-school spaces often played a significant role shaping the ways that their children helped produce spatialized social divisions within the school (chapter 5).
Less-privileged parents and caregivers also tried to manage their children’s spatial trajectories and peer relations outside of school, and like privileged parents they often sought diverse options in an effort to find those that appealed to their children’s interests and talents. But because of these families’ economic circumstances, they had far fewer designed learning environments that they could access, and competition for affordable and high-quality options was often extremely intense. One mother from the Bronx shared with me how she would get up before dawn on a winter morning in order to wait in line for hours all in an attempt to enroll her daughter in an affordable and high-quality summer program offered by New York City’s Parks Department. Even then, she was not always successful. “They start accepting applications in February,” she explained, “and they start accepting applications at 9:00 in the morning. They only have 40 spots so I left my house at 4:30 a.m. last year. Do you hear me? 4:30 a.m. When I got there, I was number 55. I was like, ‘Oh, my God. I can’t believe it.’ But I took the number.” February in New York City is often bitterly cold, and I was trying to imagine waiting outside in the early morning for four and half hours, especially when the whole effort could be futile. “You stay on the line because if you don’t have all your paperwork and you don’t have the stuff, they won’t take your application,” she continued. “You have to have everything. So there were a few people that didn’t have their stuff or whatever. This is what you have to do. This year I left at 4:00. I was like number 30 or something like that.” The mother’s efforts were admirable and impressive, but like less-privileged families’ attempts to gain access to District Two schools, her strategy could not be generalized as a political strategy, and it too created competitive resentments. “People were there from the neighborhood, and, you know, they feel like, ‘This belongs to us. We are in the neighborhood so we should have first choice.’ ” The competitive pressures and stress that such conditions encouraged were palpable and intense. “If you want your kid in something nice,” she continued, “these are the things that you have to do. If you can’t really afford some of this stuff, you have to beat the crowd.”
Not only does this mother’s story illustrate that there are not enough good services to go around, hence creating divisive and competitive relations among families seeking to access affordable programs for their children, but it also shows how residential geography is often viewed as a form of entitlement. In other words, just as we saw competitive and divisive class struggles in families’ attempts to gain access to schools, so we see similar dynamics in families’ attempts to structure their children’s access to nonschool spaces.
In part because of the high costs associated with accessing private nonschool programs, less-privileged parents also tended to direct their children toward different spaces and networks of extracurricular activities than their more-privileged peers. Many of these students participated in after-school programming offered by other schools or community-based organizations like the Boys and Girls Club, the Make-A-Wish Foundation, or local churches. And as with their more privileged peers, the less-privileged students’ participation in leisure and enrichment activities was often gendered. Several of the less-privileged boys were deeply involved in group sports, especially basketball and football, some of which were sponsored by not-for-profit community-based organizations, like the Boys Club, and some of which were offered by private leagues. The Boys Club was significantly more affordable than the private leagues, but even some families with limited economic resources saved up for a private football league. In general, less-privileged girls tended to spend more time in activities that were not managed and directly supervised by adults, in part because there were fewer subsidized activities that were attractive to them and in part because some of these girls participated in gendered forms of labor in the home. Some of these girls hung out at libraries after school, others went to their parents’ work, others helped look after younger family members and cousins, and several just went home. Interestingly, and in part because of this relative autonomy from adult-managed practices during the afternoon hours, these girls were also among the most precocious students of social media; yet, ironically, these online spaces were not the ones that the Downtown School’s designers imagined and valorized as part of their learning network, and, if anything, they were the topic of didactic lessons about online safety and civility.
In sum, parents and students’ did navigate and help connect an eclectic variety of extracurricular spaces that could be characterized as different learning environment and learning networks. But designers’ renderings of diverse learning spaces connected by new media technologies hardly approximated the lived spatial connections and related social divisions that parents and students helped construct through and beyond the school. Reformers’ processes of rendering spaces as technical objects that were amenable to their control almost completely excluded the ways in which parents—whom they could not fully control—helped constitute not only the various environments that students traversed but also the social connections and divisions between these spaces. The vast majority of the nonschool spaces that families sought had little to do with digital media or design, and access to these various environments was both structured by and structuring of entrenched social divisions. Designing and subsidizing learning environments played a role in producing these divisions, in part because the enrichment activities that reformers supported in these spaces appealed to some students much more than others. As one lower-income mother with a daughter put it, “I think the Downtown School has a great idea, I just think they should have more outside activities.” At her old school her daughter had participated in various performing arts programs—including dance, singing, and theater—and she had become quite good at and enamored with these activities, none of which were supported by the Downtown School. “A kid is not going to be stuck to the computer all day,” she shared. “Offer programs, offer dance classes, offer yoga.” She also recognized the tight coupling between a learning environment’s programmatic emphasis and the production of social division, especially in an era of choice. “It expands the school,” she astutely observed, “Other people might want to apply. You might want to have a band, you know? A basketball team. Anything like that. Cheerleading. You know? Things like that.”
In subsequent years school officials did expand and diversify the school’s after-school offerings, in large part because they were having difficulty getting families with girls to apply to the school. But despite these efforts, the proportion of girls in the student body had fallen to thirty percent by the school’s fourth year.
Conclusion
When people in positions of power and influence recurrently call for disruptive philanthropic interventions, they often commendably point to problems of spatialized social divisions and the inequitable access to opportunities, educational or otherwise, that often characterize those divides. They also typically invoke new technologies as a means for finally bridging spatialized social divisions and, hence, to help realize the long-held promise of a fair and united polity (Marx 1964; Nye 1994). When such calls descend upon the figured worlds of experts, as they repeatedly do, participants in these worlds engage in processes that problematize spatial divisions as they render the production and interconnection of space as if they were processes that reformers could control with the technical remedies that they are developing. For example, when these remedies center on new media technologies, as they do time and time again, reformers routinely render problems of spatialized social division as if they were problems that the information and communication technologies of the moment could overcome (Cuban 1986; Mosco 2004). Like other fixations, these spatial fixations exclude many factors that contribute to the production, division, and interconnection of space, including the contributions of the intervention’s intended beneficiaries (Lefebvre 1991). In the case of the Downtown School, reformers rightly saw that conventional schools had been problematically imagined and constructed as enclosed spaces that separated the school from the world, but they also imagined that recent advances in digital and networked media would let them bridge these divisions. Through processes of problematization and rendering technical reformers’ spatial fixations occluded many of the forces that would help produce and connect the spaces that they were designing. Once viewed from the perspective of parents and caregivers, reformers’ imagined learning environments and learning networks no longer appear as spaces that experts can craft, connect, and deliver to the world in equitable ways. Rather, they appear as political spaces that help produce social divisions as various parties’ attempt to access and control them. As the vignette that opened this chapter illustrates, the attempt to produce and connect special spaces for learning involves the ongoing production and maintenance of spatial divisions, and the construction and management of these divisions mediates the production, and often reproduction, of social divisions. Parents play an important, but often underacknowledged, role in these processes. When parents attempt to gain access to educational spaces for their children, one of the most important criteria that they consider is who else is included in and excluded from the enclosed environment. Parents attempt to make and use spaces as means of social division for many reasons, but they often do so under conditions that encourage divisively competitive dynamics. Widening economic inequalities and the increasing marketization and educationalization (Labaree 2008) of more and more aspects of young people’s everyday lives appears to have intensified these competitive and divisive tendencies. Reformers are not unaware of these dynamics, but many of the forces that animate division tend to be marginalized, if not excluded, during reformers’ processes of problematization and rendering technical. Because parental contributions to the production and connection of enclosed learning environments largely escape reformers’ control and knowledge, parental contributions also tend to fall by the wayside when reformers attempt to design networks of interconnected learning environments.18 As we have begun to see, these spatial fixations—along with pedagogic fixations, fixations about the project’s intended beneficiaries, and fixations about participation by the local community—contribute to all sorts of unanticipated trouble for reformers as soon as their philanthropic intervention is launched into the world. The following chapters examine how these excluded forces destabilized reformers’ carefully crafted plans and yet how reformers largely responded to these destabilizing forces in ways that allowed them to keep their optimism for their intervention more or less intact.