At the end of every school day, the carefully designed and scripted world of the Downtown School momentarily came into direct contact with the world beyond the school. The process was highly routinized. Educators escorted their advisory groups in single-file lines down three flights of stairs and through a door that exited onto the sidewalk on the north side of the building. As advisory groups approached the door, educators’ control waned, the pace of descent quickened, and the single-file lines stretched and frayed. As students streamed onto the sidewalk, the educators came to a stop just beyond the doorway. Across the sidewalk, a handful of parents chatted with each other as they faced the exit. Some crossed the sidewalk to strike up a casual conversation with one of the educators. On some days the principal came outside and crossed the sidewalk to talk with the waiting parents. These parents were regulars, and I got to know most of them quite well. All were active in the PTA and showed up regularly for the school’s various assemblies and showcases. Most were creative professionals with flexible work schedules.
When students spilled out of the building, they typically forked and pooled into inward-facing clusters to the east and west of the exit. As these students waited for friends and commute partners, some took cell phones, music players, and portable gaming devices—all of which were banned during the school day—out of their pockets and bags. Friends shared gossip about their day at school, resumed conversations that classes had interrupted, joked around, and participated in small games such as chase. These forked clusters mostly matched the cliques that I discussed in the last chapter. Participants in the cliques of predominantly privileged students clustered to the west of the exit. Some greeted waiting parents and chaperones and eventually departed down the sidewalk to the west, and several parents left with a few of their children’s friends in tow. In contrast with these students and families, almost all the participants in the cliques of predominantly less-privileged students clustered to the east of the exit. When they departed they headed east, without adults, in one or two large groups. On most days they headed to a nearby pizza parlor or bodega for a snack and then took various bus lines home or to organized after-school activities.
I suggest that these clusters mostly matched the clique divisions that formed during the school day because students who crossed racialized class divisions inside the school typically would not do so on the sidewalk. For example, while Hannah and Chloe regularly hung out with the Cool Kids cliques inside the school, they usually clustered to the west of the exit after dismissal. Some of the waiting parents knew these girls and their parents, and I got the sense that Hannah and Chloe wanted to keep aspects of their school friendships private from their parents. Occasionally their friends called out to Hannah and Chloe from down the sidewalk, eliciting a blush from the more privileged girls and laughter from their less-privileged friends. Similarly, students from less-privileged homes who avoided hanging out with the Cool Boys and the Cool Girls cliques during the school day nevertheless tended to depart to the east after dismissal. As their more-privileged friends headed off to ice-skating lessons, dance classes, and other private after-school activities, these students tended to head to a nearby library, where they waited for their parents to get off work. Others headed home.
Thus far we have examined several dimensions of a cyclical process that I am referring to as disruptive fixation. We have seen how powerful people from outside the figured worlds of reformers call upon and offer to support disruptive interventions that leverage the seemingly unprecedented philanthropic possibilities of recent innovations in media technology. We have seen how reformers respond to these calls by assembling teams of experts that include participants who are relative newcomers to the worlds they are asked to redesign but who specialize in the new techno-cultures that the powerful outsiders extoll. We have seen how these specialists engage in the interrelated processes of problematization and rendering technical as they go about imagining and designing a philanthropic intervention that can seemingly disrupt the status quo. We have seen how fixations about space, pedagogy, and the people reformers aim to help occur through these processes, and we have seen how these fixations exclude numerous factors and forces that will grip and destabilize an intervention in practice, often in ways that thwart reformers’ aims. We have begun to see how the people who plan and execute a disruptive intervention respond to these unanticipated forces not so much by examining the limits of their fixations as by engaging in a different sort of fixation: they quickly reach for resources that will help stabilize the project against the turbulent forces that their fixations have excluded. We have seen how many of these resources and techniques ironically come from canonical versions of the organizations that reformers aim to reinvent. And we have begun to see how many of the people who design and support a philanthropic intervention manage to mostly repair and maintain their sense that a project is both innovative and beneficent despite these apparent tensions and contradictions. We have seen, for example, how they tend to overlook and downplay the canonical and controlling features of the intervention while ritualistically celebrating what I have been calling sanctioned counterpractices—those aspects of the project that most closely approximate reformers’ idealizations. If history is a guide, the swell of idealism for a particular disruptive philanthropic intervention will eventually retreat, but history also suggests that it will not take long for new swells to rush forth once again.
While this sketch outlines a cycle of disruptive fixation, it does not yet sufficiently account for the roles that local elites play in perpetuating these cycles. In polities that see themselves as liberal and democratic, a new round of disruptive fixation can take root only if reformers can win political support from some members of the local worlds into which they intervene. Some contemporary reformers value this local participation, and, indeed, they often problematize other reform efforts for not taking local concerns and perspectives sufficiently into account. Yet reformers also do not fully anticipate the compromises they will be asked to make in order to win this support (Li 1999, 2007), and, indeed, they probably would not have been able to imagine their projects as disruptive and democratic if they had fully anticipated the extent to which these locals would steer the project toward their own ends.
This chapter explores how processes of fixation simplify and distort the political partnerships that reformers will form with members of the worlds into which they intervene. While simplifications of the population of intended beneficiaries appear to be an enduring feature of processes of problematization and rendering technical, the prevailing rationalities and discourses that guide and legitimate these processes also appear to have changed somewhat in recent decades. As Nikolas Rose (1999) has argued, in the last several decades many Anglo American (and likely other) social reformers have advocated for a third way between, on one hand, top-down statist interventions that expect local populations to accept the interventions that technocrats have planned and, on the other hand, purely market-based approaches that leave the governing of a population entirely up to individuals and the private sector. According to Rose, third-way scholars and reformers have argued that some of the responsibilities for governing should be delegated to communities, which could stand for anything from voluntary and charitable organizations to the presumed groups of multiculturalism. We see a similar ethos in the importance that many contemporary technology designers grant to notions like participation, commons-based peer production, and participatory cultures (Jenkins et al. 2006; Turner 2006, 2009; Kelty 2013). From a governmentality perspective, ordinary people are now expected to participate in the governing of their communities, however conceived, in order to contribute to the common resources, meanings, and values shared by members of the group.
As Rose observed, such discourses have the paradoxical quality of treating the notion of community—and, by extension, we could say participation—as, on one hand, a quasi-natural and extra-political phenomena, and, on the other, a key component in a particular mode of governing (1999, 167–68). According to Rose, the notion of community—which has a long history in liberal political discourse—becomes part of a particular governmental mode when reformers render it technically, that is, when they treat it as something that can be studied, formalized, designed, and managed (175). In the case of cutting-edge educational interventions that target young people, notions like community and participation are rendered technical in part by the ways that designers and reformers study, imagine, and plan ways for parents and caregivers to be involved in the governance of an intervention. When these interventions focus on redesigning schooling, parents and caregivers are often rendered as harmonious members of the “school community” and should thus work in partnership with reformers and educators to accomplish the task of governing the intervention and rearing the young. As part of this process of rendering community technically, those designing educational interventions create mechanisms for parents and caregivers to participate in the governance of the intervention. Some of these mechanisms, such as Parent Teacher Associations (PTAs), have a long and institutionalized history, whereas others, such as fundraising and various forms of volunteering, are more emergent and are thus subject to more interpretative flexibility as various parties attempt to establish and legitimate appropriate modes of parental involvement (Lareau and Muñoz 2012). As part of these broader historical changes in modes of governmentality, sharing in the responsibility of governing schools has increasingly come to be seen as an aspect of good parenting in the United States, especially among more middle-class parents (Lareau 1987, 2003; Hassrick and Schneider 2009; Posey 2012; Posey-Maddox 2014).
This chapter explores the theme of community fixations by examining reformers’ ambivalent relationships with local elites, who, in the case of the Downtown School, were primarily privileged parents. Reformers rendered both families and educators as part of a harmonious and, hence, apolitical school community, and both were also idealized as participants in a broader learning network. As part of reformers’ community fixations, parents and educators were imagined as connectable to each other in unprecedented ways thanks to recent advances in information and communication technologies (chapters 2 and 3), although the reformers also planned to offer more conventional mechanisms for parental involvement, such as the PTA. Reformers’ imagined this relationship with the project’s intended beneficiaries as mostly symbiotic and apolitical, and, as such, they did not anticipate that factions of parents would exert considerable destabilizing pressures on the project as soon as it was launched. In an attempt to stabilize the project against these unanticipated and often divisive forces, reformers and educators once again engaged in a much more pragmatic form of fixation: they allied themselves with factions of powerful parents that offered to help stabilize the project in exchange for considerable power sharing. As we will see, such alliances undermined reformers’ democratic aspirations and tended to reinforce existing structures of power, privilege, and division. That these parents’ participation steered the project so far away from reformers’ original aspirations but also helped reformers mostly keep their idealism for the project intact complicates not only assumptions about the transformative potential of disruptive philanthropy but also assumptions about the inherently democratic character of community involvement and local participation.
Being Involved
As the vignette at the opening of this chapter helps illustrate, some privileged parents had routine access to school officials, including the principal, through quotidian practices such as picking up their children after school. Some of these parents also came by the school during the day for seemingly innocuous purposes, such as dropping off their children’s lunch. While parents and many educators often saw these practices as harmless and even dutiful cases of good parenting, they also provided some parents with regular access to school officials as well as unique perspectives on what was happening inside the new school.
“It’s pretty easy at the school to be in touch,” one of the professional mothers told me when I accompanied her to her family’s house after one of the school’s PTA meetings. “I often can’t get their lunch together in the morning, so I have to go drop it off, then I stop in the classes,” she added. The mother was a frequent visitor to the school, and after several months I had gotten to know her quite well, as had the teachers, principal, and reformers. The mother and I would frequently chat on the sidewalk after school had ended, and when we did she often gently pressed me for information on what was going on inside the school, both in classrooms and among the school leaders. In addition to picking up her children after school and dropping off lunches during the day, she acted as a volunteer for field trips and open houses for prospective families, and she was a regular attendee at, and sometimes volunteer for, the school’s various showcases, festivals, and parties. She was also a regular, and often vocal, participant at official forums for parental involvement, such as meetings for the PTA and the School Leadership Team (SLT), the latter of which was charged to provide guidance on the curriculum. Within a month or so of the school’s opening, privileged parents like this one held all the top leadership positions in both the PTA and the SLT.
These highly involved parents also played an outsized role in shaping other parents’ understanding of what was going on inside the school. As I briefly discussed in chapter 3, many of the school’s privileged families met and established an informal coalition several months prior to the school’s opening. Privileged parents with quotidian access to the school played an influential role within this coalition since their status as quasi-insiders positioned them as valuable sources of information about what was going on at school. Obviously students also routinely moved between the school and homes, and they often shared accounts of what happened at school with their families. While adults often considered students’ stories less reliable, student accounts gained validity as parents shared their children’s stories with each other, primarily through e-mails and phone calls, and especially when parents with quotidian access offered similar accounts. “I get a lot of e-mails,” the same mother just quoted continued. “I’m generally referred to as ‘the bridge.’ So I feel like a lot of people contact me from different factions.”
This mother’s reference to the e-mails she received evinces how new media technologies did indeed shape the dynamics of parental involvement in the project’s governance, but they did so in ways that had been largely excluded in reformers’ renderings of a fluid and harmonious informational network connecting parents and educators. While reformers had imagined, and attempted to implement, information and communication technologies that frequently updated parents about what their children were doing at school, they had not anticipated that a coalition of privileged parents would use similar tools in order to coordinate and amplify their political power. Like any coalition, this collection of parents had its internal disputes and divisions, and yet its members typically presented a common front—one that they professed spoke for all the parents—when they voiced their ideas and demands to school officials. Deliberations and coordination among coalition members typically took place through e-mails, phone calls, and various face-to-face discussions among the parents who were members of the informal coalition. As such, reformers, school officials, and parents who were not part of the coalition had limited means for knowing about, let alone shaping, these political processes until after the coalition announced their proposals and concerns in a collective, and often fairly consolidated, manner.
One feature of this communication dynamic is that it tended to propagate rumors and amplify anxieties among the parents who were networked to each other, especially when the stories that they told each other appeared to fulfill some parents’ stereotypes about students from less-privileged homes. I spoke with a few privileged parents who were reflexive about this tendency, even though they also participated in it. As one creative professional father put it, “There was kind of this flywheel vortex developing. Things would be put out, and innuendo turned into these fantasies: a school in chaos, bullying and all this.” Despite this reflexivity, when adults with quotidian access offered accounts that confirmed anxious suspicions, the coalition mobilized to confront reformers and educators with a flood of e-mails and phone calls; members of this coalition also used more official venues for parental involvement—namely, the PTA and the SLT—to make forceful demands on reformers and educators.
While the parents who participated in this informal coalition did not always succeed in getting their demands met, reformers’ processes of problematization and rendering technical had not come close to anticipating the extent to which these parents would exert political pressures on the school, nor did their cutting-edge innovations offer a way to counter these forces once they became aware of them. As such, reformers and educators often found that they had little choice but to cede to many of the demands of these parents, even though doing so undermined reformers’ idealizations of disruptive and just social change. This capitulation to the demands of local elites and the associated compromising of the project’s ideals happened for several reasons.
For one, while these parents’ attempts to shape and control the project were clearly political acts, they were often depoliticized by both institutionalized mechanisms for parent involvement as well as more generally accepted ideas about the importance of community involvement in the governance of schooling. Because the coalition controlled the PTA and SLT, they could advance their perspectives and aspirations through institutionally sanctioned channels for community involvement. When they did so, they often presented their demands as if they represented all the parents, when in fact they were the consensus views of a faction of predominantly privileged parents. As such, resisting parental demands could give the impression that reformers were undemocratically installing the sort of top-down technocracy that they had problematized.
Second, the demands of privileged parents had teeth. Privileged parents had better “voice” and “exit” (Hirschman 1970) options than most other parents, and the two advantages reinforced each other. In terms of voice, parents who stopped by the school frequently and engaged in lots of volunteer work cultivated relationships with reformers, school leaders, and teachers, and these relationships allowed them to voice their ideas and concerns more frequently, privately, and informally. Additionally, many of the privileged parents held advanced graduate degrees, and several pointed to their professional expertise as legitimating their contributions to the school’s governance. Again, parents did not tend to present these attempts to be involved as a form of politics but rather as a generous service that they were offering on behalf of the school community. “I felt with an architectural design background, I could be helpful,” one of the creative professional parents shared when we were discussing the school’s planned relocation. The conversation quickly turned to other areas to which the professional parents attempted to lend their credentialed expertise: “And then there were a couple people like Curtis, Donny’s stepdad, who’s a lawyer, and a good kind of advocate type. He and I basically, along with Anne, handled a lot of that. And now with the bullying and all this, I’ve brought in Jorge, Ivan’s dad, who’s a mental health professional, with a lot of experience with schools and juvenile psychiatry, to kind of advise and consult with and help get them interested to advocate and deal with the issue.” Educators and reformers sometimes rebuffed these offers by parents to volunteer their expert assistance, but doing so was also difficult given the valorization of community participation.
In addition to offering these professional services, seemingly as generous gifts, highly educated parents routinely presented themselves with written, verbal, and body language that displayed their high cultural capital, and these displays helped them win influence in their relations with reformers and especially school officials and teachers. Because much of the correspondences among parents and between parents and school officials took place through e-mail, parents who were skillful writers gained influence in part because they wrote so effectively. Similarly, parents who could voice their positions in the manner of a formally educated person tended to wield extra influence in PTA and SLT meetings. And, as already noted, the coalition further buttressed these advantages by allowing privileged parents to consolidate their voices in private and then amplify a unified voice when interacting with the school.
By contrast, less-privileged parents and caregivers tended to have greater difficulty making their voices heard by educators and privileged families. Most were not part of the informal coalition of parents, and most did not, and often could not, regularly attend PTA and SLT meetings. Not only did gaining quotidian access to the school require a lot of unpaid work, which was difficult for less-privileged parents to offer, but so too did all the back channeling among parents. As the mother who referred to herself as “the bridge” suggested, “I get 100 e-mails a day from school parents. It’s unbelievably labor intensive.” Because these practices were so labor intensive, participation was highly structured by parents’ working lives and their material circumstances more generally. For the most part, the parents who had regular access to the school and school officials were professionals who had a fair degree of control over their work schedules. Mothers also did most of this volunteer and support work, although some fathers with flexible work schedules were also actively involved. There was one less-privileged father who worked in construction and who often stopped by the school when he was not employed, and there was one unemployed single mother who dropped in on the school quite frequently, but neither of these parents occupied a bridge position in the coalition, and I am fairly sure they were left out of most of the back channeling that took place among more privileged parents. Neither parent held leadership positions in the PTA or the SLT.
When parents and caregivers from less-privileged homes were able to attend more official forums for parental-educator relations, such as schoolwide meetings for parents, most of the less-privileged parents sat toward the back of the auditorium and rarely spoke; by contrast, most privileged parents who had quotidian access to the school sat toward the front of the auditorium, and some sat next to educators and school leaders. These parents often spoke before and more often than less-privileged families, and a few carried on casual conversations with educators and school leaders before, during, and after the meetings. Moreover, when parents who were underprivileged did speak, more privileged parents would sometimes trivialize their concerns, sometimes in public and sometimes in private conversations with me or with each other. For example, after one schoolwide meeting, a professional mother told me that one of the less-privileged mothers who had spoken during the meeting was “truly insane” before joking that I should interview her for my project. The privileged mother elaborated on her comment by telling me about a conversation where the less-privileged mother had interpreted some of the taunts that students made to each other at school as “normal kid stuff.” This interpretation exasperated the professional mother, who saw such taunts as completely unacceptable. The professional mother told me that she thought the less-privileged mother had a “severe mental illness,” a claim that she then attributed to another professional parent, a psychologist, who, according to the mother with whom I was speaking, had formed this diagnosis based on the manner in which the less-privileged mother had been smiling while she was talking. All these factors contributed to amplifying the voice of more-privileged families while damping, if not silencing, the voices of those who inhabited significantly less-privileged circumstances.
Privileged families also had better exit options than the less-privileged families, and threats to leave the school reinforced their voice. As I will shortly discuss, in the school’s first year a large faction of professional parents threatened to pull their children from the school if educators did not make the changes they demanded. Here, too, the informal coalition benefitted privileged families because it allowed them to threaten to exit en masse. Privileged parents could make this threat because they lived in District Two and hence could access other quality public schools. Further, several privileged families could (begrudgingly) pay for private schools, and indeed one disaffected family departed for a private school during the school’s second year. As such, privileged parents were empowered with the sort of consumer sovereignty that proponents of school choice have celebrated, and choice increased the power of their voice to influence the school. By contrast, families from less-privileged backgrounds, and especially families living outside of District Two, had much more limited exit options than the school’s privileged families, and hence they did not enjoy nearly the same power within the choice system. Since less-privileged parents did not enjoy nearly the same choices, their voice was also comparatively weakened.
While reformers and school officials generally welcomed parental involvement, the appropriateness of parental influence in the school’s governance was also highly ambiguous, especially when this participation took place outside of the official forums of the PTA and the SLT. I often got the sense that involved parents did not want to come across as if they were overbearing, disrespectful of reformers’ and educators’ expertise, or attempting to shape the school unfairly in their children’s favor. Involved parents often emphasized to me that they were not the stereotypical PTA or “helicopter parent” that had been widely disparaged in the media, and they often stressed that they preferred a hands-off approach. “I’m so not the PTA mom,” the mother quoted earlier told me after explaining all the ways she was involved in shaping the school’s governance. “I’ve never been involved. I turn my children over to the educators. I trust that the educators know something about education, which I don’t. Take care of them, and I’ll pick them up at the end of the day.” But because the Downtown School was new, she said, she felt she needed to be more involved. Because the school was new, it also did not yet have standard protocols for parental involvement, and, as such, it was fairly easy for parents like this one to insinuate themselves into positions of influence. Plus, since the school’s planners and educators were so busy trying to get their project up and running, the extra help was often needed and appreciated. “I feel like I have a sense of what’s going on in the school more than I did when they were in fifth grade,” the mother continued, “just because it’s new and very open, and I’m pretty involved.”
In short, the school’s privileged parents were much better equipped than the school’s less-privileged parents and caregivers to access school officials and to participate in the school’s official and informal modes of governance. Some used their flexible work schedules to routinely drop by the school and to volunteer at school events. By being networked to each other as well as to powerful people beyond the school, these families were better able to share information, form consensual viewpoints, and mobilize collective action. They used these connections to help win leadership positions on the PTA and SLT, and they wrote, spoke, and carried themselves in ways that signaled their high cultural capital. Finally, the classed geography of their District Two residences provided them with exit options that could be used as leverage in negotiations with reformers and educators.
In many ways, these advantages are not that surprising. Privilege, after all, is precisely the advantages available to some groups and not others. It is also not surprising that privileged parents did all that they could to provide advantages for their children. But what is more curious is how these practices were tolerated by reformers and educators who designed and morally legitimated their philanthropic intervention in large part by appealing to concerns about social justice. I do not believe the reformers and educators who designed and worked at the Downtown School were insincere in these aims, nor did they appear especially eager to capitulate to privileged families’ demands. In one case, one of the school’s leaders was even reported to have “had a breakdown” after trying to resist the pressures of privileged parents for several weeks. Yet time and again, reformers and educators not only mostly gave in to these demands but also managed to mostly repair their idealizations of the project. Examining a particularly contentious episode between the reformers and the school’s privileged parents helps illuminate how these seemingly contradictory outcomes were accomplished. While other contentious episodes—such as the relocation battle discussed briefly in chapter 3, as well as struggles over how much emphasis should be given to preparing for the state’s standardized tests—revealed internal fissures among the coalition of privileged parents and, hence, led concerned parents to back down on their demands, when privileged parents consolidated their voice, as they did in the following episode, reformers and educators had little choice but to capitulate.
Fueling Fears of Imminent Collapse
I was introduced to the prospect that the intervention could imminently collapse on the morning of the second day of school. An hour or so earlier, one of the school’s leaders had held an emergency early-morning meeting for all educators. A mother had called the night before suggesting that her son, who was white and comparatively privileged, had been bullied on the first day of school (later, the boy’s father suggested to school officials that perhaps the boy’s mother had overreacted). The school leaders wanted to coordinate an immediate response, and, as part of that response, one of the school’s leaders visited all the advisory classes to address the purported bullying issue with students. The school leader’s address to the students began by comparing bullying to a pollutant: “Did you notice the bags of garbage on the street in front of school today? Garbage is stinky and unsightly, right? Well we’ve been dealing with our own garbage this morning.” After noting that they had received complaints about bullying, the school leader went on to compare the school to a house. The leader emphasized that bullying threatened the very foundation of the house, “You can always replace the roof, the walls, and the bathroom. But if the foundation goes, the whole structure comes down.” Bullying, from this perspective, was a moral pollutant and an existential threat to the school as an idealized community.
While I knew that bullying was a hot topic in the media before I started fieldwork, I had not anticipated the degree to which fears about bullying would build into panics that substantially altered the political direction of the school, often in ways that undermined reformers’ philanthropic idealizations. For concerned parents and some educators, bullying was not just an unfortunate, but common, aspect of children’s and young people’s peer relations, something that could be called out and hopefully corrected when observed by adults. Rather, bullying was often presented as a moral and existential threat to their children as well as the school community. Starting from the first day of school, stories about bullying quickly spread among parents in the informal coalition. For some privileged parents, these reports appeared to confirm their preconceived anxieties about the presence of lower-income students of color. Privileged parents habitually ascribed the specter of the bully to members of the cliques of predominantly less-privileged students, and especially the clique of boys, even though I observed students from all backgrounds being mean to each other and even though most of the antagonistic actions by members of the Cool Kids cliques were directed in quasi-jest towards other students who hung out in these cliques.1 Hyperbolic stories of these students’ dangerous nonconformity—their “cursing,” “fresh,” “obscene,” or “shocking” language; their “disruptions in classrooms”; their “intimidation” and “sexual harassment”—circulated among privileged parents throughout the fall.2 Some privileged students had shared stories about these students’ transgressions with their parents, and a few of the parents with quotidian access to the school lent credibility to these students’ accounts, even though these parents had spent only brief moments inside the school and did not have a good sense of what daily life was like inside the school.
By winter, the seeds of panic had grown into a crisis. The involved parents’ demands were clear: they demanded that school leaders implement zero-tolerance policies in order to to quickly purge unsanctioned behavior and, if need be, to remove the purported perpetrators. Here, for example, is a snippet of an e-mail that one of the creative professional parents sent to educators and parents; the subject line of the e-mail was written in all caps: OF UTMOST IMPORTANCE: BULLYING:
We as concerned parents and educators take these complaints with the greatest gravity, and will not abide by such behavior in any way, shape, or form. We all agreed that there should be zero tolerance for such behavior. Not one child at the Downtown School needs to suffer at the hands of another student. Not one child needs to worry about intimidation, sexual harassment, racism, or bullying in our school. Our school should be a safe haven, a sanctuary of learning and security for our children, and we all agreed to work toward this end. . . . The culture of television, rap music, the street, is not the culture of the classroom and does not belong inside the school walls.
Several aspects of this parents’ e-mail deserve comment. For one, despite the fact that many of the school’s sanctioned counterpractices were particularly well attuned to the out-of-school interests and practices of boys from privileged families and despite the fact that privileged parents routinely crossed into the school as they attempted to shape the direction of the project, the parent appealed to an idealized learning environment that reformers also yearned for: that the school could be an apolitical and culturally neutral sanctuary of learning and security. In doing so, the parent helped reaffirm the promise of reformer’s spatial fixations (chapter 3) even as he called for changes that seemingly undermined their pedagogic fixations (chapter 4), as well as their broader commitments to social justice. At the same time, he problematized reformer’s inability to accomplish their spatial fixations by suggesting that an abject alterity—the culture of television, rap music, the street—had punctured and contaminated that sanctuary. He linked unsanctioned behaviors to an illegitimate, and thinly coded, racialized culture that presumably came from and belonged to another space, the streets, properly located beyond the school walls. Not only did professional parents routinely suggest that a polluting culture had infiltrated their idealized learning environment, they also hyperbolically suggested that this unwelcome alterity threatened to infect their children. As one mother, a professor, said at a PTA meeting, “How do you deal with the infectious tendency of this behavior, that spreads horizontally, and infects others? It’s transmitted from generation to generation and from person to person.” In another e-mail, a professional parent described the issue as follows: “potent cliques seem to have arisen and feed off the preying on others.” Such hyperbolic language did not tarnish the prospect of creating the idealized and harmonious community that reformers had envisioned; rather, and in an all-too-familiar tendency with utopian undertakings, it repaired this fixation by calling for measures that would purge purportedly corrosive elements while also policing the community’s borders.
This work of repairing idealized fixations about the project also entailed efforts to prevent a more-direct consideration of how the project was a site of politics and, hence, how their acts and demands were themselves political. While students’ acts of resistance toward authorities and their taunts and put-downs toward each other were an opportunity when reformers, educators, parents, and students could address the problematic and contentious social divisions that organized students’ lives outside of school, privileged families actively closed off a consideration of such factors by calling for zero-tolerance policies and other universalizing dictates. When I asked one creative professional couple what zero tolerance meant, the father replied, “It just means you don’t say, ‘Oh, kids are kids! That’s okay.’ There’s some disciplinary action, and some threat to the kid to say this doesn’t happen in our school.”
The mother jumped in, “There’s a hard line of response to behavior that’s not tolerated, and there’s no excuse. You don’t make an excuse for the child.”
“‘Oh they’re street kids,’” the father continued. “ ‘Oh, they are tired.’ ‘Oh, they’re just boys.’ ‘Oh, they’re just from this part of the world.’ ‘Oh, they’re just a certain age.’ It’s basically—it’s not cool. It doesn’t happen here. It happens again, you’re out of here.”
Similarly, as one creative professional parent wrote in an e-mail to the principal, with members of the design team carbon copied:
Please realize, allowing such out of control, blatant misconduct to persist endangers our whole school and everything you and everyone else involved has worked so hard for. . . . We as caring parents and dedicated educators cannot let this go on. This kind of behavior has nothing to do with a certain disadvantaged segment of our population. It is not age-related. Nor hormone related. It is not economic bound. It has nothing to do with race. All members of our society, rich, poor, middle class, pink, blue, rainbow-colored, yellow, brown, black, red, white, must be respectful and tolerant of others. . . . Zero tolerance should be our policy and real punishment must be our credo.
In this quote we can again see how idealized appeals to a harmonious and morally just community are entwined with appeals to close off a consideration of power and politics: the attempt to exclude a consideration of how social class, race relations, age, and other structural factors that extend beyond the site of the school might have shaped the issues transpiring within the intervention; the linking together of parents and educators with the pronoun we and the moral framing of their collective efforts as acts of parental care and professional dedication; the claim that transgressive elements threatened to bring down the whole project, as well as its moral promise; the demand that authorities use the full extent of their institutionally sanctioned power to discipline and, if need be, purge, those who took part in unsanctioned responses; and the legitimation of using power in such ways through appeals to the presumed universal standards of tolerance and respect. In other words, despite being drawn to the philosophies and approaches of a student-centered intervention that was connected to the world, privileged parents considered authoritarian zero-tolerance policies and disciplinary techniques, as well as attempts to police the school’s borders, as a legitimate means for creating an idealized sanctuary of learning founded on purportedly universal norms of respect and tolerance—which can easily be read as contemporary versions of “civilized”—even if those accused of showing disrespect were routinely subjected to disrespect, intolerance, and symbolic violence by the dominant culture more generally and by the privileged parents in these very instances. Perhaps sensing that such calls were at odds with the pedagogic ideals that attracted privileged parents to the school, one of the creative professional parents told educators at an emergency meeting about bullying, “We’re all behind you cracking down, cracking the whip, showing that it’s not tolerated,” at which point he paused for a moment before adding, “It’s not fun, and it’s not about learning, but it affects learning.” Like educators’ reconciliation of classroom-management practices with their pedagogic idealizations (chapter 4), this parent justified calls for disciplinary power by classifying such practices as a separate, but necessary, precondition for what the intervention was really about: the facilitation of supposedly apolitical and beneficent learning activities.
Initially, reformers and educators mostly tried to resist these professional parents’ attempts to influence the governance of the school, and several privately shared with me that they thought some of the parents’ comments were racist. The reformers and educators that I knew well were frustrated by these parents’ aggressive attempts to shape the school, and they were also much more willing to consider the ways in which social divisions in the world structured tensions within and around the school. One of the school leaders, who had a background in social work and who was responsible for instituting the called for disciplinary measures, was especially reluctant to accept privileged parents’ diagnoses and acquiesce to their prescriptions. But reformers’ idealized fixations had also led reformers to be blindsided by these parents, and the cutting-edge aspects of their intervention offered few resources for fending off such pressures once they became evident.
“They’re trying to dictate, absolutely,” one of the school’s designers shared with me toward the end of the school’s first year. The reformer seemed annoyed with these parents, understandably so, and also surprised. “Parents have made a lot of inappropriate comments about kids who are lower income and of color,” the reformer continued, “comments that you think we’re done with those kinds of things. But we’re so obviously not done, even in progressive Manhattan, the bluest of the bluest places in America.” Offering a glimpse into how the designers’ fixations excluded consideration of such forces, the reformer continued, “It’s just that we didn’t suspect that—we were all so wild doing all sorts of innovative things with the curriculum and the structures of a school—we were also going to be dealing with a social experiment, which is integrating kids truly, truly having an integrated school. That has been challenging for parents,” the reformer said. It seemed to me that the reformer was caught in an especially compromised position. While the reformer was clearly annoyed and even offended by some of these parents’ behavior, this person and other reformers seemed reluctant to forcefully rebuke these parents, probably because they feared that if they did so, then a large faction of these parents would make good on their threats to leave the school.
Despite reformers’ and educators’ insights into the problematic character of these privileged parents’ participation in the project’s governance, in January of the school’s first year, and after several months of trying to resist privileged parents’ demands, reformers and educators finally capitulated and rapidly introduced a slew of canonical disciplinary techniques. The tipping point occurred shortly after two of the widely recognized leaders of the Cool Boys clique, both of whom were high-achieving students of color, were given weeklong “superintendent suspensions” for allegedly sexually harassing two of the girls who hung out in the Cool Girls clique. One of these girls identified as white and had creative professional parents, while the other identified as black and qualified for free lunch. For months, the four students had been central players in their cliques’ courtship dramas (chapter 5). While I do not know the full extent of the incident that led to the suspensions, I heard from students that one of the boys had “touched one of the girl’s butts during a game of Truth or Dare at school.” I also heard from parents that the boys had been sending lewd, aggressive, and inappropriate text messages to the white girl with creative professional parents. While school officials, professional parents, and many students labeled the incidents as sexual harassment, the students involved did not see them as clearly defined. When the incident came up in conversations among peers at school, one of the suspended boys pleaded, “I didn’t harass her!” Additionally, while the girls involved initially put distance between themselves and the boys, especially at school, they remained friends with the boys and continued to interact with them, especially online. Whatever actually happened, a consolidated mass of privileged parents threatened to leave the school, and reformers and educators finally acquiesced to their demands.
This particular crisis was eventually eased by the departure of core members of the Cool Boys and Cool Girls cliques, especially those who held high-status positions within their respective cliques. The three students who had emerged as leaders of the Cool Boys during the first several months of school, two of whom routinely received some of the highest scores in the school on exams, transferred to larger, less-resourced schools that had sports teams, more of a dating scene, and much smaller proportions of children from professional families. They did so after months of repeated suspensions, pervasive surveillance by educators, toting around behavior cards, and the other disciplinary measures discussed in chapter 4. In contrast with the ambiguous playfulness that characterized their unsanctioned practices earlier in the year, by the spring their status as disruptive and dangerous deviants who needed to be pacified or purged had become fixed in the eyes of many anxious professional parents, educators, and peers. Although I was not at the school as often during the school’s second year, I heard from several parents that members of the Cool Girls clique who were from less-privileged homes were the ones figured as bullies in the school’s second year, and by the end of the second year several of the most influential members of this clique, some of whom were also high academic achievers, had also left the school.
While several reformers and educators shared with me that they were disappointed over these students leaving, the school’s design team, as well as many of its educators, continued to champion the school as a cutting-edge model of philanthropic intervention, and they did so with all appearances of sincerity. Even after the school’s contentious first year, reformers and educators continued to celebrate the school’s sanctioned counterpractices in various venues where the school staged self-representation of itself, and they even developed digital resources, which they called kits, to help spread their model of reform to other reformers and educators. Some of the school’s designers and their wealthy backers launched a second version of the school in another major city, and the foundations that supported the school’s planning continued to direct large grants toward the nonprofit organization that was run by one of the school’s founders. In one case, one of these foundations even hired a member of the school’s design team to locate and fund similar innovations in digital media and learning.
That the contentious political struggles just discussed did not appear to substantially tarnish the idealism of the school’s designers and backers deserves comment. As discussed in chapter 4, the recurring and ritualized celebrations of the school’s sanctioned counterpractices did much to help repair hopeful feelings about the project. Additionally, broader rhetorics about choice appeared to have helped deflect more sobering self-reflection. Many reformers, educators, and parents from privileged backgrounds suggested that the students who had left the school had done so because they had been a bad match for the school’s innovative model. Similarly, the parents of the students who left the school also suggested that the school had been a bad fit. “The Downtown School could work for some other kid,” the mother of one of the departing students shared with me, “but it just wasn’t working for my son.” Instead, and with help from leaders at the Downtown School, her son enrolled at an older and more-conventional school that, ironically, was called School of the Future. That school had been founded in the early 1990s, likely with a similar, if less intense, fanfare to that which now surrounded the Downtown School. But unlike the Downtown School, the School of the Future was not currently a coveted option among privileged parents living in District Two. “School of the Future is a more traditional school,” the mother of the departing student added, “which works for this kind of kid.” Another mother of one of the departing students expressed that she was also looking for a more traditional school, with high standards, good test scores, sports teams, a debate team, “and all that good stuff.” When framed in terms of market logics, this sort of educational segregation is easily depoliticized as a product of individual preferences, a move that deflects responsibility for those divisions away from the actions of privileged parents, reformers, and educators.
In addition to depoliticizing the students’ departures as matters of personal choice, the criterion of a good cultural fit justified new efforts to seal the school’s borders and to control who and what passed through. In addition to demanding stricter discipline within the school, several of the involved professional parents took an active role in trying to shape admissions and recruitment. They brokered relationships with elementary schools in District Two that had high percentages of students from creative professional families, they recruited friends to apply, they volunteered to meet with prospective families at open houses, and they helped shape how school officials defined selection criteria. As these parents gained influence in the school’s admissions’ processes, school leaders and some of the highly involved parents gradually changed how they talked about inclusion. Instead of saying that the school was for “kids these days,” as the school’s designers had stated in the school’s planning documents, they started saying things like, “We’ll take anybody, but we want to make sure they get what we’re about.”
This comment, which was made to me by one of several parents who held a PhD and worked in academia, was echoed by several of the other highly involved professional parents. “They can’t do the unscreened thing anymore,” another involved parent, who also held a PhD, told me in an interview in the spring of the school’s first year. “Our selection criterion, our only selection criterion is ‘informed choice,’ ” she added, referencing the Department of Education’s policies for how new schools in the choice system could influence their admissions processes. “What we think would make sense, the parents who’ve been involved in the discussions about this,” she continued, “is that you define ‘informed’ in a particular way, so that you’re getting kids who are a good fit with the school.” The school had only been open for a few months, but these parents were already trying to influence how school leader’s interpreted and applied the informed-choice criterion. They also tried to shape admissions to their liking by volunteering at open houses, where they could subtly encourage and discourage different families from applying. Even though these parents had pressured reformers and educators to make the school more isomorphic to conventional schools, at open houses they emphasized the school’s alterity and sanctioned counterpractices, which, as we saw in chapter 3, primarily appealed to other creative professional parents. “I did all these open houses,” she continued, “and at every open house I said to people, ‘Just think about whether this is a good fit for your child. It’s game-based learning, these are not your mother’s jeans, this is a totally different way of being in school. You need to feel comfortable with it.’ ”
Once again we can see how a magnified and idealized emphasis on the school’s unconventional features—and especially its sanctioned counterpractices—played an important, if unexamined, role in the remaking of social divisions. Even though the pedagogic practices of the Downtown School were more similar to than different from conventional models and even though the school’s routines became more conventional in part because of pressures from privileged parents, involved parents and school officials increasingly conveyed that the school was a good fit for some families and not for others by emphasizing the school’s supposedly unique features. And, as we have seen, the uniqueness of the school’s sanctioned counterpractices, particularly their geeky resonance, primarily appealed to parents who worked in the culture industries, especially if they had boys.
Partnering with these local elites did help stabilize the philanthropic project against the prospect of a sudden and embarrassing collapse, and these alliances did help repair idealizations of community among those who continued to commit themselves to the project. After educators finally gave into the demands of privileged parents, nearly all the students from privileged families remained enrolled in the Downtown School through eighth grade, several had younger siblings enroll, and some of their parents, especially parents of boys, became among the school’s biggest supporters and champions. In large part because of these families’ involvements and endorsements, in subsequent years more and more creative professional families in District Two sought a spot at the Downtown School, to the point that the school became a hot option and was quite difficult to get into. As one creative professional said to me after they heard me give a short talk on the school during the school’s third year, “Everybody I know who has kids that age want their kids to go to that school, and it’s really hard to get in.” As we chatted, she suggested that some professional families were even moving to District Two just so their kids would have a chance to attend. “It’s like a private school in the public system,” she explained. I agreed and mentioned that the schools shared a pedagogic philosophy that was similar to the private Waldorf and Montessori schools. “Yes,” she replied, “but they’re incorporating technology.”
Idealizations and Conditions of Community Involvement
I have been arguing that reformers’ political partnerships with local elites were partly accepted and legitimated because of more widespread assumptions about the inherently democratic character of community involvement and local participation in the design and governance of a philanthropic intervention. The founders of the Downtown School were part of a growing collection of social reformers who advocate for philanthropic interventions that are participatory, user-centered, community-based, citizen focused, and so forth. A similar ethic, but from the other direction, pervades what has become a mark of good-parenting practices in the United States, especially among middle- and upper-middle-class families (Lareau 1987, 2003; Lareau and Muñoz 2012; Hassrick and Schneider 2009; Nelson 2010; Ochs and Kremer-Sadlik, eds. 2013; Posey-Maddox 2014). Such idealizations of community participation in the design and governance of philanthropic interventions are understandable, especially given the well-known shortcomings of top-down attempts at technocratic social reform (Scott 1998). But an unreflexive endorsement of terms like community and participation can also obscure the ways in which sanctioned forms of community participation often reinforce and legitimate privilege as well as exacerbate social division. At the Downtown School, many parents did not have the time or resources to be extensively involved in shaping and running the school, and those who did have these advantages did not use them to simply enrich “the school community.” Instead, involved parents promoted their political interests as if they were the interests of all the parents, even though their demands often had detrimental consequences for other students and families who did not enjoy their advantages. As with the other fixations that this book has been examining, idealizations of community and participation converted diverse experiences, divided interests, and unequal power relations into seemingly more tractable and apolitical entities—the community, the parents—as they overlooked the conditions that made sanctioned forms of participation something that could and should be desired, learned, and practiced.
What the highly involved parents at the Downtown School shared was not so much a gendered, raced, ethnic, or national identity—although these identifications did sometimes matter—as similar class conditions and corresponding cultural predispositions. Complicating stereotypes, several of the highly involved parents were fathers, numerous families had lived significant periods of time outside the United States, not all were white, and others were citizens from other countries. Most were doing quite well compared to the vast majority of the people in the world as well as to other practitioners in their respective professions. Yet their positions of relative privilege were also tenuous (Neff 2012), and their ability to reproduce a similar social standing for their children was by no means guaranteed. Most did not have large sums of money to bequeath to their children, nor could most buy their children into elite private schools. Several lost their jobs during the course of my study, and others were frequently scrambling for career opportunities, sometimes even moving across the world to do so. In trying to provision educational advantages for their children, they had little choice but to navigate a schooling system that was intensively competitive. Privileged parents often bemoaned how competitive schooling now seemed: the insanity of having to apply to middle school as if it were college, another round of competitive applications for high school, the eventual rat race of getting into a good college, and the further uncertainty of what sorts of meaningful occupations would exist on the other side of college, the other side of graduate school, or the other side of who knew what.
For many of these parents, the Downtown School seemed like as an appealing educational alternative to what one creative professional parent called “the race toward medical school.” After a contentious meeting in which some parents pushed school officials to spend more time preparing students for the state’s standardized tests, a frustrated creative professional parent shared with me why their family had been drawn to the Downtown School in the first place. The parent told me about one of their older sons who had gone to “one of these fancy schools” where they stressed competition and lots of homework. He said that the son became a nervous wreck and that he was still suffering from these earlier schooling pressures even though he was now in college. The father said he did not want that for his child who attended the Downtown School; he did not want their younger child to become “that type of kid.”
When such concerns and yearnings are considered in the context of an increasingly competitive, disciplined, and unpredictable political and economic order, some privileged parents’ intense involvements in the Downtown School no longer appears as simply crazed effort to give their kids a leg up. Rather, they can also be seen as entailing critical insights into the broader political and social conditions in which they lived, insights that were much like those of the school’s designers and reformers. Many could see that conventional schooling systems were organized as a hypercompetitive race that produced a few winners and many losers. All could see that this race had negative consequences for nearly everyone involved. And all were motivated to direct substantial energies towards efforts to disrupt these unwanted processes. But their attempts to do so ironically helped sustain and spread the very conditions that generated those afflictions. Their responses were not unlike that of a person who, discomforted by the effects of climate change, installs a more powerful but ecofriendly climate control system in their home. They did not challenge the political and economic orders that have made schooling and their lives ever more competitive and precarious, and, if anything, they helped circulate claims that legitimated such arrangements: self-realization through creative entrepreneurship, unprecedented opportunities thanks to new technologies, lifelong learning (e.g. reskilling), and so forth. Problems generated in part by a more-widespread acceptance of these claims were understood narrowly as problems with conventional schooling or particular individuals and, as such, these parents fought for remedies that may have helped them temporarily secure some relief for their children but that left the sources of their concerns intact. In doing so, they not only helped sustain the conditions that generated their concerns, but they also divided themselves from other families that were also trying to cope with precarious conditions, but from significantly more disadvantaged positions.
The increasing entrenchment of spatialized social divisions into fortified enclaves and networks makes attempts to bridge these widening divisions ever more challenging (Davis 1990; Graham and Marvin 2001). Not only did these spatialized social divisions discussed in chapter 3 facilitate the stereotyping of people who primarily lived their lives in other spaces, but also, and in a related vein, many of those in positions of relative privilege were quite palpably afraid of having their children share spaces with children from less-privileged backgrounds, especially, as we have seen, when issues of race, gender, and sexuality were involved, as they often are in schools and other enclaves for youth. One of the school’s designers referenced these dynamics while recalling a conversation they had had with one of the involved parents. “He was afraid for his kid to be around kids of color,” the designer said, “just literally afraid of other kids because of their backgrounds.” The designer went on to reflect on how such fears can take root when families spend the majority of their lives separated along lines of racialized social class. “Like he actually was very innocent in his concern,” the designer explained, “I had to remind him that eighty-plus percentage of the inner city are those kids.”
In the Downtown School’s second year, one of the creative professional parents who had been gripped by the panic over bullying during the previous year found himself at the center of a new moral panic, this one centered on girl bullies. In part thanks to his eloquent e-mails condemning bullying in the school’s first year, the father was elected to one of the leadership positions in the PTA. When the new panic broke out, the father decided to check out the situation in person and spent several days sitting in on classes and moving with students throughout their days, much as I had. When we later discussed these forays into the school, the father told me that he had changed his perspective on the bullying frenzies. “Sure some students act out,” he said, “but they’re just kids,” reversing his early arguments in favor of zero tolerance. The father added that the professional parents had a tendency to gossip with each other, get worked up, and then overreact.
While this parental engagement with students from diverse backgrounds produced a hopeful personal transformation, I do not want to suggest that such an approach could easily solve the problems I have been addressing. Most parents and guardians did not and could not spend extensive time inside the school. Further, marketlike choices for educational services offer families, and especially privileged families, options that allow them to avoid dealing with discomfiting issues of privilege and cultural difference. Finally, once removed from direct participation—a consequence of spatialized social divisions—the negative feedback amplification of self-selected communication networks can produce hysteria that is difficult to dislodge. Toward the end of the father’s year as the PTA officer, I asked him how things had gone being involved. “I hate it,” the father said, noting privileged parents’ recurring hysteria, “There are a lot of neurotic parents.”
Conclusion
While privileged parents routinely figured bullying as an invasive force that threatened to destroy the school, it was more their own hysteria about bullying and threats of exit that fueled reformers’ anxieties about an early and embarrassing collapse of their philanthropic project. Not only had these parents’ threats to leave pressured reformers into deploying canonical resources and practices that ironically made the school much like more traditional urban public schools, but it also bolstered some privileged parents’ attempts to seal off the school in ways that they could control. The noteworthy point here is that reformers capitulated in ways that undermined their philanthropic ideals not because they were duplicitous or totally unaware of tensions between their ideals and their actions, but because they found themselves in a crisis that was only partly of their own making. Like other well-intentioned reformers, their fixations did not anticipate the numerous forces that would overflow, grip, and twist their philanthropic intervention in all sorts of unexpected directions. Over and over again during the school’s first year, it felt as if the project was weathering a blustering storm, springing leak after leak and teetering on the verge of collapse. In an attempt to control these volatile forces and avoid an embarrassing collapse, reformers quickly assembled stabilizing resources from wherever they could.
As we saw in chapter 4, some of these resources came from canonical versions of the institution that reformers aimed to disrupt, particularly the disciplinary techniques whose genealogy Foucault (1977) traced. As we saw in this chapter, other stabilizing resources came from local elites who offered their support on the condition that they could take a prominent role in shaping the project’s governance. At the Downtown School, the local partners who were best positioned to offer this support—and also the best positioned to withdraw it—were privileged parents. Reformers did not partner with these local elites without reservations, nor were they unaware of their project’s entanglement with forces whose control and generation extended far beyond their reach. When recounting the school’s challenges, reformers often acknowledged the magnitude of the divisions that structured students’ out-of-school lives, and some commented on how these divisions likely contributed to the contentious struggles that they were trying to handle in the school. But the dominant tendency, especially when reformers worried that the future of the project was at stake, was to try to stabilize the project by just about any means available. Most turned to technical diagnoses and fixes that left optimistic feelings about the philanthropic nature of their intervention intact. The school needed better leadership, some said, or they needed more teacher training because the model was so new, they needed more rules and strictures or a more developed school culture or better admissions policies, or less bureaucratic oversight, or, as is all too familiar in the case of schooling, they figured some of their intended beneficiaries as especially deficient or irredeemable with their remedy, and so on. The deployment of stabilizing resources, and especially partnerships with local elites, helped dampen these volatile forces and avoid an embarrassing collapse, but what endured was not a shining new model of schooling or an innovative mechanism for fixing social divisions, but rather a version of canonical schooling retrofitted with seemingly cutting-edge material and symbolic forms.