The School Diversity Notebook is excited to offer a guest post from Dr. Liz Nigro (she/her)! 

Liz is a former public elementary school teacher, who worked for four years as a general and special educator in Washington, DC. Her experience teaching in two segregated school contexts, with vastly different educational opportunities, shaped her decision to pursue policy research and activism. She recently graduated from UVA’s Education Research, Statistics, and Evaluation program and will start as Research Director for Voices for Virginia’s Children in late June. The Century Foundation published part 1 of this post, while Liz was interning with the Bridges Collaborative. She hopes to continue working toward substantive school integration and justice, through participatory action research methods in her future work and welcomes emails with questions/feedback at liz.nigro4@gmail.com 

In the commentary below, Liz outlines a vision for community-level advocacy during #thesetimes. With the executive branch now actively opposing civil rights for marginalized students, in addition to dismantling standing desegregation court orders, and congress being similarly horrible, it’s understandable that advocates would look to the courts to save us. And, although the judiciary has delivered some victories, it can’t be our only source of resistance. Indeed, there’s been more attention to community–level resistance, including local-level advocacy and mutual aid. Liz’s piece picks up this thread and weaves it into the contemporary movement for school integration. Courts may or may not offer relief from this fascist onslaught, and we should keep pressing there of course, but maybe our best hope is for us to save us. 

Commentary 2: How Local Community Coalitions Can Build Solidarity to Promote School Integration

Introduction 

If you’re reading this blog, you likely believe in the value of school integration. While interning for the Bridges Collaborative and learning from leaders in the space, I spent time reflecting on how to define school integration and why it is important for our diverse, democratic collective. After writing the piece linked above, the next big question with which I began to grapple was: how can we make this goal a reality, particularly at this moment of political opposition to diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging initiatives?

In this piece, I hope to bring us a little closer to answering this question using my perspectives as a scholar-activist, interested in investigating questions related to school integration. Specifically, I will argue for a collective organizing approach, which engages a variety of community interest holders in investigating and implementing elements of school integration. Furthermore, I argue that how we work together to implement this work should embody the key principles of school integration, including diverse involvement, representation, restorative/transformative justice, equitable resource distribution, inclusive relationships, and civic engagement practices. I display how this could look through a participatory action research framework presented in Figure 1 below. 

Why Collectively Organize

This is not the first time our society has faced injustice, and historically, collective organizing served as a successful tactic to promote a more just world. If the first few months are any indication, the next four years will likely bring federal opposition to social justice and specifically, school integration work. In response, community members acting collectively to organize within their local and state contexts will be crucial. More specifically, participating in grassroots movements/coalitions, imagining transformative futures, and taking action toward a more just future is needed. A famous example of this type of organizing, imagining, and acting, is the Civil Rights Movement. This bottom-up coalition building and protest work contributed to top-down shifts in legislation and influenced societal norms. During this era, major judicial victories relating to school segregation include Brown v. Board of Education (1954), Green v. County School Board of New Kent (1968), and Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education (1971). More recently, grassroots local movements have mobilized to address problems in their community and even nationally, such as Black Lives Matter, Indivisible, Red, Wine, and Blue and Moms Demand Action, which organize against a wide range of topics like systemic racism, political extremism/facism, and gun violence. 

There are also many modern examples within the field of education and data-driven advocacy efforts. A Match on Dry Grass offers a book full of such examples investigating how collecting and leveraging data for collective advocacy has generated change in local contexts. For instance, parents at one high school in Denver in 2002-2006 organized to ensure equitable and inclusive education for Black and Brown students and to avoid a school closure. The families looked to understand the problem, document the impact, and provide concrete solutions. Within the process, they involved those directly impacted: young people attending the school. This intergenerational team distributed and analyzed a youth-created survey and strategically shared the findings with the media as well as policymakers, which ultimately led to reforms on a local level and youth empowerment.

This type of process can be replicated across contexts today, employing the framework below that documents a new approach to research that involves a variety of interest holders (bottom right) within an action research process (top left), investigating questions related to various components of school integration (top right). Within this data-driven but mainly action-oriented approach, a variety of people can engage in the policy process and reclaim democratic power, which school integration aims to foster. Furthermore, this framework acknowledges that this work is embedded within each locality’s unique historical, socio-political, and cultural context, so does not aim to be prescriptive on the types of questions and corresponding solutions will work, given these particularities. 

Plugging Into School Integration Collectives

Family Collectives

One example of an existing national grassroots family movement that could engage in this type of localized participatory action research work is Integrated Schools, a close friend of this blog. This organizing group brings together families looking to redress ethno-racial and economic power imbalances within education systems. The movement began with mostly White and privileged caregivers, choosing to integrate schools and break cycles of opportunity hoarding. Today, their reach has expanded through local chapters, book clubs, a blog, and a podcast. Family collectives, like this national example or more local examples like Learn Together, Live Together in Washington, DC, hold the potential to collectively mobilize systems change in local education contexts. To do so, requires leveraging community relationship building, self-reflection, and collective action to address school segregation and promote integration. 

Student Collectives

Another type of group that should engage in this process is student collectives, given that students will be the ones experiencing school integration, perhaps most intimately. A recent profile discussed how NYC built an intergenerational movement between adults and youth. IntegrateNYC, now Circle Keepers, is a prominent example of leveraging student voice and power within the movement. IntegrateNYC, a coalition of public school students, pioneered the 5R framework for real school integration, upon which this guiding framework is based. As discussed in a previous blog post, these groups are part of a long lineage of student activism for school integration, dating back to the Brown era. Furthermore, involving and respecting student voice can hopefully prevent the replication of harm caused during Brown’s implementation.   

Local School/District Employees, Boards, Etc.

Other collectives that should ideally be involved in this process are collectives with more direct power within the education policy system, like district and school leaders, school board members, partnering non-profits, etc. These collectives could look to ask questions like how we could make schools more ethno-racially diverse and involve other interest holders like families, teachers, and students in the process. One example of a district taking this collective approach is Winston-Salem/Forsyth County, which is engaging with community members around redistricting and rezoning. Throughout this process, they have looked to ensure a representative set of voices are included and to build trust by grounding the work in local history as well as shared values, and goals. Furthermore, there are organizations partnering in this community engagement work like Brown’s Promise, which looks to address segregation and related funding disparities. 

My Own Experience (as a childless, graduate student researcher and former teacher) 

Finally, as someone who is no longer a student and not yet a parent, I think there is still a role for me within this movement. I found ways to plug into the movement through uplifting student voices/building their capacity, forming reciprocal relationships, and encouraging civic engagement during my time as a teacher and graduate student researcher. For instance, previously as a teacher, I co-led a democracy club after school, which taught students about issues in their community, such as environmental racism, food access, and school funding. This learning culminated in action with a student-led park clean-up on Earth Day, which mobilized the entire school community, not just those involved in the small after school organization. 

As a graduate student in the research space, I have continued to facilitate after school programs with youth, to take advantage of increased curricular flexibility. Specifically, I have worked with two youth participatory action research (YPAR) partnerships, supporting youth in designing and implementing research that is meaningful to them, with the goal of actionable change. In such work with youth, I have aimed to minimize power dynamics, encourage reciprocity, and engage with humility with youth to ensure their voice is central. As highlighted in my previous article, such work has helped mobilize change to within-school segregation through tracking practices and improvements to youth’s mental health within school settings. 

Finally, I have built relationships within my local community and the school integration space. In my experience, this work is largely relational. Community building and fostering trust go a long way. For instance, I credit this relational work for gaining this internship at the Bridges Collaborative and having an opportunity to speak on this platform. In conclusion, building supportive relationships, especially across lines of difference, is key to grassroots organizing and successful school integration. 

Backlash Considerations

With these wins in mind, there is a constant push and pull between equitable and inequitable policy creation and implementation. Movements of resistance have also recognized the efficacy of organizing. For instance, white mothers across the country took to the streets to protest busing, co-opting the tactics and terms of the Civil Rights Movement with protest signs that alluded to their freedoms. As highlighted in a previous post, this same type of counter-mobilization can be seen today with Moms for Liberty. Given the efficacy of such organizing, there is a need, particularly at this time, to employ these tactics toward justice and to prevail during this time of backlash. 

Concluding Call

The future of the U.S.’s pluralistic democracy hinges on coalitions standing together and remaining engaged. One way various interest holders can organize is by working toward substantive school integration (i.e., schools with demographic diversity, restorative justice, relationships, representation, and civic engagement opportunities) through participatory action research and advocacy within their community. This organizing work is more important now than ever to ensure the integrated schools’ movement can help form the relational connections across generations, which are needed now to safeguard against oppressive policies from the upcoming administration and build a better tomorrow.