Purpose: This study examined challenges to gentrifying schools as white spaces, exploring the efforts of administrators and parents to create an equitable school environment during the initial years of the Diversity in Admissions policy. Methods: In qualitative fieldwork conducted over 2 years at City, a Title I public school in New York City, I…

Largely overlooked in the empirical literature on gentrification are the potential effects school closures have in the process. This study begins to fill this gap by integrating longitudinal data on all U.S. metropolitan neighborhoods from the Neighborhood Change Database with data on the universe of school closures from the National Center for…

This case study investigated how three New York City schools responded to gentrification's effects as student demographics shifted. I used the conceptual framework of "urban school leaders as cultural workers" to examine the tensions, successes, and challenges inherent in the school gentrification and integration process. I found that…

In the late-2000s, Washington, DC achieved national notoriety for its embrace of market accountability in public schools and support for a steadily expanding charter sector. At the same time, the DC government pursued a concerted effort to attract new residents and investment to the city, a project that bore fruit in the form of some of the…

Background: As gentrification transforms the physical, cultural, and demographic character of urban landscapes, an expansive body of research has generated insights into the meanings and implications of this process for public schools. How school leaders facilitate or constrain school gentrification is a growing area of inquiry. Research Design:…

This article traces the state takeover and neoliberal reconstruction of a mid-size urban school district in the California Bay Area. Aligning with research on social networks in school reform, it identifies three organizational nodes of power operating within the takeover and post-takeover landscape: venture-philanthropic capital, the Teach for…

Research in the neighborhood effects tradition has primarily concerned itself with understanding the consequences of growing up in high-poverty neighborhoods. In recent years, however, the in-migration of relatively affluent households into disinvested central city neighborhoods--commonly referred to as gentrification--has markedly risen,…

While the literature on the experiences of working-class Students of Color at selective, historically White institutions has grown significantly over the past twenty-five years, how this student population is making sense of their social class identity as they gain access to dominant cultural and social capital at their institutions remains…

It has been argued that white middle classes act in the best interest of their offspring, even when these actions clash with their values. In urban contexts, parents often do this by avoiding ethnically diverse educational settings. Drawing on 35 interviews, this article aims to gain a deeper understanding of the school-choice process of white…

Racial and socioeconomic stratification have long governed patterns of residential sorting in the American metropolis. However, recent expansions of school choice policies that allow parents to select schools outside their neighborhood raise questions as to whether this weakening of the neighborhood-school connection might influence the…

Notwithstanding that Critical Race Theory (CRT) is currently in its second decade of existence, it is not and has never been something extraordinary--insofar as racism is something that has always been with us. Rather, CRT is a bona fide and avant-garde movement that leads to praxis--explicitly and courageously speaking to the injustices that…

This paper is part of broader ongoing attempts to demonstrate that shifts in educational policy can be understood as mutually constitutive with the changing nature of contemporary cities, including changes in urban policy. In this paper, the author wants to explore one aspect of these broader attempts, namely the relationships between education…