Studying Education Reform as Contentious Politics

Amy Binder

Challenges that occur within institutions rather than “in the streets,” and those that originate or are supported by “insiders,” are fast becoming the most common form of social movement in Western democracies. This project studies one such “institutionalized movement” that concerns education processes. The Stapleton Development Plan is an urban renewal project in Denver, on the site of the now-defunct Stapleton Airport—a geographical space of 4,700 acres inside the city’s boundaries. The plan represents a coordinated effort by the city of Denver, the state of Colorado, land developers, the Denver Public School District, charter schools, environmental groups, local foundations, and others to create a “new urban community.” Leaders of the project define community as a place where residents can walk or take public transportation to work, visit their children at the playground during recess, and take advantage of pedestrian boulevards and their front porches to establish tight-knit neighborhoods.. At the same time that it is meant to staunch the flow of families to the suburbs and create diverse neighborhoods, Stapleton is also designed to provide children with educational opportunities of their parents’ choosing and reduce environmental degradation. In other words, Stapleton, a multi-issue bid for social change within the confines of conventional politics and economic development—with a strong emphasis on how education plays into community life. Stapleton’s mainstream vision of community and its significant access to political and economic resources give it considerable leverage in pursuing its goals. The project promises to address many different students’ interests and needs—from pre-school to high school, from traditional pedagogy to progressive curricula and instruction. Currently, much of the discourse and action surrounding the plan is produced only by the plan’s proponents—those who are crafting the vision—and not by people who are living through the experience of new urbanism, living on the edges of that community, or otherwise have alternative viewpoints about the development. But, cracks and cleavages surrounding the effort are already becoming visible. The Denver Public School System has become highly resegregated by race and poverty since the end of busing in the past 10 years, and many of the schools adjacent to Stapleton are the lowest-performing schools in the state, as well as those with the highest concentration of poverty. Stapleton’s developers have talked about a seamless connection to these poorer neighborhoods with their troubled schools, and yet within 100 yards of houses in existing neighborhoods that might be worth $100,000 are new large homes priced at more than $500,000. One can imagine that conflicts over educational opportunities—whose children have access to which schools—between residents inside and outside Stapleton boundaries will likely arise. For example, residents on the outskirts of the development have begun to demand their own charter school, and are demanding that resources begin to flow to their older neighborhoods. If past studies of new urbanism communities are any indication (Andrew Ross’ study of Celebration, Florida, for example), then we should also expect there to be internal dissensus among residents, workers, merchants, and educators, as well. One would guess that various interest factions will emerge at Stapleton, and that the processes and mechanisms for living out the plan will have to be fought for, negotiated, and altered as the movement proceeds. Through interviews, participant observation, media analysis and a study of written materials, I plan to study the education processes and other related developments of this institutionalized movement.

About Amy Binder

Since I began graduate school in the Department of Sociology at Northwestern University, I have studied some combination of race, culture, and politics as they interact in different institutions. For the last six years, I have located those interests in the study of school processes. Using the comparative case method, predominantly, I have drawn on concepts from several different subfields to make sense of media discourses on the role of race in musical consumption, to the capacity of large institutions to thwart change demanded by alienated challengers, to employers’ beliefs about work-bound high school students. For the past year, I have been involved in researching several large-scale progressive education reforms, including the Coalition of Essential Schools, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Networks Grants program (aimed at creating and supporting small high schools), and the Carnegie Foundation’s Schools for a New Society initiative. My work has been published in the American Sociological Review and Sociology of Education, among others, and in Summer 2002, my first book will be published by Princeton University Press, called Contentious Curricula: Afrocentrism and Creationism in American Public Schools.