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Christopher Saldaña: Hi everyone. I'm Chris Saldaña and this is the National Education Policy Center's Talks Education Podcast. In this month’s podcast, we are interviewing Erica Turner, who's an associate professor in the Department of Educational Policy Studies and an affiliate in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis in the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin.

Dr. Turner's research examines racism and inequities and efforts to challenge those in education, policy, and practice. We also spoke with Dr. Brian Mann, who's an associate professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies in the School of Education and Human Sciences at the University of Kansas.

Dr. Mann's research centers on the issues of geography and educational policy in this one's podcast. In this month’s podcast, Dr. Turner and Dr. Mann help us better understand the intersection of geography, educational opportunity, and shifting demographics.

Christopher Saldaña: So for listeners who may be less familiar with your work. Can each of you briefly describe what you study and what initially drew you to examining demographic change in K-12 education?

And Erica, why don't we start with you?

Erica Turner: Thanks Chris. And it's a pleasure to be here. My research looks broadly at how a variety of stakeholders in and out of schools make sense of and act on educational inequality in both policy and practice. Our schools are locally - local schools are where a lot of education policy is made.

Both it's formed and implemented. So I generally focus on race and class inequality as they're navigated in school district governance. And I was drawn to examining the demographic change from an interest in racial inequality and multiracial politics. Moving from California to the Midwest, demographic change was a way to understand the dynamics and policy responses related to race and class inequality in school.

Bryan Mann: Yeah. And my work falls at the direct intersection of geography and education policy. So I'm the director of the Geography of Education policy Analysis Lab here at the University of Kansas. And I should also say thanks for having me and it's great to be here with both of you.

And yeah. Across our projects we use tools from human geography to investigate education policy topics. So some of my kind of early work focused a lot on cities and processes like gentrification. But while I was doing that work, in particular a study in Washington DC, I noticed a lot of action was happening outside of the suburbs.

And I really wanted to expand on that work. And think about and look at demographic change across different locales. Like I said, I started in looking at urban locales and city places, and then that work has expanded into the suburbs, which is some of the work that I've been working on recently.

Christopher Saldaña: I like that you used the word action, Brian, because I think that's a great segue into my next question, which is for Erica. So Erica, that you published a book a few years ago titled Suddenly Diverse: How School Districts Manage Race and Inequality. And I wanted to ask you, when you say a district becomes suddenly diverse what does that look like on the ground.

Erica Turner: Yeah, that's a great question. I actually try not to say that a school district looks suddenly diverse. And in the case of the districts I studied, I argue they weren't suddenly diverse, but it felt like that to the people who are leading both of these districts. You've probably heard that the US is now more racially diverse and more economically unequal than ever.

These two small Wisconsin districts that I studied, that, that was playing out, that microcosm nationally was playing out locally. So these were predominantly white and middle class city school districts, but smaller cities that had gained more kids of color and were experiencing greater poverty.

And you saw non-white kids entering schools, refugee families that were Hmong, Somali or Central American and had been displaced by war, humanitarian crisis had come over in different generations. They're also migrants and immigrants, mostly Latina and from Mexico, who were recruited to work in food processing or in agriculture and service industry work.

And then, and filling jobs in these communities and brought their families are settled out over decades. And then migrations of black families from other areas in the region looking for jobs, safer neighborhoods, affordable housing, things like that. So opportunities for their families.

But then there's also greater poverty. And this is not just people coming, it's people who were also there. Existing families and families that are coming that are really being impacted by economic conditions, especially the Great Recession in 2008-9. So these are new challenges for a district that's been predominantly white and middle class, both the teachers and the people they've served before that.

Christopher Saldaña: Brian, you recently published some work that I think compliments Erica's work really well. And one striking finding from that work is that while white student isolation has declined, particularly in the suburbs, isolation for students of color has actually increased, especially in urban areas.

So I wanna pose this question to both of you, but what do you make of this paradox and what does it tell us about how demographic change and segregation interact?

Bryan Mann: Yeah. It, I think that was probably the most interesting finding from the study that, that we did and take a step back.

The study was - where Erica's study looks in-depth qualitatively at specific locations, the study that I did with a team of geographers looks at scale. And so a lot of the terms and a lot of the decisions we had to make are a bit more, I guess I could say crude, like they, they generalize things.

But it's really interesting to see from the year 2000 to the year 2020, our research was consistent with prior research and demography on the fact that, yes, for all the reasons that Erica was talking about, there has been tremendous demographic change across the country residentially.

So in terms of schools, Chris, like you were asking like, what does this mean for school segregation? And that kind of paradox that you mentioned was an interesting finding, but it makes sense. There's, and we speculate there, and I should use the word speculate because we haven't gone into specific cases and looked exactly what was happening, but we speculate that there's two reasons for the widespread demographic change at the residential level leading to different outcomes and school segregation at the school level. One is simply compositional, as the overall population of students of color increases, you can see net increases across many places at the same time. So like suburban schools where they were predominantly white, as the kind of composition happens everywhere the suburban districts may diversify, whereas places that were non-white or had more students of color, you can see increasing isolation. That's one possibility.

I think the second one, which is and I think both of these things are happening based on kind of case studies that we've looked at. The second one is that when you think about what families are doing when they're choosing schools, I think that it's likely that you'll see that families from different backgrounds are making different kinds of moves.

So I think in the suburbs at times we see families of color making moves that are more integrative and white families as they move into urban places, for example, like we see in gentrification, seeking and finding schools that if not are, racially isolated, they are more they're higher SES schools within the urban ecosystem.

So I think the two patterns could do just with the net numbers and how they play out over all spaces, and also they could relate to the behaviors of families from different racial and socioeconomic backgrounds.

Christopher Saldaña: Erica, was there anything you wanted to add?

Erica Turner: Sure, but I, and I have a question for Bryan.

Did you notice were there differences among suburban districts?

Bryan Mann: The study we did was really broad scale, so we didn't dig into differences across suburban districts per se. Looking at like the maps and things like that, we didn't notice some, like this process, was happening more in the Midwest.

Like we did notice that there were certain regions that had changes. There was a couple of other really interesting facts about suburban districts as well. Like one is that they were the only district locale based on these census classifications that were growing instead of shrinking in terms of student population.

Another was something like more than 60% of districts had at least a five percentage change of students and residents of color. So these changes were pretty widespread. The challenge with any kind of study like this is that, what defines a district is different across the United States.

So in the south of the United States, the districts often follow county lines, where if you go to places like where I'm from in New Jersey, the districts are chopped up in their, in, such smaller units. And that matters a lot for how we classify schools and how we classify students. Coming attractions, future work coming up is what the mismatch between, for example, a rural school getting mislabeled if they're in a rural district, 'cause if you're just calling the district rural, there's different types of schools within it. that all changes throughout the United States based on the boundaries of districts themselves. So that's a great question. But the study that we didn't look at those nuances per se, but I think there, there are definitely differences across the country and digging into specifics I think is really important.

Erica Turner: Yeah because I ask, because I think part of how I think about this paradox is just in general, in the US society, we, there's this paradox, right? We value diversity, which is what how we're looking at demographic changes, essentially showing and then at the same time, like the continued racial oppression. So when I think about this kind of both heightened segregation and also kind of diversification in some, like in some places and not in others, it makes me think like, diversity is good in some ways, but not too much. And it can be a sign of legitimacy or even advantage to note, to speak a lot of languages, to have your child have gone to a diverse school as among some people, maybe not as much now as five years ago, a status symbol. And then, but on the other hand. Or think of elite colleges, right? Admissions and that's something I write about in Suddenly Diverse is how diversity can be kind of appealing in a certain way to attract or to reinforce any and then reinforces inequalities 'cause of who can access it.

And yet it's compatible with racial oppression, right? So we can have the suburbs becoming more diverse and the cities having concentrated poverty, which is what essentially segregation on one of this at one end of the segregation is anyway. And so that kind of, the paradox tells me like anti-blackness as a system is structurally alive and well.

And not in necessarily incompatible with diversity, but I asked about the district the suburban districts because, just the way neighborhoods or schools suburban to urban are means of support. Sorting and reproducing inequalities between district, between suburban districts; they're also under, they're competing against each other as well, and so I could imagine some variation there.

Bryan Mann: Yeah, absolutely. And I agree with you a hundred percent. That's spot on, like diversity as a commodity. Yeah. And I saw that a lot in the work that I did earlier in Washington, DC about the types of schools that families chose, or even like the study that I use, is students of color versus white students in that category is not, it's only so useful in such a large scale, but when you break it out into smaller pieces, yeah, like the schools that white families in Washington DC were choosing were diverse, but they were diverse in terms of linguistic diversity or they were going to schools with Latino students, but they were often avoiding schools in the predominantly and historically black sections of Washington, DC so the term used anti-black racism, like I, I think is a really important part of this as well.

Yeah I appreciate you highlighting those things 'cause I, yeah, I agree a hundred percent. They're super, super noteworthy.

Christopher Saldaña: I'm wondering how the school choice, the expansion of school choice, whether it's vouchers or whether it's the introduction of chargers, how that changes how we've traditionally thought either about the local educational policymaking process and the idea historically how we've thought of segregation.

Had the conversations that we have now around addressing Erica, for example, inequities that exist in how school boards decide how to allocate resources started to take account of the fact that parents are making these choices and it's very much impacting not only the inequality that happens around the district and where students move.

And then Brian for you, like when we think about ways that policymakers even try to think about remedying segregation has, have we caught up? Or what, where are we now in terms of how choice impacts this paradox that we're talking about.

Erica Turner: I guess my starting point, Chris, is thinking that vouchers from the very inception of the notion are rooted in a desire to maintain systems of racial inequality and subvert efforts at desegregation.

So that's the origins and a couple nice books Noliwe Rooks and John Hale I think have both written about that, and I'm sure others. And I think that's just important to mark that history of what it is, the choice that's being offered is not for everybody, but historically, and then how it can continue to function that way.

I think that part of what my book shows is not anything new. It, and it didn't come with, say, the introduction of charters or vouchers. In fact, those were - this is not true now, but I think at the time of the study, those were not really large concerns. They mattered, but not in the way they really do in some other places or what we're looking at now.

But there was still inter-district choice and that sets up a system of competition that, and therefore, and is related to school funding that's very front and center for school district leaders, whether they're school board members or superintendents in their minds. Because losing any student has an economic cost to it and that's true I think no matter what the choice system is. So that very much then and if the people who can always choose, always prefer a school that offers them more than the other school districts get, or, and maintains their privileges and we are already on this unequal playing field where that is mostly gonna be white or already economically privileged families, then I think very quickly you get to again, segregation is a system of maintaining inequalities. And those two then kind of work hand in hand because you choose the, you, the parent choose the thing that you see as advantage in your child.

Bryan Mann: Yeah, and I would add that it's interesting because policymakers have tried using types of choice for desegregation.

Like the magnet school movement, for example, is a big part of that. And different types of school choice policies have different flavors and different outcomes. But I would say in general choice has not led to desegregation across the majority of these tools. There's some quibbles in certain cities or certain programs, but in general it hasn't.

And I think a large part of that is that there's a subtle finding that keeps showing up is that parents do implicitly or sometimes explicitly choose based on demographics. And so if you're a student who was of quote unquote undesirable demographic in the school choice market, then people are always going to be avoiding you.

And that's essentially the definition of segregation. And so I think that's a huge challenge with using school choice policy to achieve these goals. Exactly as Erica was saying is that when more privileged families have those choices they, it seems like, double down on the type of segregation and a lot, there's a lot of work out there that asks parents about these processes and some are implicit with it. Some say that they desire diversity, but they they're unable to find it. There's all sorts of social mechanisms at play, but the larger systemic one exactly as Erica was saying, is this long history of anti-black racism in the United States.

And it shows up in, in many ways across types of school education policy. And yeah, but so the evidence on choice, policy and desegregation with - there are, like I said, a few examples where there's successes, but universally there's not that many of them.

Christopher Saldaña: So I wanna take us back to the district level policymaking context and how leaders try to address issues of racial inequities or racial injustice.

Erica, in your work, you introduced the concept of colorblind managerialism to describe how district leaders have responded to demographic change. Can you describe for us what that looks like in practice and why race-neutral approaches tend to fall short in promoting equity?

Erica Turner: Thank you for that question.

I, in the book, call it colorblind managerialism, but I really prefer to talk about it as race-evasive managerialism. Now the colorblind language comes from the kind of history conceptually of the term, but I think recognizing that it has, it's some ableist language. I'm trying to use race-evasive anyways instead. So the way I am observing this and thinking about it is a way of leading public institutions, like public schools that kind of takes its cue from business, specifically corporate and entrepreneurial models of business. And so this kind of managerialism emphasizes generic management skills like quantitative measure measurement of outcomes as means of decision making and competition or entrepreneurial skills or strategies as a means of guiding public organizations. And so the emphasis might be on competing well or measuring correctly. And often the end goal is around raising test scores for individual students or for the district or attracting more students.

And that kind of thing. Market share, if you will. And in practice, this kind of looks like things we see all the time in schools, right? Board members, district administrators, principals, adopting performance-monitoring approaches where they're collecting, monitoring and reporting academic outcome or performance data.

It's like a main strategy for addressing disparities and achievement. And so in the schools that I - school districts that I was looking at - there were performance, teacher professional development, which was determined by standardized test data, school-based data examination of database decision making groups at each school, evaluation of strategic goals based on these same kind of measures. So a lot of assessments and a lot of monitoring of assessments. And then there were other strategies like marketing diversity is the one that I emphasize. Creating and designing schools that will appeal to families like inter-black international Baccalaureate, et cetera, to meet this kind of customer demand.

And I think these are ubiquitous and the problem is not so much that they're based on business per se, it's that they're really race neutral. And so as a starting point, they don't already recognize the already existing inequalities that should be shaping, I would argue, like how schools are making their decisions and operating.

So this the kind of, I think without more explicit design for ensuring equity, these approaches allow existing inequalities to persist. For example, we measure all the schools without recognizing some schools are maybe educating kids who don't have a regular meal, and then sanction them for not meeting targets doesn't actually shift racial inequality or economic inequality for that, for that matter. So these are essentially neutral to those policies, and therefore they've never challenged the existing status quo.

Bryan Mann: I, I also notice in districts when like they're thinking about the demographics, like they're looking at the composition of students themselves in schools and say they're a district that values having diverse schools throughout their district - often these school districts start at the high school level, and I've always found that to be problematic because I think that there's so much in terms of relationship-building and bias and all these things that happen that it would be great to see school districts start with considering the patterns of enrollment at the earlier levels, at the elementary school levels. Because for example, like I've seen this in some of the schools that I've worked with where the, they've had regional high schools or they've had high schools that were pulling from multiple, more segregated elementary schools. And then you go into the high school itself, or at the middle school, this happens as well. And you go into the lunchroom and kids sitting at - they self-segregate in the lunchroom and there are students clustered by race in the lunchroom. And so I think in some district policymaking, when they are able to achieve diversity at some other school levels, some of them start at the high school because it's easier.

But I would just make the point to district policymaking that if you're pursuing these goals to yes, absolutely follow policies that are not race evasive, and also to consider the entire ecosystem and the trajectory of students from early age through high school and not try to kind of start the integration at later ages because the social dynamics make it so that it's a more complicated kind of process.

Christopher Saldaña: I wanna move back to thinking about how we categorize districts, and I think you've both helped us think about how districts exist in, in different ways and with different characteristics and with different student compositions. And in your work, you both suggest that scholars and policymakers need to rethink how we can conceptualize quote unquote, urban and suburban schools. So I wanna ask you why this matters and what are the risks of continuing to just carry forward past conceptions of quote unquote urban and suburban schools?

Bryan Mann: Yeah, so I think there's like a foundational article in Urban Education and it's published in the Journal of Urban Education by Dr. Richard Milner who's now a faculty member at Vanderbilt. And it talks really about how one of, like the core arguments is about how public discourse, and even in like academia, urban education is implicitly coded as education for students of color. So the words urban become less about geography and more about race.

And I, and you see this in interesting ways, like in practice, like for example, like a rural school leader might refer to what the census would call like a town as quote unquote, their urban area, right? It's where students of color are concentrated. And on the flip, like when the public or media talk about suburban schools, the image that tends to be conjured is one of whiteness and affluence. And I think the problem with both of these perceptions is that they don't always match the contemporary demographic patterns on the ground, like I've talked about like I mentioned earlier there's obviously cities are experiencing gentrification in pieces and so urban or city may be diverse in pocket, more diverse in pockets than it was a couple decades in the past. And the suburbs too, the suburbs are more diverse than I think a lot of people realize. Even during elections and things like that, they talk about suburban and I think they're conjuring images of demographics and they're not actually saying that, it's a kind of coded language.

And so I think where this becomes consequential is that when you have students in an educational leadership program, and in their mind, they're going to be suburban school leaders per se. They may need increasingly what has been framed as urban education training according to this past dynamic.

And they may need preparation around diversity and culturally responsive leadership and as Erica's termed it race-evasive or not doing race-evasive policymaking. And so I think that's part of what's important is to problematize the, what people are really saying when they're using these geographic labels and then pointing out that the labels in the minds and the imaginations of people who are using them may mean something or on the ground may BE something different than what they think they are.

Erica Turner: It, the urban schools or urban districts is often used very euphemistically, and it's naturalized because it isn't really - the notion isn't examined closely outside, like broadly speaking outside of the circles that we're talking about.

And so the view of this is what urban places or suburban places are like. It's, it becomes very naturalized in this. Assumed. And one issue is that places are, and people in them are misrecognized like Brian said. And I think another issue is that within urban spaces, again, somewhat the flip of the suburban imagine space is that people and schools in urban spaces are often understood in deficit, in stereotypical ways.

And it's seen as natural, like just what people in schools there are like, rather than recognize that there's these particular structural conditions that have created these spaces to be the way they are. Some places just thrive more than others. And so things like segregation and uneven economic development and those are typically raced as well, even within cities. So I think that makes it hard for us to remember or recognized and see, when we just think of urban as this kind of way things are how they both have been constructed to be that way and could be otherwise. And there's not, I'm not saying that urban places don't, aren't seen as positive, but even when they are seen as positive, these kind of structural elements are still obscured.

So that we can like really again, like celebrate the diversity of urban places, but maybe not recognize that your - whatever your ethnic food is supplied by a working class, sometimes exploited group of immigrant labor, et cetera. I think and it's often these notions are also seen from the outside and have been exploited for profit.

So people within urban communities that are being portrayed as unsafe or out of control, that is not necessarily the experience of people who live in them, and it doesn't capture the experience of what, how they may be supported by those communities benefit from them. Or they may offer something that just may not, that's a value that isn't, that doesn't exist just because a place has more resources.

Bryan Mann: And can I just add one more thing too related to geography and labeling and things like that. I alluded to this earlier, but I think it's really important is labeling, like using the census definition of urban, like at the district level versus at the school level, has really big implications.

And for researchers out there, I would really encourage them to use school-level labeling because, for example, the state of Hawaii has only one single school district, and if you look at its classifications, I think it's classified as suburban just because of the average student or whatever, where they go to school.

And if you are there's these coded and ways that we use these labels in language, but then also in the research aspect of things like how the labels are defined through the census and things like that. I think the, it's where we started the conversation, like the boundaries are so different everywhere that researchers should use the school level classification because of how these different districts, like a suburban district may actually contain rural schools and quote unquote urban schools using the census definition. So I think these pieces like technically are really important as well to think about.

Christopher Saldaña: That's another great segue, Brian, because the last question is about recommendations and you've both done a great job of dropping some nuggets and recommendations along the way.

But if there is, and there are many, I imagine, communities or leaders or families who are trying to navigate demographic change. And genuinely trying to do that in ways that promotes integration and equity and justice. What sorts of recommendations would you give to those communities and folks?

Erica Turner: I I think my point, my work tries to point to the tensions and where schools reproduce inequality as being grounded in broader structural inequalities in communities. And I think to the extent that we have schools that kind of have been designed to be inequitable or to privilege certain stakeholders you don't get out of that without kind of challenging that and that makes it, it makes, because it's already like that in a lot of school systems, right? There are these parents who can threaten to leave the district and that seems scary to a lot of school district leaders, et cetera. I think it really requires some kind of countervailing power.

It means like that people outside of schools, like those marginalized communities I think it often has to come from outside of the school. So that's one thing that's a very kind of broad thing. I, and I'll acknowledge like people are doing kind of equity audits and different ways of looking at data in ways that are also trying to be more attentive to a broad number of measures or to different starting places.

So there's all those kinds of strategies as well. But I do try to focus on the structural reasons behind why people behave how they do. And so I think that one important thing is to think about how we can change those structures so that it doesn't, makes it less likely that people will do that in certain ways.

And then the other thing is in new work that I've done with Alex Freidus is I think it'll be coming out in Ed Researcher pretty soon. We've looked at research on school segregation, integration, and diversity over the, like last 70 years since Brown. And in that we're trying to say I think one thing we can take from that is how we should think in more nuanced ways about what it requires to have educational justice and racial justice in education. And so I think there's been arguments for redistributing resources in more just ways. There's other kinds of arguments that have sometimes been pitted against the redistributive intention about recognition and having like equal status and for your groups and then representation of your desires in how schools are governed. And so I think that those are - we've argued that it's not productive to necessarily think of them as always intention, and we should be trying to get them aligned in order to really have racially just schools.

And so I think that is another, it's not a recommendation the way people typically think about it, but I think it's a framework for thinking about how do you move forward in a way that is racially just given that we don't have it now, so we're not working from a blank slate, right? We're already working from these preexisting inequalities.

Bryan Mann: Yeah, and I, Chris, I gave away a bunch of my recommendations through my answers earlier, but I think the only thing I would add is that when I have students, and I'm talking through the, say they're in a situation where they are able to achieve diversity or whatever it is, that integrated school environment and the resources are there, I point to an old framework the contact hypothesis, the Allport, it's there's been a lot of work since that and there's it's not perfect. But this lists like four things to think about as trying to cultivate good inner group dynamics. The first is equal status that everyone in your school, in this case, it would be students are on equal footing.

The second is that they're shared goals, that the school has some shared goals that everyone pursues together. The third is that there's intergroup cooperation. So you find ways to have groups together that are cooperating. And the fourth and this is exactly what Erica has been talking about is support from the authorities and the law and norms is so that there's institutional support through the means of resources or other types of things.

So like I said, the Allport it's a, it goes back to the fifties and Brown vs Board stuff, but I think it's a good starting point for students that latch onto a framework that could get them going in the right, students being educational leadership students, is the world that I'm in, get them going in the right direction if they are in those rare environments where they have students and families from different backgrounds in their schools.

 So that's just, yeah, another one that I would add.

Christopher Saldaña: Thank you, Dr. Turner and Dr. Mann for being on this month's podcast. As always, we hope you're safe and healthy. Remember, for the latest analysis on education policy, you should subscribe to the NEPC newsletter at nepc.colorado.edu.