September 12, 2005
Lipman, Pauline. Race, Class and Power in School Restructuring. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1998.
In her book, Lipman examines the effect of school restructuring on two urban junior high schools which she calls Gates and Franklin, located in a mid-sized Southern city. Efforts to restructure these schools (which included giving teachers more authority, creating smaller “teams” of students within classes and forming organizations that promoted dialogue about race) were all thwarted by teachers’ own unacknowledged racial prejudice and by the power wielded by Riverton’s white upper-middle-class parents, school board members and administrators. Lipman concludes that efforts to restructure schools fail to address the needs of minority and low-income students because they tend to reproduce larger social inequalities.
Lipman begins by giving a history of school desegregation and restructuring in Riverton, and in the United States more generally. She defines restructuring as a movement that began in the mid-1980s in an effort to enhance the role of teachers in schools (14). Citing Schlecty (1990), Clune & White (1988) and Elmore & Assoc (1990), Lipman writes that, “The term restructuring implies a fundamental redefinition of the means and ends of education…However, in practice, restructuring carries a variety of meanings. Site-based management, steering committees of teachers and parents, collaborative management by principles and staff, instructional teams, reorganization of schools into houses or clusters, coordination of schools and social services, scaled-down bureaucracies—all have become common organizational features of schools that claim to be restructuring” (14).
However, as Lipman points out, efforts to restructure schools often fail to help minority students. Despite efforts that have been made to reduce inequalities and improve the achievement of students of color, “low achievement, disproportionate assignment to low academic tracks and special education classes, high drop-out rates, and academic disengagement and alienation of students of color continue to be critical issues,” Lipman writes (8). Schools continue to have a dominant white culture and power structure (12). Furthermore, Lipman points out, African Americans continue to be stereotyped as a “problem people” by TV and in popular culture. Schools propagate this racist stereotype by labeling young, African American males “at-risk” and therefore prone to amoral or violent behavior. As Lipman writes, “Naming children ‘at-risk’ directs attention away from institutional practices, policies and ideologies and implies that widespread school failure is a rather natural consequence of these students’ characteristics” (13).
In an effort to understand better why restructuring efforts often fail to help low-income and minority students, Lipman studied the Riverton school district in the summer of 1988 through 1991, just as administrators were beginning to implement a restructuring program. Through interviews and classroom observation, Lipman uncovers the many racist and classist stereotypes that this program propagated.
Lipman explains that restructuring is based around three central concepts: “1) decentralized organizations that strengthen teachers’ participation and initiative foster innovation; 2) collaboration may promote critical inquiry and dialogues of change; 3) smaller, collective settings will nurture students, strengthen their commitment to school and build trust between students and teachers” (36).
All three of these restructuring concepts failed to address the needs of minority and low-income students in Riverton, Lipman explains. Concept 1 fails because “…the activities, programs and strategies devised by teachers reproduced the inequalities which shaped African American students’ lives in school. The incentives and contests, which figured so prominently in the works of teams at Gates, actually highlighted African American students’ subordination” (283). Concept 2 fails because, “…in general, there was little reflective conversation about beliefs and practices or school policies. Issues at the core of many African American students’ experiences in school—deficit models, misinterpretation of discourse (language, style, social interactions), academic tracking, negation of students’ strengths, the exclusion of diverse students’ experiences and histories in the curriculum, the problematic implications of an emphasis on individual competition—were not touched” (284). Concept 3 fails because “…the one-sided emphasis on supportive relations with students led to paternalism. At both schools, many teachers adopted the stance of saving the students from their families and communities rather than working with them to devise solutions in the interest of children” (287).
Lipman concludes that, “The general direction of restructuring in Riverton—the issues educators addressed and their responses to those issues—was shaped by prevailing discourses about African American students and by dominant educational ideologies. The discourse surrounding African American and ‘at-risk’ students exerted a particularly potent influence on how educators defined the problem of African American low-achievement and disengagement from school…In the restructuring project and in the voices of many teachers and administrators, African American students were the problem, not racism and inequality, and the remedies were directed to them” (291). In Riverton, as in other instances of restructuring, “the concern was with formal and superficial signs of integration, not racism and inequality” (289). Lipman believes that in order to reach out to minority and low-income students, larger social/structural issues must first be addressed: “Unless educators challenge existing values, practices and policies that are taken for granted, meaningful and lasting change is unlikely” (38).
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