Dr. Erica Turner, author of Suddenly Diverse, to Present at the Wisconsin Book Festival: Unraveling the Complex Strands of Academic Inequity (Part 1 of 2)
UW-Madison Professor and Researcher Dr. Erica Turner grew up in the Bernal Heights district in San Francisco
By Jonathan Gramling
On some levels, Dr. Erica Turner was placed into the midst of the educational issues as a child that she now studies at UW-Madison and wrote a book about called Suddenly Diverse, which she will speak on at the Madison Downtown Library on October 21st at 10:30 a.m.
Turner was born and raised in Bernal Heights, just south of the Mission District in San Francisco. Her parents — her father was African American and mother Chinese American — were well-educated and placed education at the center of family life and values. And her parents — particularly her mother — were very intentional about their children’s education.
“At that time in San Francisco, due to a court-ordered desegregation consent decree, there were some magnet schools that had been set up,” Turner said. “There was also a long-standing magnet high school that traces back to the 1800s. At each of these steps in our education, my mother would talk to us about them. And one of the things that really stuck with me was she had also grown up in San Francisco. I was assigned to go to the middle school that she had gone to. She went to that school and she found not only was there one teacher there that she had when she was a child there, but also a lot of segregation within the school. There was a lot of tracking with mostly Black and Latinx students in the lower track classes and white and Asian kids in the other track classes. For many reasons then, she didn’t think that school was the kind of school that my parents wanted to send us to. I instead went to a school that had been created out of that consent decree with the aims of racial justice. It was a primarily Mexican and Central American student population. It was a pretty dramatically different school. It was a really, really wonderful school in my own experience. But the choice in that whole conversation around that made me think, ‘Why does a place like San Francisco that professes to believe in racial justice and equity, a progressive vision of society nonetheless still has schools that perpetuate racial inequality?’And it wasn’t just in my middle school experience. When I went to high school, I went to this magnet school, Lowell High School, which has been consistently the site of debates about how admissions should be a fair admissions process, very analogous to the affirmative action debate in higher education. Who gets into this school? And what role should race play in the assignment to what is a very sought after school.”
These experiences are what fueled Turner’s intellectual curiosity. She earned her undergraduate degree at Swathmore College aand taught school for a few years before earning her Ph.D. at UC-Berkeley. It was while she was completing her dissertation work on two school districts in Wisconsin that Tucker applied for and received a position at UW-Madison’s School of Education.
“I ended up studying a lot around school district decision-making and married that with kind of trying to understand the racial politics of school district decision-making,” Turner said. “And that was in grad school and I’ve been on that trajectory ever since. It’s kind of a personal and intellectual question about how do we profess to believe in equity and schools as an engine of that, but then continue to perpetuate inequality through our schooling. And then intellectually, a lot of focus has been on how districts make decisions within the organization, but not paid attention to the often political decisions, ones shaped by race. I was interested in bringing that together in my book Suddenly Diverse.
Suddenly Diverse focuses on the experiences of two school districts in Wisconsin, whom Turner refers to with the pseudonyms Fairview and Milltown.
“These school districts are undergoing demographic change and they try to enact policies that will better serve their changing student population in equitable ways,” Turner said. “Despite those intentions, they end up adopting policies that I would argue undermine racial equity and rewrite racism in many ways. I feel that in these places, they really want to hold on to public schools. But I would argue that it is very hard to hold onto the publicness and equity-oriented concepts of what public schools can be when you enact these new managerial approaches.”
Public schools oftentimes balance multiple goals within the academic setting. Sometimes they are complementary and sometimes not.
“Some of these goals are just kind of the individual mobility of students and families and groups that might involve getting a good job, securing the skills and the means to make a life for yourself,” Turner said. “But also there are goals around equity. Schools have been seen as a vehicle for making a more equitable society. And then also around democracy and the kind of place we want to be, the kind of society we want to be with civic skills and learning about other places in the world and history and some of those things. People have argued that all these three kinds of goals have typically missed it. There’s an idea about individual social mobility that there is a kind of set of goals and ideas about schools and purposes of schools being to further a democratic and just society and third kind of having other goals that serve society around reproducing society, whether it is culture or people to be in positions and particular jobs that are needed in communities.”
Another goal has risen to the fore in relatively recent times and it has tended to dominate the others, the whole concept of measuring achievement.
“What has been privileged is this idea of achievement and literacy and mathematics especially,” Turner said. “So we can see that with the idea of thinking about schools as needing to raise test score as a major purpose or goal and practice of what’s happening in schools rather than other things like teaching history or teaching debate or journalism or art. The way my book kind of engages with this idea is to say the idea of the purpose of schools has an analogy in how we see the purpose of educational leadership. The purpose is to increase achievement and to do that really efficiently or effectively. That’s a different goal and has different implications for what schools should look like. In my book, I talk to and I observe school board members, school superintendents, assistant superintendents and people who work within the central office. They are concerned with running school districts and making decisions about what schools should look like and what kind of practices and reforms should be carried out. This kind of the central organism for how we govern schools in the U.S. I argue in the book that there is kind of a new logic behind how people think that educational leadership should happen. And that should operate along the lines of what is called new managerialism. It’s the idea that again school leaders should work in entrepreneurial and corporate or business-inspired ways to help boost achievement as a primary goal. For example, there is this idea then of school leadership following a business-like logic. What is the best way to raise achievement or raise test scores and how can you have schools compete with other schools for enrollment and market themselves to satisfy their customers and so forth and so on.”
Turner calls this “Colorblind Managerialism.”
“In the book, it is called ‘colorblind managerialism’, which follows a particular scholar named Eduardo Bonilla-Silva who talks about color blindness as a form of racism today that seeks to minimize systemic racism,” Turner said. “People are saying, ‘I don’t see color.’ That is where the term color-blindness comes from. ‘That’s something in the past. It’s just a few aberrant individuals who are racist.’ It’s a pretty common discourse across the political spectrum. His point is that isn’t true. And so by minimizing the significance of race as a way of continuing racism because if you ignore it or don’t do anything about it, then it can persist. Instead, people say, ‘Oh, it’s those people. It’s their cultural beliefs.’ They deny that it is an issue that has to be addressed. So from the perspective of colorblind or race-evasive managerialism, managerial responses are race-evasive with the idea of putting in a new testing and accountability system or looking at data and then seeing how different groups are doing, which is really common in schools now. That’s a race-evasive one. People may identify that there is a problem of racism, but the solution does not address the underlying problems of unequal educational outcomes by race.”
As our society becomes more diverse, school districts feel a need to market themselves as being diverse school districts as a way to attract and retain students. Saying it doesn’t make it so.
“The other thing that I look at and document is how school districts see marketing of their diversity as an equity-oriented effort,” Turner said. “The districts want it to say that diversity is a positive thing. So they had a real thing that they were responding to and trying to market: diversity. And that’s the knowledge that kind of a dominant way within our society of thinking about what a good school is and it’s a white school and not a racially diverse school or school that has Black or Latinx students. They wanted to calm that perception that as schools became more diverse, people saw them as not good schools. But marketing diversity can be a real surface response. Even here at the University of Wisconsin, we have the history of having Photoshopped in a Black student into a picture of a UW football game for promotional materials. That was very surface. It doesn’t actually change the fact of who the student body is and why there is remarkably small numbers of students of color at UW-Madison.
