Diversity Dissonance as an Implication of One School’s Relocation and Reintegration Initiative

Abstract

Purpose: This article describes one charter school’s ‘diversity’ initiative—a relocation to a racially and socioeconomically diverse site—intended to reintegrate minoritized students displaced by gentrification. Research Design: We employ Critical Race Quantitative Intersectionality to frame the descriptive analyses of student enrollment, city census, and parent survey data that narrates the resulting student demographics after a school’s relocation. Our goal in utilizing an anti-racist framework rooted in Critical Race Theory is to a) quantify the racist material impact of “race-neutral” reform through intersectional data mining, b) disrupt the notion of letting “numbers speak for themselves” without critical analysis, and c) taking a transdisciplinary perspective to reveal the hidden patterns of whiteness under the guise of diversity. Findings: Our findings highlight the limits of a school’s agency to implement ‘diversity’ policies aimed at reintegrating minoritized students displaced from opportunity. While the relocation racially diversified the student population, the policy failed to reintegrate the district’s historically minoritized population. This exclusion both limited who had the right to use and enjoy the school and reinforced the school’s status and reputation, thus cementing its whiteness as property. Implications: We conceptualize diversity dissonance as a framework that challenges the unary ahistorical criteria that describe current school demographics, and calls for leaders and policymakers to problematize how the construct of diversity is interpreted when considering minoritized students’ access to programs and schools. Diversity dissonance situates diversity from solely an inclusive rhetoric to an exclusionary one, where limited access reinforces status—mimicking rather than juxtaposing whiteness.