What American urban secondary schools could be: an international perspective

Pages463-472
Date06 August 2018
Published date06 August 2018
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1108/JEA-08-2018-172
AuthorMoosung Lee
Subject MatterEducation,Administration & policy in education,School administration/policy,Educational administration,Leadership in education
COMMENTARY
What American urban
secondary schools could be:
an international perspective
Not much has changed
Back in the spring of 2005, as a first-year doctoral student at the University of Minnesota,
Iparticipatedinanenrichmentprogramforforeign Fulbright scholars pursuing graduate
degrees in US unive rsities. The prog ram was held in New Or leans just a few month s
before Hurricane Katrina struck Louisiana. More than the enrichment agenda, I enjoyed
the mild spring weather of New Orleans and deep cultural flavors imbued in the city. On
the last day of the pro gram, the partic ipants visited a lo cal high school in N ew Orleans.
IstillrememberthemomentthatIwalkedthrough the entrance gate of the high school,
because I encountered a dark side of the urban schooling system in America: I saw a police
officer with a gun and police car just in front of the main building. Oh my goodness, a
police officer with a gun in school!I was thinking inside. One may dismiss my experience
as just a cultural shock. But I think it is more than culture shock; it is evidence of a
systemic problem persistently facing US urban schools. My intention is not to debate the
pros and cons of law enforcement officers in US schools[1]. Rather what I wish to point out
is that things have become worse since the first school resource officer was assigned to a
school in the 1950s. School violence issues have escalated, and other major dysfunctions
appear to be perpetuating across many secondary schools in the US. This is evidenced in
this JEA special edition, titled Understanding and improving urban secondary schools:
new perspectives.For example, Roozbeh Shirazi depicts the issue of segregation within a
school through the eyes of school staff:
[] whats happening even in the lunchroom [] every time I went down there looking for a
student, Im like, oh, look towards the black tables or the white tables or whatever because very
rarely are they, are they intermingling and its really disappointing.
Despite the Brown vs Board decision of 1954, black-white racial segregation between
schools has continuously taken place in parallel with the racial segregation between
urban and suburban areas (Orfield and Lee, 2006). Furthermore, racial segregation within
an urban school, illustrated in Shirazis article in this issue, has been consolidated and
complicated with the influx of new immigrants, including refugees. The findings
presented by Shirazi resonate with Stacey Lees (2004) observation 14 years ago from
an urban high school in Wisconsin:
As a relative newcomer to the UnitedStates [] Cha [Hmong ESL student] occupies the sidelines in
the cafeteria, thehalls, and classrooms [] Cha has a small circleof Hmong friends that include his
girlfriendand two other boys. Significantly,his friends are all relativenewcomers to the UnitedStates
[] Cha regularlyeats lunch with this same groupof friends and laughs and talks quietly[](p.21).
Within-school segregation should not be trivialized as studentsvoluntary
self-segregating behaviors. Such behaviors appear to be consequences of multiple
forms of disadvantage (e.g. lack of parental involvement, culturally-insensitive
curricula, limited English proficiency, institutionalized racism, peer pressure, low SES,
school poverty, crime). Within this multi-layered disadvantage, minoritized students
self-segregation within a school seems to be the last resort, because they have no other
Journal of Educational
Administration
Vol. 56 No. 5, 2018
pp. 463-472
© Emerald PublishingLimited
0957-8234
DOI 10.1108/JEA-08-2018-172
463
American
urban
secondary
schools

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