"You Can't Bus Parental Attitudes: Parenting and the Battle over Segregation and Inequality in Connecticut's Schools" by Chauncy Hart Lennon

Chauncy Hart Lennon

Deposited 2000

Abstract
This dissertation is an anthropological study of an educational policy planning process that took place in Connecticut in 1993 and 1994. Ethnographic research with supporters and opponents of this initiative to voluntarily promote racial desegregation and educational quality explored the cultural notion of parenting practices that is used by state residents to make sense of racial, economic, and educational inequality. To understand the contemporary battles over segregation and inequality, it is crucial to see how the idea that parental attitudes and behaviors determine a child's potential for academic achievement increasingly sets the ground rules for debates about the causes of educational inequality, and, in turn, what steps can and should taken to foster equality. Two conflicting dynamics are at work. On the one hand, this notion of parenting practices is deeply rooted in a middle class view of the role and obligation of parents that cuts across racial groups, underpinning a growing sense that desegregation is no longer a top priority for urban African-Americans or their white counterparts in the suburbs. On the other hand, persistent racial segregation and educational inequality along urban-suburban lines creates very different positions from which most whites and blacks experience educational inequality. This leads to opposing interpretations between whites and blacks about, in general, the existence of structural inequality and, in particular, the nature of parenting practices as a form of inequality. For the white, suburban middle classes parenting practices are tantamount to a new form inherent inequality, beyond the ability or responsibility of society to remedy. For African Americans inadequate parenting is one of the numerous forms of inequality that students in disadvantaged urban schools face and that the larger society has the ability and responsibility to correct. The emergence of parenting as an explanation of inequality and as rationale for opposition to reform also illuminates the complex nature of the responses of the suburban middle classes to shifting structures of economic opportunity and to transformations of the economic, social, and political ecology of metropolitan America.