Publications

This study investigates dilemmas of whiteness that challenge a young people’s campaign for school integration in New York City. Using ethnographic data, I illustrate the ways in which whiteness shaped individual racialized identities as allies and activists; contributed to an organizational culture that many members of color considered a “White space”; and operated as both an asset and a limitation in the group’s collective organizing strategy. I argue that multiracial educational coalitions and social movements must critically and consciously engage with the dilemmas of whiteness that they encounter.

Freidus, Alexandra. 2023. “White Organizers or White Organizations? Activism and Identity in a Youth-Led Movement for School Integration.” Harvard Educational Review.

This study examines competing justice claims that stakeholders—including district leaders, families, and educators—evoked during the 2020 COVID-19 New York City school reopening debates. Drawing on frameworks by Fraser (1997, 2000, 2005) and Abu El-Haj (2006) and thematic analysis of 300 news and opinion articles, we examine stakeholders’ overlapping and contested understandings of justice in public education, including claims related to how school resources are distributed; whom district policies recognize; and who is represented in policymaking. In addition to deepening our understanding of the educational politics of the COVID-19 pandemic – an event with field-changing consequences – our analysis offers researchers and policymakers a more robust basis for advancing equity and conceptualizing just educational policy for multiple stakeholders.

Freidus, Alexandra and Erica Turner. “Contested Justice: New York City’s COVID-19 School Reopening Debates.” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis.

Discussions of school integration often contrast the perceived deficits of segregated schools with the perceived strengths of schools with diverse student bodies. In this study, I examine the relationships that school community members infer between student demographics and school quality in diversifying areas of New York City. I use portraits of three New Yorkers to examine the ways that school community members reluctantly re-inscribe the stigma associated with segregated schools, assuming that the best way to improve a school is to increase its diversity. These braided discourses of pathology and diversity call into question the extent to which advocacy for integration advances the goals of educational justice.

Freidus, Alexandra. 2022. “Segregation, Diversity, and Pathology: Constructing School Quality in Gentrifying New York.” Educational Policy 36(4).

Drawing on a year of participant observation in an untracked, diversifying middle school, I examine how sixth graders positioned themselves and were positioned by others as “smart” or “not smart.” I focus on peer interactions during cooperative small group instruction, identifying the material, relational, and ideational resources students used to navigate academic and racial hierarchies. I explore implications for researchers and practitioners who seek to disrupt racialized academic outcomes in untracked classrooms.

Freidus, Alexandra. 2021. “Looking Smart: Race and Ability in a Diversifying Middle School.” Anthropology and Education Quarterly 53(2)

This article examines the ways Hazel, a white girl entering kindergarten, became known as a child with a problem rather than a problem child in her gentrifying school. Building on a year of classroom observations and interviews with students, school staff, and parents, author Alexandra Freidus identifies the role of racialized discourses related to disposition, medicalization, family, and community in shaping Hazel’s reputation and contrasts Hazel’s reputation with that of Marquise, a Black boy in her class. Hazel’s and Marquise’s storylines teach us that to fully understand and address the differences in how Black and white children are disciplined, we need to look closely at the allowances and affordances we make for some students, as well as how we disproportionately punish others. By examining the ways educators in a gentrifying school construct white innocence and Black culpability, this study illustrates the relational nature of the “school discipline gap” and helps us understand how and why some children are disproportionately subject to surveillance and exclusion and others are not.

Freidus, Alexandra. 2021. “Problem Children and Children with Problems: Discipline and Innocence in a Gentrifying Elementary School.” Harvard Educational Review 90(4): 550-572

This article examines the frameworks that stakeholders bring to debates about diversifying schools in gentrifying areas of New York City. Using critical ethnographic methods, I explore stakeholders’ hopes and fears about the effects of shifting school demographics and the relationships between student demographics and school quality. I find that stakeholders use racialized discourses of belonging to discuss whether, why, and how student demographics matter. These discourses of belonging overlap with perceptions of demographic change as opportunities for integration, fears of gentrification, and threats to individual property. Complicating celebrations of ‘‘diversity,’’ I explore the ways in which race is implicated in considerations of who belongs in a school and to whom a school belongs.

Freidus, Alexandra. 2020. “Modes of Belonging: Debating School Demographics in Gentrifying New York.” American Educational Research Journal 57(2): 808-839

I strive to understand the tensions between a diversifying school’s efforts to create an antiracist school community and a classroom pedagogy that frequently marginalized the experiences, knowledge, and questions of students of color. I use the school’s response to the 2016 presidential election as a window into the challenges involved in developing assetbased pedagogies in racially and culturally diverse classrooms. By exploring the texture of teaching and learning in a school that endeavors to sustain its racially and culturally diverse students, I complicate widely held but often underexamined, assumptions about the benefits of diversity in the classroom.

Freidus, Alexandra. 2020. “’I Didn’t Have a Lesson’: Politics and Pedagogy in a Diversifying Middle School.” Teachers College Record 122(7)

Middle-class, professional, and White families in gentrifying cities are increasingly choosing neighborhood public schools. As critical consumers of public education, these families frequently bring not only new resources to schools but also new demands. This article examines the process of “school gentrification” by analyzing the discourse of a neighborhood parents’ listserv. I find that as they worked to make their local public school “great,” advantaged parents performed the role of careful investors, defined themselves as the source of the school’s potential value, and marginalized low-income families and families of color. These findings raise important questions about educational equity for both educational researchers and urban school and district leaders.

Freidus, Alexandra. 2019. “‘A Great School Benefits Us All’: Advantaged Parents and the Gentrification of an Urban Public School.” Urban Education 54(8): 1121-1128

This article explores the challenges that have made the pursuit of school integration difficult in the contemporary era. Using court records and newspaper archives, we explore how a New York City school desegregation order came to be seen as ‘‘unnecessary,’’ ‘‘unfair,’’ and ‘‘anachronistic,’’ claims that seem to deny the salience of race in one of the most segregated school systems in the nation. In 1974, Mark Twain Junior High School in Coney Island became the first New York City school to desegregate under federal district court order. Three decades later, Mark Twain was a highly desirable magnet school under a court-mandated desegregation plan that left students across the city competing fiercely for admissions. In 2007, an immigrant parent from India successfully sued New York City, claiming his daughter was passed over in favor of white students who scored lower on the city’s selective school screening test but were admitted in the name of maintaining the 1974 court-mandated racial balance. We argue that Mark Twain’s story vividly illustrates not only the importance of demographic change in school desegregation policy but also the evolution of racial discourse and the conceptions of the public good in the post-civil rights era.

Freidus, Alexandra and Pedro Noguera. 2015. “From ‘Good Will’ to ‘Anachronism’: School Desegregation in an Era of Shifting Demographics, Racial Discourse, and Conceptions of the Public Good.” Humanity and Society 39 (3): 1-25