The DEI Doctrine: How Suburban Schools Interpret Inequality

Handsman, Emily

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-1qsx-jc10

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The DEI Doctrine: How Suburban Schools Interpret Inequality

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This dissertation analyzes how suburban school districts made sense of and planned to reduce inequality between 2019–2021. Previous literature has found that suburban schools, despite their reputation as the best in the country, are deeply unequal (Lewis and Diamond 2015; Lewis-McCoy 2014). Building on this previous scholarship, I ask: How did suburban school personnel interpret their role in responding to inequality? The time period included in this project includes the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic as well as the police murder of George Floyd, both of which caused significant disruption to suburban school districts. To address this, I ask: How did the events of 2020 change the way suburban school personnel interpreted their role in responding to inequality? To answer these questions, I use interviews, documents, and ethnographic data from three school districts outside of Philadelphia, in addition to a broader sample of documents from the 60 surrounding school districts. I find that even before diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts were invigorated in 2020, suburban school districts had a blueprint for interpreting inequality that I call the DEI Doctrine. This doctrine consists of three tenets: 1. Schools, school districts, and their workers have a professional responsibility to work to fix inequality AND to educate students about broader social inequalities; 2. DEI initiatives focus on creating representational diversity to the exclusion of other potential equity goals; and 3. DEI initiatives are nonpartisan and able to exist in communion with districts’ commitment to political neutrality. Next, I find that overall, this doctrine absorbed the shocks of 2020, guiding school districts as they navigated these difficult times. In order to analyze these tenets and disruptions, I rely on a combination of ideas from institutional theory, the sociology of education, the sociology of race and racism, the sociology of culture, and political sociology. In the end, this dissertation makes contributions to scholarly understandings of institutional myths, racial ideology, political neutrality in schools, and the effects of disruptions on school districts.

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