Knowing Their Lines: How Social Boundaries Undermine Equity‐based Integration Policies in U.S. and South African Schools

In this paper the authors argue that although the United States and South Africa have produced qualitatively different national frames about the necessity for racial integration in education, certain practices converge in both nations at the school level that thwart integrationist goals. Drawing on sociologist Jeannie Oakes and colleagues’ idea of schools as “zones of mediation” of economic, racial, social, and cultural phenomena, the authors provide empirical evidence of how a complex set of social interactions — sustained by explicit organized school practices — limit educators’ and students’ abilities to accept and comply with integrationist aims of equity and the redress of cumulative disadvantages due to past racial discrimination.

They discuss how social and symbolic boundaries reproduced by educational actors in everyday school practices illuminate the macromicro tension between the goals of racial integration policy and perceived group interests. Their arguments emerge from thorough analyses of ethnographic, interview, and survey data from four desegregated and mixed race schools in South Africa and the United States obtained over a four-year period from multiracial and desegregated schools located in four US and South African cities.

This report was presented at the CASBS Summer Workshop, "Race and Inequality in Education: Reframing a Research and Policy Agenda for the 21st Century."