The Politics of School Rezoning in the “Cradle of a Nation”: Racial Segregation, Settler Colonialism, and Private Property in Williamsburg, Virginia

Abstract

Rezoning public school attendance boundaries offers important possibilities for promoting school integration; however, it tends to generate contentious debates, often with white, middle-class parents furiously opposing school reassignments. In this paper, we ask: what logics and discourses do race and class-privileged parents draw on to justify educational inequities, and how are such discourses employed? To explore these questions we analyze a high school rezoning controversy in the Williamsburg-James City County School Division in Eastern Virginia. We conducted a content analysis of public commentary collected from school board meetings, two district-administered surveys, and social media and local news outlets. We bring together Critical Race and Settler Colonial theoretical perspectives to argue that white, middle-class parents and residents mobilized the intertwined logics of private property and whiteness to claim entitlement to the highly ranked Jamestown High School. They did so by combining well-worn colorblind, deficiency frameworks with argumentative logics that leveraged their position as property owners in affluent neighborhoods. First, they linked home ownership in expensive, residential subdivisions to “responsible parenting,” “freedom,” and “choice.” Second, they constructed the social bonds and “community” forged in overwhelmingly white, high-cost, residential sub-divisions as valuable to schools, making residents deserving of assignment to “the best school.” This analysis sheds crucial light on the discursive linkages between color-blind racism and white private property and how white, class-privileged parents mobilize these deeply intertwined logics to defend entitlement to educational resources.