2025 Theses Doctoral

Framing Racial Equity in U.S. School Districts

Siegler, Bonnie Rogers

Many organizations, including school districts, made public statements describing their commitments to racial equity in response to Minneapolis police officers’ murder of George Floyd and global calls for racial justice in summer 2020, but what can be learned about race, organizations, education, and inequality from these statements? Are they simply empty promises? How has the growing backlash against DEI efforts in organizations changed the interpretation of these statements? Even still, what do these commitments reveal about changing institutional norms around racial equity in organizations and public education?

I collected any online public statements about racial equity in the summer of 2020 from a random sample of 990 U.S. school districts, as well as a purposive sample of roughly 448 districts nested in 50 large metropolitan areas. I use this dataset to answer several questions about racial equity commitments in U.S. school districts and organizations more broadly.Why do some organizations make statements while others remain silent? Drawing on research on corporate sociopolitical involvement and racial equity work in public education, I argue that statements play a role in constructing organizations as legitimate, thus maintaining support of their constituents.

Chapter 1 examines which districts made public statements in response to Floyd’s murder and which remained silent. I consider the influence of the demographic and ideological characteristics of the district’s surrounding community; its chief executive, the superintendent; and the relevance of deadly anti-Black police violence and of DEI efforts to the local community. I find that the proportion of Democratic voters and proportion of college-educated adults in the surrounding community, as well as having a decreasing majority of White students, positively predict that a district made a statement, while the proportion of Black students, the sociodemographic characteristics of the superintendent, relevance of the Black Lives Matter movement, and existence of achievement gaps between White and Black students do not predict that a district made a statement, nor did the behavior of their neighboring districts. I thus argue that districts make statements to appeal to ideologically aligned adults in their community and because they are “managing” demographic change.

This finding suggests that racial equity commitments are important for organizational legitimacy in certain contexts in the U.S., but not normative everywhere, and not necessarily in communities most harmed by systemic racism.

What do these statements reveal about how leaders of organizations approach racial equity? What can organizational approaches to racial equity show about racial attitudes and beliefs across the United States? Chapter 2 uses computational text analysis methods to identify common patterns in the statements and how they vary by district demographic characteristics. I find three main ways district leaders described the problem of racism in their districts that vary by the partisan-leaning and income of the districts. Using these patterns, I develop a theory of racial equity frames, or ways organization leaders think they should publicly describe racism, which align with commitments to different organizational approaches to addressing racial equity. These frames vary from race-evasive, in-line with norms of color-blindness, to anti-racist, suggesting organizations must recognize their own complicity in constructing racial domination in society. While the “Bad Apples” frame supports the status quo and the “Let’s Talk” frame suggests mostly performative changes, statements using the “All Hands on Deck” frame suggest some school district leaders have taken and/or plan to take significant steps to address racism in their organizations, breaking with past norms. This understanding of racism is associated with greater proportions of Democratic voters, providing background that can further elucidate the backlash against DEI efforts in public education led by Republican partisans. Racial equity frames theory provides a fruitful lens through which to examine racial equity commitments across organization types and over time.

I find that district leaders vary in how they portray the importance of talking about race as part of their organization’s approach to racial equity, with districts serving higher income communities portraying “talk” as central to their commitment to racial equity. Chapter 3 demonstrates that how high-income districts describe the importance of talking about race varies by the proportion of White students in the district. District leaders in predominantly White, high-income districts assert, sometimes explicitly, that they must teach privileged White students to talk about race to prepare them to be leaders in a diversifying society. This chapter develops a theory of race-conscious refinement and contributes to the sociology of Whiteness by complicating the theory of racial ignorance, as well as adding to research on White racial socialization.

Together, these three chapters suggest that many of the commitments school district leaders made in 2020, even if followed through on, are unlikely to make major strides towards eliminating racial inequality or racism in schools in the U.S. Nevertheless, organizations, particularly those serving advantaged communities, expressed a desire to recognize present-day racism, breaking with typical race-evasive or diversity-focused organizational practices. Exploring how this approach impacts racial inequality and racism in the United States provides an important path for future research.