Racialized Decoupling and Race-Neutral School Integration Policies From the Implementers’ Perspective

Today’s school integration policies in the United States are often “race neutral.” Scholarship on these race-neutral school integration policies finds they do not change the racial and ethnic composition of schools or do so under very specific conditions. Yet, we know relatively little about the mechanisms explaining these outcomes. Building on 2 years of qualitative data collection in two public elementary schools in a New York City implementing a voluntary, race-neutral integration policy, I find school leaders experience a racialized decoupling of their commitment to racial equity from the policy’s race-neutral design, its choice-based design, and the implementation context. I show how school leaders navigated this decoupling and how it led to racialized outcomes. I contribute to our understanding of the mechanisms shaping the outcomes of race-neutral policies, a point of growing importance given recent Supreme Court decisions on higher education.