Diversity or Gentrification: Middle-Class Parents at Working Class Schools

What happens after middle-class parents arrive at an underperforming majority-minority school with a Mandarin immersion strand program? I use parent interviews and observations to examine the institutional changes in an elementary school. I show how a struggling school located in a working-class neighborhood gradually gentrifies without neighborhood demographic change. I find the immersion program creates a disconnect between the demographically different immersion and the non-immersion parents and students. This pushes the immersion parents to seek a school that is completely immersion. The findings suggest those that may benefit most from an improved school environment may lose the opportunity to participate.