“My Priorities Have Definitely Shifted”: How Changes in Civic Ecosystems Reshaped Youth Organizers’ Views of School Integration

Background: For over 70 years, the Brown v. Board of Education decision has played a central role in how people in the United States envision educational policy and educational justice. However, scholars of education policy have largely overlooked young people’s complex and consequential understandings of integration policy and how these views may change over time. Indeed, few researchers of civic learning have examined young people’s long-term trajectories of civic learning at all. With this in mind, we use a unique longitudinal data set to examine how youth organizers for school integration did and did not change their thinking about school integration as their civic ecosystems changed, following their graduation from New York City schools. Research Questions: We aim to answer the following questions: (1) How did young people who organized for school integration change or not change their conceptualizations of educational justice after graduating from New York City public schools? (2) How did participants’ experiences in new educational, political, and demographic contexts inform their civic learning and their views of school integration? Research Design: We developed holistic portraits of four focal participants based on analysis of two waves of interview data with 25 participants conducted three years apart, supplemented with observations and focus group data. Three of these portraits examine participants whose views and contexts had significantly shifted over time, while one contrasting case examines a participant whose views had remained notably stable despite significant changes in her educational context. Conclusions: We find that as young people experienced new civic ecosystems, their conceptualizations of educational justice shifted, leading some—but not all—participants to develop different views of school integration. While they continued to consider integration a worthwhile approach to redistributing resources, many no longer saw it as their primary goal, and they grappled with the ways in which racially diverse institutions often failed to make students of color feel comfortable, safe, and recognized. Their varied trajectories nuance our understandings of just educational policy and the complex, lifelong processes through which young people engage in civic learning.