Only STEM Can Save Us? Examining Race, Place, and STEM Education as Property

Abstract

The rhetoric about science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education in urban schools reflects a desire to imagine a new city that is poised to compete in a STEM-centered future. Therefore, STEM has been positioned as a critical part of urban education reform efforts. In various US cities, schools labeled as failing are being repurposed as selective STEM-intensive academies to build a STEM education infrastructure. In Memphis, Tennessee, this process makes visible issues with educational inequity, exacerbated by school choice and gentrification processes. In this article, I use whiteness as property, a tenet of critical race theory, to examine STEM education in Memphis as a case of urban STEM-based education reform in the United States. I describe claiming STEM education as property as a 2-phase process in which middle-class Whites in urban areas participate to secure STEM education by repurposing failed Black schools and to maintain it by institutionalizing selective admissions strategies.

Notes

1. Project Lead the Way (http://www.pltw.org) is an organization that provides K-12 STEM curricula to schools across type (i.e., public, private, charter) and geography (i.e., urban, suburban rural).

2. http://www.fox13memphis.com/top-stories/memphis-is-americas-4th-most-segregated-city-report-states/569853494

3. http://www.scsk12.org/about/

4. http://www.scsk12.org/optional/

5. This story is based on local news reports from Memphis (Bauman, 2017; Bauman & Kebede, 2016; Carefoot, 2017; Pignolet, 2016; Spickler, 2014; Watts, 2016). I also gleaned information from the web sites for the Maxine Smith STEAM Academy (http://www.memphissteammiddleschool.com) and Shelby County Schools (http://www.scsk12.org), as well as Rousseau Anderson et al. (2017). This situation is currently unfolding, so this article reflects my best effort to describe the situation accurately at the time of writing.