St. Louis at the Crossroads of Race, Empire, and Place in Urban Education Reform in the United States

Researchers are increasingly paying closer attention to the geography of educational opportunity, particularly the role of race and place in shaping people’s educational experiences and outcomes (Diamond et al., 2021; Morris & Monroe, 2009; Morris & Woodruff, 2015; Posey-Maddox, 2017; Tate, 2008). The city of St. Louis—known for being a northern city with Southern culture—provides a significant, symbolic but often overlooked context (place) for understanding and examining urban education reform in the United States.

I first came to know the city in the mid-late 1990s when I traveled between Nashville, Tennessee, and St. Louis, Missouri, to work as a graduate assistant on a research project led by highly regarded scholars Ellen Goldring and Claire Smrekar of Peabody College at Vanderbilt University. Professors Goldring and Smrekar had received funding from the Spencer Foundation to understand school choice, particularly magnet schools, in three different cities, one of which included St. Louis (Goldring & Smrekar, 2000; Smrekar & Goldring, 1999). While carving out my niche on the research project and eventually a dissertation topic, I was particularly intrigued by one Black school community in St. Louis—Farragut Elementary School located in the historic Ville neighborhood. Beyond Farragut’s shiny hardwood floors and immaculate hallways, I was in awe of the sense of pride the school’s staff created with the community and the powerful relationships forged over decades among the mostly Black teachers, students, and families. Farragut Elementary School embodied elements of the kind of school-community that led to academic excellence that Black people experienced in the segregated South (Anderson, 1988; Jones, 1981; Savage, 1998; Siddle Walker, 1996, 2000). Quite often, the narrative related to Black schooling during that time, and even today, painted a sordid picture of Black K-12 educational institutions. Farragut’s faculty, staff, students, and their parents’ experiences and outcomes; however, countered this pervasive perspective. Yet, few researchers studied academically high-performing schools like Farragut and its intrinsic presence of what I would later come to define as communally bonded schooling (Morris, 1999, 2004, 2009).

Between 1997 and 2015—while working as a professor at the University of Georgia and researching a school community in Atlanta, Georgia, that also displayed communally bonded schooling—I stayed abreast of Farragut Elementary School in St. Louis. I periodically visited the school and paid attention to the changes in the school that would begin to unravel what I had captured in an American Educational Research Journal article “Can Anything Good Come from Nazareth? African American schooling and community in the Urban South and Midwest” (Morris, 2004). Though not exhaustive, some of Farragut’s changes included the principal’s death, the retirement of Black teachers and the hiring of Teach for America teachers, the growth of charter schools, and the lack of investment in the community surrounding the school. Once considered an exemplary school on almost every measure of achievement, Farragut Elementary School had quickly become a shell of its former self. The school was closed in 2021 by district administrators due to purported low student enrollment, underachievement, and fiscal concerns (Morris, 2021).

My second immersion in St. Louis city’s and region’s schooling systems occurred when my family and I relocated from Metro Atlanta, Georgia, in 2015. I relinquished my tenured and full professorship position at the University of Georgia and accepted an endowed full professorship in urban education at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. My presence in St. Louis at this time was not by happenstance. I felt “a calling” to return to the city and complete the work I had begun a couple of decades before. It appeared as though the current neoliberal reform-driven movement had amnesia when it came to education in the city, approaching reforms with a dismissal of the deep history of the city’s and region’s Black communities and schools. Consequently, policymakers and planners were not ensuring that viable Black public schools and communities were part of the city’s future.

My move to St. Louis was less than a year after the killing of Michael Brown Jr., an unarmed Black teenager, by a White police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. The streets of Ferguson, Missouri—located a mere 10 miles from St. Louis—had erupted during the summer of 2014, as protesters demanded justice for young Michael. Brown’s killing would eventually illuminate to the world the entrenched inequities throughout the St. Louis region and how those inequities provided a testament to the conditions that Black and poor people face nationally (Rothstein, 2017; Weathersby & Davis, 2019). I went into the fire, so to speak, put down roots, and challenged myself to grapple with the educational and social challenges the city’s residents, particularly Black people, faced. Thus, the iconographic perception of St. Louis (and its inner-ring suburban neighbor, Ferguson) personified racial injustice and inequity, eerily similar to Birmingham, Alabama, in the 1960s and South Africa in the 1980s.

Since returning to St. Louis nearly eight years ago, I have led a research project focused on the experiences of Black students under the city’s desegregation plan over the course of three decades. I am currently leading a Lyle Spencer Award-funded research study titled “Countering the Unintended Consequences of School Reforms: Communally bonded Schools, Reconnecting Black Students, Strengthening Communities, and Improving Educational Outcomes.” This study involves multilayered and multiyear community-based case studies in three predominantly Black St. Louis area school districts: St. Louis, Ferguson-Florissant, and Jennings. The project examines how decades of reforms and disruptions (e.g., desegregation, state takeovers, charter schools, and school closings) have increased the uncertainty around schools’ viability in the lives of Black students. My research team is deeply engaged in this work at the present, in a city that has a long history of racial and cultural erasure. As Johnson (2020) writes in his book, The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States, St. Louis has been at the center of this erasure:

From the Lewis and Clark expedition to the police killing of Michael Brown in 2014 and the launching of the Black Lives Matter movement, many of the events that we consider central to the history of the United States occurred in St. Louis … St. Louis has been the crucible of American history—much of American history has unfolded from the juncture of empire and anti-Blackness in the city of St. Louis. (p. 4)

St. Louis’s founding is mired in—and rests on—racial inequity and anti-Black terror. To begin, the city of St. Louis—which was critical in expanding the United States as a settler empire—emerged from European settlers’ dispossession of Indigenous people’s lands (Johnson, 2020). The genocide of Indigenous people through warfare and disease, followed by the enslavement of Africans and the establishment of racist policies and practices, would set the economic and ideological foundation and future for the city, the state, and the United States’ Manifest Destiny. St. Louis, Missouri, sits at the historical, geographical, cultural, political, and social crossroads of race and empire in the United States. The city is located within the border state of Missouri, touching, literally, six other states in the region. Missouri was admitted as a slave state under the Missouri Compromise of 1820. During the American Civil War (1861–1865), more than 100,000 Missourians served in the Union Army, and approximately 30,000 Missourians served in the Confederate Army. St. Louis’ historical significance is further evidenced by the fact that it was the site of landmark legal court cases pertaining to African Americans’ civil rights (Dred Scott v. Sandford, 1857), access to higher education (Gaines v. Canada, 1938), racially restrictive housing (Shelley v. Kraemer, 1948), and public school segregation (Liddell v. City of St. Louis Board of Education, 1980).

Positively referred to as the “Gateway City,” and infamously known as one of America’s most violent and racially entrenched cities, such dichotmous descriptions of St. Louis reveal how places have identities and carry a special meaning or have a shared history (Frazier et al., 2003). While we can link places to humans’ identities and histories, place-based narratives change over time due to voluntary and involuntary human migration. For example, Indigenous nations once inhabited the land now known as St. Louis. European settlers destroyed Indigenous nations’ communities, cultures, and languages. Once predominantly White suburban areas of St. Louis, such as Ferguson, Missouri, are now primarily African American and low-income (Jones et al., 2015). These demographic shifts—not solely by people’s own volition—have been spurred and facilitated by empire building, as well as economic, housing, urban planning, and educational policies (Gordon, 2009; Henig et al., 1999; Johnson, 2020; Rothstein, 2017).

St. Louis’ national educational significance is illustrated by the impending termination of what was once the nation’s largest voluntary desegregation plan, Missouri’s takeover of “failing” school districts (overwhelmingly African American), a spate of school closings in predominantly Black and low-income communities, and the turmoil and inequality unveiled by the 2014 “Ferguson Unrest” and the 2017 Stockley verdict, both related to the killing of unarmed African American males at the hands of White police officers. With this sociopolitical and historical analysis providing both context and a lens, this collaborative issue of the Peabody Journal of Education is presented. However, this issue’s focus on St. Louis offers only a glimpse into why we, as a scholarly community, must continue to understand the city’s role as a pivotal place for examining the dynamics of race and culture in educational reform.

Our issue of the Peabody Journal of Education situates the St. Louis region of the United States as an essential center for exploring and understanding major theoretical, reform/policy, and practice-related issues in terms of race, identity, social class, and educational inequality and opportunity. Our emphasis on interrogating place-based examinations of race, ethnicity, class, identity, and schooling, in this special issue highlights the lessons one can glean from a place-specific analysis of educational reforms and policies in the United States. In doing so, we recognize that the analysis of places must be situated within historical and contemporary moments. Whereas the 2008 election of Barack Obama as the first African American president of the United States gave rise to new conversations about race and opportunity throughout the United States (Morris & Woodruff, 2015), the 2016 national election of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency represented a seismic shift that encouraged the overt display of a White nationalist agenda as witnessed in Charlottesville, Virginia, the 2020 murder of George Floyd, and the 2021 riot on the U.S. Capitol.

Moreover, the swearing-in of Betsy DeVos as the U.S. Secretary of Education, a long-standing opponent of traditional public education and supporter of school vouchers/charter schools, propelled additional concerns and discourse about denigrating public education for racially and ethnically diverse students disproportionately experiencing poverty. Within that sociopolitical context and a national atmosphere of uncertainty and unpredictability around race, education, and opportunity, conversations abound. The St. Louis region is at the epicenter of national conversations about the education of students living in poverty, the resegregation of public schools, charter schools, policies and practices that reproduce educational inequality for immigrants and language minority students, school closings, racial profiling, and unfair policing. The authors within this issue, including the community-based leaders in the featured roundtable, address some of these issues and the implications for education.

In “Creating Black Girl Space in St. Louis: Revisiting and Reclaiming Black Girl Voice in the Classroom,” Sheretta T. Butler-Barnes (Washington University in St. Louis), Khrysta A. Evans (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Seanna Leath (Washington University in St. Louis), Marketa Burnett (University of South Carolina), and Misha N. Inniss-Thompson (Cornell University) have addressed the challenges that Black girls face in developing a healthy sense of self, while experiencing the racism, colorism, and sexism in diverse school settings. As the authors’ study with 30 Black girls across demographically diverse schools reveals, Black girls, especially those in predominately White and diverse school settings, face challenges related to unfair disciplinary practices, their intelligence, and sense of girlhood. In this clarion call, they push the scholarly and educational communities to develop more robust studies, policies, and programs that fully humanize Black girls while they learn. Invoking the experiences of nineteenth and twentieth-century Black women such as Sojourner Truth and Mary Church Terrel, the authors of this article situate how Black girls’ experiences in the contemporary context of schooling in St. Louis, Missouri, must also be placed within an intersectional framework.

In “Dual Language Bilingual Education as a Pathway to Racial Integration? A Place-Based Analysis of Policy Enactment,” Lisa Dorner (University of Missouri—Columbia), Jeongmi Moon (Jeonbuk National University), Juan Freire (Brigham Young University), James Gambrell (University of Northern Colorado), G. Sue Kasun (Georgia State University), and Claudia Cervantes-Soon (Arizona State University) have examined the enactment of dual language bilingual education policies in the Midwest and the consequences for racialized children from immigrant and multilingual families. Their article highlights the importance of considering the geographical, racial and ethnic, and the sociopolitical contexts for further understanding equity and social justice matters for linguistically and racially minoritized communities. Resonating with this issue’s theme, they assert the need for place-based investigations of education reforms and policies in linguistically and ethnically diverse school systems such as St. Louis, while critiquing factors that support and constrain multilingual education programs and policies.

In “Switching for Survival and Success? Black Students’ Struggles, Shifting, and Solidarity Within the St. Louis Desegregation Plan,” Zori A. Paul (Marquette University), and I amplify the voices of Black students who have participated in what was at one time the largest voluntary desegregation program in the United States. At its height, approximately 13,000 Black students from the city of St. Louis transferred into predominantly White and suburban school districts. Emanating from qualitative interviews with 37 former Black student participants who participated in the plan between 1983 and 2018 (Waves 1–4), we captured participants’ experiences and struggles, along with their perceived agency and solidarity as a way to ensure their chances of surviving and succeeding in schooling contexts that drastically differed from their home and community environments.

In “Shuttering Schools in the Gateway City: School District Viability and Black Community Relations After Mass K-12 School Closures in St. Louis, MO,” Ebony Duncan-Shippy (Washington University-St. Louis, Missouri) continues to bring attention to the impetus for and the consequences of closing schools that serve Black students, families, and communities. Employing a mixed method approach that draws on various sources of data and tracing educational trends over 30 years, from 1990–2020, she examined when, where, and why K-12 public schools closed in St. Louis to highlight the social conditions and policy decisions that contract contemporary urban education. Her sociological analysis captures the importance for St. Louis Public Schools’ district leaders to support educational reforms and practices that strengthen the district’s connections to the city and link education reform to the overall development of schools and communities that serve students, families, and communities on the racial and economic margins.

Last but not least, the imperative nature of capturing community members’ voices around race, schooling, and educational reform in St. Louis should not be underestimated. “Discussing Urban and Community Education in Saint Louis: A Roundtable,” is actually a transcript featuring a select group of grassroots community-based organizational leaders in St. Louis committed to cultivating vibrant schools and communities, enriching cultural and schooling experiences for students and families, and providing young people with powerful opportunities in STEM and the arts. Rather than always having researchers tell their stories, these leaders’ amplified voices discuss what they feel are important directions for the future. Participants included Cynthia Chapple, Founder and Executive Director of Black Girls Do STEM; Dionne Ferguson, Founder and Executive Director of Good Journey Development; Aaron Williams, Executive Director of 4theVille; Dr. Art McCoy, former superintendent of Ferguson/Florissant and Jennings School Districts and Founder and Executive Director of SAGES, LLC; and Dr. Jacquelyn Lewis-Harris, former Director of the Center of Human Origin and Cultural Diversity at the University of Missouri—St. Louis and presently a community research liaison with the Center for Communally Bonded Research. Dr. Adrienne Dixson (University of Kentucky), a leading race and school reform scholar, moderated this community-oriented discussion. What they produced was amazing.

In closing, I thank the former Chief Editor of the Peabody Journal of Education, Robert L. Crowson, and its current Chief Editor, Claire Smrekar, for supporting the idea for this issue a few years back. Finally, I thank Joan E. Dodgson for providing critical editorial support for this issue, as well as the anonymous reviewers for their contributions to ensuring a high-quality peer-review process. I hope this Peabody Journal of Education issue encourages future research into geographical areas that have not received the attention they deserve but provide important scholarly, policy, and practice-related evidence for understanding the dynamics of race, class, place, and education.

Acknowledgments

This project was funded in part by the E. Desmond Lee Endowed Professorship of Urban Education at the University of Missouri-St. Louis—a position held by the author. Additional grant support comes from the Spencer Foundation’s Lyle M. Spencer Research Award.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflicts of interest are reported by the author(s).