Dominant understandings of “good” schools are strongly associated with the presence of white students. The purpose of this dissertation is to denaturalize the association of goodness and whiteness in U.S. schools, in order to illuminate how this association, which is deeply embedded in understandings of meritocracy and deservedness, perpetuates injustice in and through U.S. schools. For this study, I chose the small, Massachusetts town of Cobblerton (pseudonym), because of its overwhelming whiteness, reputation for excellent schools, proximity to majority Black and Brown Boston Public Schools, and because I grew up in Cobblerton and graduated from its high school. I employ a critical race methodology to build on and extend current research on school segregation and inequality by investigating the causes and consequences of what I call “white educational resource hoarding.” This study asks: How was Cobblerton’s whiteness created and maintained historically? What are the impacts of white educational resource hoarding on Cobblerton and its schools? How do narratives of the “goodness” of Cobblerton and Cobblerton Schools justify and sustain white educational resource hoarding?Through interviews, both with key town decisionmakers and those impacted by their decisions, as well as historical document analysis, and observations of school committee and strategic planning meetings, I interrogate the historical and contemporary processes by which this small Massachusetts school district created and sustained itself as an overwhelmingly white space and at that same time, developed a reputation for school excellence. I also employ autoethnographic methods to analyze my own experiences as a student in Cobblerton and, later, as a teacher of mostly Black, Brown, and Indigenous students, in the context of white educational resource hoarding. I find that white educational resource hoarding is the process by which purportedly "good" educational resources, experiences, and outcomes accumulate in educational spaces that are accessible to white students but exclusionary to Students of Color, thereby normalizing and reproducing the deeply held association between good schools and whiteness. While this process involves policies and practices directly related to schooling, it also includes dynamics of infrastructure development, zoning, and town planning. I find that policies in the early 1970s were explicitly created to protect the town’s whiteness, but residents today are unaware of this, which makes the town’s whiteness seem natural, normal, and innocent. As a result, the pedagogy, curriculum, and culture of the “good” school district is white-normed, and Students of Color suffer from a lack of culturally responsive pedagogy, curricular erasure, and racist bullying, which the school is unprepared to respond to or prevent. Further, district leadership pursues white-normed understandings of goodness for their schools that contain no critique of systemic injustice, and so seek to manage rather than abolish inequality. This research into white educational resource hoarding has implications for educators, including teacher educators, school districts, and education researchers. For educators, this work intensifies the urgency of adopting culturally relevant pedagogy, especially the critical consciousness aspect, in order to disrupt the white ignorance that is otherwise reproduced through schools like Cobblerton’s. School districts can support teacher development as critical educators. In so doing, they will be pushed to reconsider how to define “goodness” within their districts. Finally, education researchers must untangle our understandings of good schools from whiteness, and critically ask and keep asking, what is a good school? What is a good education, under racial capitalism, during a climate crisis and a U.S.-sponsored genocide, on violently stolen land?
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