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

Abstract

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 schoolcommunity 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 highperforming 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).