Beyond School Walls: The Politics of Community and Place in Two Philadelphia Neighborhoods

Author: Gretchen E.L Suess

Dissertation School: Temple University

Pages: 313

Publication Date: May 2008

Availability:
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Access Number: 10841

Abstract:

Leaders in Philadelphia are concerned about the economic future of the city and the obvious disparities that exist across the city's neighborhoods. As Philadelphia, the "City of Brotherly Love," defines a means of becoming a globally competitive city, many of its institutional leaders have looked to the public schools to help them reach their goals. They are in agreement that many of the schools are preventing the local economic development of the city, by failing to successfully compete with suburban school districts for middle-class families, and are cementing low-income children into a future of low-wage work and continued poverty in the urban core. As cities like Philadelphia embark upon fast-paced development to help them compete in the global economic market, leaders are calling upon increased civic engagement among citizens to help them improve the city.

This comparative ethnographic dissertation project closely examines the events surrounding the rebuilding of two large comprehensive public high schools in two gentrifying, but predominantly low-income and working-class parts of the city of Philadelphia. All too often "the poor" are said to not be civically engaged, and are judged for not mobilizing for the improvement of themselves, their neighborhoods, or their local schools. By investigating and explaining civic engagement around two neighborhood high schools, both serving low-income, working-class communities long restricted by a lack of resources, but with solid histories of local social activism, we have an opportunity to learn much about the dynamic processes behind poverty and how the civic engagement of the poor is threatened into silence.

Inside the schools, teachers work in the most challenging of environments. Beyond the school walls, in condition made worse by rapidly gentrifying urban neighborhoods, residents fight general poverty and social structures that perpetuate inequalities through misunderstandings and national priorities that exclude the poor and working-class from accessing resources and influential civic spaces. When these structural dynamics are put into context with day-to-day activism, we are left with a richer understanding of how poverty, racism, and cultural political exclusion are perpetuated and why, despite all good intentions, "civic engagement" and public education cannot remedy social inequities.

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