The history gap: Collective memory,journalism,and public discourse on racial achievement disparities in progressive communities

Community identity, memory, and mediated public discourse

In writing about collective memory, we refer to the shared memories of a specific geographic place as constructed and maintained largely by its media outlets. Much scholarship has documented the cultural role news media play (e.g. Carey, 1988) in preserving community values and history. As the result of a socially collaborative process of mediation (Halbwachs, 1992), these historical memories are key to how communities know themselves; they are created not in isolation, but in conversations influenced by broader politics and social dynamics (Thelen, 1989). Journalism is a “vital and critical” agent of memory (Zelizer, 2008: 80), as it constructs memory within a community across time and place (Kitch, 2008). Media’s pervasiveness makes historical reference more impactful than other forms of remembering, such as a memorial or a museum (Edy, 1999). While much collective memory scholarship has focused on media’s role in commemorating past events and celebrating anniversaries, private-influenced public conversations (usually by policymakers or other influencers) that entrench memories within communities (Stone and Hirst, 2014).

Yet, often institutional players such as government officials and journalists are privileged in determining the historical narrative (Edy, 1999)—what is remembered and what is forgotten. Mass news media widely circulate what constitutes “the first draft of history” and give journalists and their preferred sources more control over the portrayal of the past than any individual or group (Zelizer, 1992). Within the field of K-12 school reform, media access in the United States gave educational policy elites disproportionate levels of control, obscuring the input of teachers, parents, and activists (Tyack and Cuban). News stories on the topic of education, then, reflect Zelizer’s (2008) observation that reporting tends to promote a “broader, more universal message” that reinforces “simplistic narratives” (p. 82) rather than providing nuance, historical context, or challenges to the dominant collective memory of a place. When the past is invoked, it is done as an “aside or an afterthought” (Zelizer, 2008: 85).

The resulting history has often been portrayed as rigid and objective, when in reality it is flexible and subjective, the result of the process of quieting some voices while elevating others. The practices of news construction (e.g. story selection, sourcing) further result in presentations of news that reify dominant structures and ideologies by emphasizing acceptable interpretations of events (Gutsche, 2017). These are often unnoticed and unchallenged by the consumers of news products. Our study explores how the news media in each of the case sites promoted narratives that reified a more enlightened, progressive ideology—one that celebrated schools as equalizers instead of places harboring generations-long inequities. This collaboration between institutions and social processes obfuscated historical legacies of racism (Giroux, 2013) in order to emphasize progress (Bodnar, 1994).

However, non-institutional actors can step forward, harnessing digital media to orchestrate alternative memories (Birkner and Donk, 2018; Edy, 2006; Erll and Rigney, 2009). Counter-memories emerge, en mass, in public. The body of scholarship related to counter-memory engages the tension between the group and the individual, between the grand narratives that persist and the lived experience that might contradict them. Counter-memory “focuses on localized experiences with oppression, using them to reframe and refocus dominant narratives purporting to represent universal experience” (Lipsitz, 1990: 213). If identities are formed at least in part via shared memories and commonly held values, then contestation in online spaces and personal interactions can reclaim the past as a way to also reclaim identity constructions. This is especially true in the case of contentious issues, and so race and ethnicity scholars have explored the interactions between counter-memory and collective memory (see: Kretsinger-Harries, 2014; Whitlinger, 2015). Counter-memory can include vernacular culture (Bodnar, 1994) and counter-publics created by marginalized groups (Squires, 2002). Increasingly, social media, blogs, and other non-institutional media platforms become the space where counter-memories are expressed (Robinson, 2009).

The financial constraints facing local newsrooms and the declining availability of reporting resources further exacerbate the ahistorical nature of present-day reporting and create a mainstream media environment heavily reliant on institutional actors. These official explanations for the existence and persistence of educational achievement disparities have furthered the use of grand narratives in journalism that obscure the voices of minority populations. Yet, the proliferation of digital spaces, such as Facebook, Twitter, and online commenting sections, created new avenues for the formation of counter–collective memories that not only seek to challenge the dominant narratives of a place, but also to provide further nuance to policy conversations. This new media environment allows for the sharing of counter–collective or alternative memories, “without having to conform to the communication principles of the majority” (Edy, 2014). We interrogate memory as it emerges in the public discourse in these communities, trying to understand how collective and counter-memories play out in public discourse driven by journalism and social media.

Public schools and reform

Schools in particular are places where different kinds of remembering inevitably tangle. They play a central role in US culture as the principal agent of cognitive, moral, and civic instruction, a defining experience for American youth, and an instrument of public policy (Angus and Mirel, 1999; Fass, 2016; Kaestle, 1983). But invoking the past in understanding present-day educational issues has often proven problematic, and the long history of utopian educational rhetoric is accompanied by an equally long history of systemic discrimination. The schools revered for their promise of uplift within Protestant and progressive values (e.g. Dewey, 1922; Lassonde, 2005) were also key agents of oppression and segregation (e.g. Anderson, 1988; Snyder, 2015). The result has been that US students achieve starkly different academic outcomes based on race and class. Rather than acknowledge and engage these complicated and contrasting histories, educational reform tends to be ahistorical in an effort to appear above politics (Tyack and Cuban, 1997).

As “one of the most stubborn and pernicious manifestations of racial inequality in our country,” racial achievement gaps sit at the confluence of several historical forces (Chubb and Loveless, 2002: vii). The first federal report on the education achievement gap appeared in 1966, and, despite “substantial interest and effort,” the gap persists and has gradually come to be regarded as a cause of socioeconomic inequality (Harris and Herrington, 2006). Today disparities appear in metrics like graduation rates, GPAs, honors enrollments, and test scores (Jencks and Phillips, 1998). In the three cities examined in this study, the attempts to address education disparities were rife with divisive issues: busing and integration initiatives, charter schools, and special programs like detracking (which eliminates levels such as honors). Educational journalism—and the counter-memories that appear alongside these conversations—offers an apt place to study where collective memory is formed and negotiated, contested, forgotten, and reborn.

The case studies

Diving deep into local community—nuancing the disparate groups that make up all cities (Gutsche, 2014) and even singling out university cities (Robinson, 2018)—has a robust tradition in journalism scholarship. Ann Arbor, Evanston, and Chapel Hill emerged as ideal study sites for several reasons. All share key characteristics, including (1) nearby major universities; (2) widely-held ideologies among educators, politicians, and community activists that promote social reform and equity, and seek to advance humanity through public education; (3) a community identity best described as “progressive” based not only on heavily Democrat voting patterns but also on self-labeling from interview subjects, literature about the cities, and city officials themselves. ² Robinson (2018) also used these cities as a site of study on progressive politics, which are farther left than the label “liberal” in that not only do progressives believe in government-funded programs such as Medicaid, but they push for radical reforms of institutions and widespread social change that would comfort the afflicted (Gordon, 1990; Hofstadter, 1963).

Most importantly, these three cities also share persistent achievement disparities, with metric gaps from 20% to 60% points in everything from graduation rates to reading and math tests throughout K-12, and are committed to trying to close them. In Ann Arbor, the district tried to resolve disparities with initiatives including a mentorship program and the hiring of an achievement gap administrator (nicknamed “the Academic Achievement Gap Czar”) in 1990. In Evanston, where the diversity of the city’s high school is a point of local pride, the drastic underrepresentation of minorities in advanced-level classes led to the implementation of a detracking initiative in 2010 that changed the structure of the high-school honors program to boost minority enrollment in advanced courses. And the school district in Chapel Hill sponsored myriad workshops and programs to better engage minority students. Public conversations about these disparities flourished. All had had significant mainstream news coverage of racial disparities and proposed solutions, but experienced significant newsroom losses combined with increases in alternative information outlets.

We documented all of the media about K-12 schools, youth, and race and all of the major influencers for the public discourse about this topic over a 5-year time period, as well as the individual histories of the places around race. To answer our research questions about what racial pasts emerged in news coverage, as well as what other widely circulated mediated content discussed the disparities, this study employed a mixed-method qualitative design to first identify what kinds of racial memories were being circulated, and then to understand how meaning was constructed from this content. We started with a textual analysis of 134 news articles, blogs, and newsletters using keywords pertaining to the city’s K-12 racial achievement gaps with 2187 online comments attached in total. We found these using the search engines of all the local media in town, including college newspapers, as well as Google and LexisNexis with variations on the keywords “racial achievement gap,” and snowball sampling from those texts to find blogs, newsletters, Facebook/Yahoo groups, and so on.

From this content, we selected 18 people who either authored the content or were quoted for interviews using a semi-structured template. In all, there were six interviews from each city, a mix of journalists, community leaders and politicians, bloggers, and school officials. We asked interview subjects to characterize their community’s public discourse about race in order to assess how and in what contexts historical interpretations might emerge. They were asked about specific historical events that had shaped their community, how the past informed present-day conversations, and how their local journalism, blogs, and social media content reflected history (or not). All of this content was analyzed using discourse analysis to consider the social contexts in which both text and talk are embedded, understanding that media texts are complex, contested products of ideology and hold symbolic meaning (Lindloff and Taylor, 2010). The analysis assumed any emergent meaning was constructed according to dominant value systems (Van Dijk, 2008); we paid particular attention to evocations of historical events and time periods, articulations of the causes of racial disparities, and references to community identity, as well as how these interplayed between text and our interviews.

The first sections in this article respond to the first two research questions, detailing how journalism covered these disparities, exploring present-day references to past realities by platform, and describing the counter-narratives that emerged to challenge the progressive identities. The remaining research question about implications for collective memory and counter–collective memory scholarship will be addressed in the discussion and conclusion.

The changing local news landscape and historical memory

The decline of local media across the United States has been well documented, and small newspapers face severe economic pressures that have led to reduced publication schedules, significant staff layoffs, and closures. Each case study site did not have a daily professional publication, and the responsibility for local news coverage fell to either an online outlet responsible for larger regional coverage (as in the case of Ann Arbor and Evanston) or student media associated with a university (present in Evanston and Chapel Hill). The resulting fragmented media landscape presented problems for creating a cohesive history related to education issues. In Chapel Hill, interview subjects reminisced about a time when multiple reporters would attend school board meetings, and when two local papers competed. Ann Arbor interview subjects were especially aware of how high turnover on education beats had decimated the institutional memory necessary to provide historical context, according to one former Ann Arbor reporter:

[Newspapers have] gotten rid of longtime journalists, or have longtime journalists move on so there’s not necessarily the institutional memory about the district. … Reporters don’t necessarily have the knowledge that this is a discussion they had 10 years ago, this is a discussion they had six years ago. (James, August 7, 2015, personal communication)

An Ann Arbor school board member noted the following: “These subjects are not subjects you can kind of fly in, look at some data, and write a story. You know, you really need context” (Tonya ³ , August 13, 2015, personal communication).

The financial constraints of the newsroom created conditions—among them demanding reporting schedules—that made it nearly impossible for reporters to examine how present-day issues were the result of decades-long processes, according to interviews. News articles in Ann Arbor were largely ahistorical, which perpetuated a collective memory that emphasized the herculean efforts of the school district to resolve the achievement gap. They nodded to the long “struggle” of the district in relation to the “gap,” but characterized the problem largely in terms of metrics instead of historical causes. Stories centered on how the district itself was working to resolve the disparities, while situating the problem as one rooted in the present and shared by all communities (e.g. Coffman, 2012a, 2012b; Knake, 2015; Tiedemann, 2013). In Evanston, the media helped build the idea that those in charge of schools “knew best” for communities of color. In the reporting of the high school’s detracking initiative, reporters neglected to explore why, for example, minority students were long absent from these classes. Often, articles focused exclusively on actions of the superintendent:

When Eric Witherspoon became superintendent eight years ago, he noticed that AP classrooms were filled with mostly White students, while regular classrooms were filled with mostly minority and often low-income students, who make up 41 percent of the student body. (Friedman, 2015)

The rest of the article detailed what Witherspoon and his staff did to try to fix the situation, without talking about the processes behind the demographics.

In the absence of extensive historical discussion, task forces, metrics, and reports dominated pieces in all three cities, often recycling the same kind of information over and over. Routinely described as a problem that has “persisted for decades,” little discussion of the gap’s roots appeared (Mac, 2015). Articles alluded to structural inequalities and institutional issues, such as the differences in educational opportunities between student groups, but they did not name them explicitly. Context was missing: One Chapel Hill article referenced the district’s “culture of instruction” and noted changes were needed without further information (Hooley, 2014). Another piece referenced the “deficiency” of the school system and pointed to its inability to educate the children that it served because it “really is built around White, middle-class cultural norms” (Gassaway, 2010) without elaboration. Huge historical gaps happened: of how neighborhood schools were closed and Black and Brown kids were bused long distances; of the widespread use of standardized tests and evaluation systems that privileged White children; of the long-term norms of hiring mostly White teachers with little training in culturally relevant practices; and so on. About these histories, silence reigned—at least in mainstream public discourse.

Occasionally, ineffective historical efforts tended to be characterized in later discussions as demonstrative of the noxious disparities, boosting the narrative that differences between the races were inevitable. Our participants mentioned one Ann Arbor hiring and then removing of a new achievement gap administrator repeatedly as an example of the failure to provide a deep discussion of the social, cultural, and institutional factors complicating the district’s efforts to fix the gap. News articles at the time that covered the appointment of the “Academic Achievement Gap Czar” in the 1990s largely portrayed it as a misuse of district resources. This lack of context was detrimental to achievement gap initiatives going forward, according to private interviews. “People will point to the academic czar [as a failure], but when you look deeper into it, you know, she was given a nice office, but she wasn’t even given a frickin secretary,” said one Ann Arbor school official (Sarah, August 21, 2015, personal communication). She noted articles frequently neglected to mention the underfunding, lack of resources, and failed initiatives already tried. By not acknowledging (or perhaps not knowing about) a more diverse historical memory and not interrogating the absences in the collective memory surrounding the gap, local journalism created the perception that these persistent problems were rooted in present-day issues, and policy discussions reflected that belief.

Reporters fell back on grand narratives of a city’s progressive educational credentials. In Ann Arbor and Evanston, these oft-mentioned memories included their histories of desegregation, diverse school districts, and a strong community commitment to investing in public education. “Education is what we do in Ann Arbor … It is our brand. Just like Detroit did cars,” said a school board member (Tonya, August 13, 2015, personal communication). “I think part of the problem has been that our history, at least, has been trying to do short-term fixes for a long-term problem,” noted another member (Sarah, August 21, 2015, personal communication). Evanston’s two school districts—one oversees K-8 education, the other the high school—voluntarily desegregated in the late 1960s (a fact repeated throughout our interviews and in the media coverage), and now the city proudly touts the diversity of its high school (where 43.3% of the student population is White, 31% Black, 16.6% Hispanic, 3.9% Asian-American (Chicago Tribune, 2014). Evanston liked to talk about diversity, all interview subjects noted, but did not necessarily engage with it on a daily basis. As conversations began over the detracking initiative, the school board realized the city needed to have a larger conversation about race, in part because many residents were unaware of the systemic racism that had put Black and Brown students at an academic disadvantage. Interviewees reported community members were reluctant to discuss race, despite a high level of engagement from the progressive community on other issues, in part because it contradicted an ideology of “Evanston exceptionalism” that many residents embraced. “It exposed the community,” said one school official. “Going through this whole experience showed me that we’re not nearly as different as we’d like to think we are” (Michael, August 26, 2015, personal communication).

In contrast to Ann Arbor and Evanston, publicly articulated counter-memories have long challenged progressive identities of Chapel Hill, a liberal bastion surrounded by a very red state. Chapel Hill’s White residents remembered the past one way, and its African American citizens another, and public discourse had long reflected that. The school district had a reputation as one of the state’s best, but only for White, middle-class children. While education was one of the region’s proudest legacies, the impacts of slavery and Jim Crow had also created a “very specific context and matters a lot” to the city, said one former school official:

I know African-American families from Chapel Hill that still keep alive the stories of their ancestors who were enslaved and also specifically the memories in their families of first getting freed from slavery. … of course Jim Crow and civil rights battles, all that stuff, is all part of the overall dialogue in Chapel Hill. (Charles, July 31, 2015, personal communication)

Competing counter-narratives proliferated, as did clashes over the meaning of historical symbols (specifically the Confederate flag) and the origin of institutional educational problems. But as the school district attracted more outsiders—that is, people who moved to take advantage of the public school system—historical context was lost, according to interviews. Add in the decline of mainstream institutional media outlets that covered the small city with any sort of regularity, and it created a situation where many could not understand the impact of social, cultural, and economic forces that were historically formed. One school administrator noted, “Most people think people of color are poor because they’re lazy … And they don’t understand the historical context of how they’ve been denied access to education” (Michelle, August 4, 2015, personal communication).

This lack of understanding of the role schools had historically played in perpetuating the racial disparities hurt public support for necessary (but often costly) programs. ⁴ (White) citizens could misremember how they were complicit in perpetuating systemic failures in education and “re-remember” a kinder story of educational integration and civil rights. Having great schools for all was a key progressive tenet for these communities, and many had spent decades building them; to tell them their life’s calling was resulting in massive discriminatory practices proved impossible to accept for some. Reporters, many of them cycling through these small newsrooms quickly, lacked the institutional knowledge and resources to challenge the storyline. And administrators and others in the school districts hesitated to discuss their histories and previous attempts to close the achievement gap because those stories depicted a sense of failure, and bucked against the idea of progressive reform, as one reporter from Ann Arbor pointed out:

If the district is saying, “Hey, we’ve been having this conversation for the last 40 years,” it kind of highlights the stuff they’ve been doing for the last 40 years might not be—it might not have been working. (James, August 7, 2015, personal communication)

Alternative communication spaces and the emergence of counter-memories

Without an institutional media source to act as a reliable repository of collective memory, the onus fell on individuals to create counter-memories that challenged conventional understanding of the historical forces that created the achievement gap. Worried about the effect the lack of local journalism had on local politics, citizens in Ann Arbor and Evanston led efforts to establish new media outlets, both online and in print, in order to increase coverage of school board and city council meetings. But many of these outlets were short-lived and their reach and influence hard to measure. The Ann Arbor Chronicle, launched in 2008 by a former Ann Arbor News editor and reporter and his partner, focused on civic affairs and local government and only occasionally covered the school district. In Evanston, several new media outlets emerged, including Evanston Now, started in 2006, and the Evanston Roundtable. In launching the free, bi-weekly Roundtable, Evanston residents Larry and Mary Gavin sought to address the lack of local news coverage with in-depth articles on community issues and an intense focus on education. Early on they formed close ties to the school administration—like reporters covering beats—and focused primarily on testing data. During our study period, the Roundtable produced several articles that detailed the complex history of Evanston with desegregation and the schools’ achievement disparities (Evanston RoundTable, 2012; Gavin, 2011). One long piece called on back news stories, past school reports, public memos to the school board, and election turnout data, and iterated the entire history of school desegregation from the 1960s, noting—as many on our interviews did—that

Evanston was the first Northern city to desegregate all of its elementary schools. …

However, not everyone looked favorably on the vigorous thrust toward total school “integration.” Phrases like “lower standards,” “personal favoritism,” and “reverse discrimination” were being bruited about in some quarters. (Gavin, 2011)

In this piece, desegregation represented a battle in which the city as the hero ultimately triumphed, and that it was “the first Northern city” to do so—a point of pride. In other cases, they fell into the same coverage patterns as their mainstream counterparts. For example, a 2010 Ann Arbor Chronicle piece purported to tell the story of the gap, beginning with an overview of the district’s reporting on academic achievement in the district, and its measuring of student performance via test scores, but did not engage with any historical causes (Coffman, 2010). With their limited resources and lack of institutional memory, these outlets failed to pinpoint past discriminatory practices in the schools to understand the current disparities, and did not remedy the loss of institutional memory at the mainstream outlets.

Activists, engaged parents, teachers, and others stepped into the public discourse as well, using commenting sections of news sites and social media as a repository for counter-memories. In these spaces, citizens blamed the disparities on a wide range of causes: “We all know there are problems and have been problems in this school system forever concerning how to teach and reach the Black students” (The Ann Arbor News, 2010). At times, commentators examined the issues with a longer historical lens than the news articles: The achievement gap was “one of the shadows cast by racism” and “the accumulation of years of opportunity, or lack of it” (Norton, 2010). Others lamented the decades of work and millions of dollars spent. These observations challenged the ahistorical nature of education reporting in Ann Arbor; some commenters recognized the historical forces at play, and attempted to insert them into the public discourse. And yet other commenters became defensive over the city’s identity, re-asserting the schools’ achievements and the city’s strong work ethic. In truth, online discussion was characterized by polarizing diatribes, often rooted in racist characterizations. The key to success in Ann Arbor, these commentators observed, was hard work—the persistence of the gap indicated laziness, disinterest, or inability on the part of minority students and their parents.

Observing these discursive controversies, Evanston officials and faith-based leaders collaborated to form a local group called Evanston Own It, which tried to do the work of counter–collective memory in making residents more aware of the city’s history, to own what had happened, and to understand the systemic nature of the city’s disparities, according to our interviews. One goal was to give historical context to the conversations about issues facing Evanston—including education—and help people understand how history informed the events of the present. “You have to make that place because people have to understand what has happened, and how, you know, history affects us,” explained an Evanston alderperson. “And, if we don’t, you know, look at our past and sort of benefit from that we will continue to make the same mistakes over and over again” (Dorinda, August 20, 2015, personal communication). But little coverage of Evanston Own It, other than a press release about its launch, nor any publicly disseminated content relaying that promised historical context, was found in local journalism. This historicizing work occurred outside of professional reporting texts or even online content; instead, at events and meetings and among informal chatting, a counter–collective memory was developing that education advocates in part were spurring, building support for major policy change.

The clash between the collective memory maintained by traditional mediated platforms and the counter-memories that emerged in alternative spaces revealed a disconnect between not only a city’s perception of itself and its identity, but also in the validity of its historical narratives. In Chapel Hill, one revealing incident involving a picture of two high school students posing with a North Carolina Civil War regiment flag posted on Instagram demonstrated the fragmentation of historical memory within the community as Edy (2006) described. The debate over the flag’s symbolism—whether as racist symbol or as testament to Southern pride—presented conflicting interpretations of the students’ action rooted in different interpretations of North Carolina’s past. While some sets of parents dismissed the photo as merely a high schooler’s attempt to engage with history, other members of the community described the impact of the flag’s legacy on current social structures. One piece included a source that said these students were “representative of what the dominant White culture teaches” (WNCN-TV News, 2015). Another argued the school district needed to address what was described as a “racist legacy” and support “students of color and not teach them a whitewashed version of history” (Khrais, 2015). Here journalists engaged with counter-memory, but used it as a prop for a binary discussion that made coverage more combative than thoughtful. Again, it was in the commenting sections and blogs where a dialogue over the meaning of the historical reference played out. One commentator wrote the following: “ … the Confederate flag is the only symbol that connects this region” (Wiley, 2015). Another added the following: “Do your research and see that the Confederate Flag does not stand for slavery! It stand[sic] for southern pride and heritage” (Buchanan, 2015). They were met with replies like “[The confederate flag] reminds of slavery, Kkk to name a few” (WRAL, 2015) and commentary condemning the school district for not doing more to contextualize the flag for students. A blog post chastised the school system for failing to “provide students with a more nuanced understanding of the history and legacy of the Confederate flag” (Levin, 2015). These alternative opportunities for engaging with the city’s racial inequality acted as a repository for different memories, establishing the groundwork for a renewed counter-collective that might help new Chapel Hill residents understand the past with more nuance.

Collective memory, counter-memory, and perceptions of progress

Consequently, these multiple conversations with their varying storylines represented the tension between the “right” history to remember, the one that could help the schools in their progress. Interviews revealed intense skepticism among Ann Arbor, Evanston, and Chapel Hill residents about any new programs. This was said in Ann Arbor, but a version echoed in all of our interviews: “The disparity has been there for years and oftentimes you have an audience that will say, ‘why are we talking about this? It hasn’t changed. It’s the same thing warmed over’” (Tonya, August 13, 2015, personal communication). As they noted the superficial coverage of racial disparities in the news media with dismay, two school board members from Ann Arbor mentioned they made the issue a key talking point. “I’ve taken on achievement as my prized issue from day one,” said one, noting how she organized “listening sessions” for residents to understand the gaps in more historical context (Tonya, August 13, 2015, personal communication). The other added,

It’s important to have leadership who can hear all of those things, but continue to press forward, … attempting to make those changes, but to speak publicly about the need for continued change, even though it’s something we have been working on for years. (Sarah, August 21, 2015, personal communication)

As these challenging narratives took hold in public spaces such as online commenting sections and grew as well in private discourse, counter-memories had the opportunity to develop into some kind of collective that sparked progress in more policy-oriented spaces.

Interviews revealed more thoughtful and contextualized individual counter-memories. For example, the Evanston superintendents noted how institutionally racist policies such as the closing of neighborhood schools, housing discrimination, and generations of socio-economic inequities exacerbated disparities over time. All interview subjects in Evanston cited the city’s efforts to integrate in the 1960s, but also referred to the decade as the genesis for academic performance differences, primarily because the Black population was impacted disproportionately through the closing of community-building institutions. “This goes way back,” said a school official. “We didn’t close the White schools and bus the White kids into [Black] communities. That’s just not the history of this country. And Evanston … the same thing happened there” (Alfred, June 23, 2015, personal communication). Another top school official added, “And we closed the institutions. We closed the Y. We closed the hospital in the heavily concentrated African American ward, the fifth ward” (Stephen, June 23, 2015, personal communication). Counter-memories to the dominant collective were present in the non-mediated public dialogue about academic achievement and the detracking initiative. Educational leaders, community activists, and politicians realized that the public did not understand the city’s history, and that that ignorance contributed to inequities between student groups.

Discussion

These interviews and media text analyses revealed four characteristics that demonstrated the interplay between collective and counter-memories in these communities, all of which suffered deep losses of mainstream media resources during our study time period. One, the high turnover among reporters meant little institutional memory and historical context appeared in news stories. Two, when those left in the newsroom covered racial achievement disparities, they reinforced a collective memory where the community’s progressive education policies triumphed over “nagging” gaps. This articulated the problem as one about failing children rather than about a failing (progressively instituted) system. Three, a robust private counter-discourse existed, challenging dominant narratives, at times in public settings. Finally, the rise of online social platforms offered places for these counter-memories to gain traction. Although they did so in a way that encouraged polemic discourse rather than new proposals, counter-memories were formalized in a more collective oriented setting.

When those in power (the government, the press) are privileged in remembering, an oversimplified discourse dominates, resulting “in both a magnification of present defects in relation to the past and an understatement of the difficulty of changing the system” (Tyack and Cuban, 1997: 154). This collective memory ignored the contrary experiences of those most affected by the achievement gaps’ persistence—students of color and the generations that came before them—and promoted a progress-oriented grand narrative of shared memories (e.g. Evanston was the first Northern city to desegregate!) closely aligned with these places’ progressive identities. Furthermore, it created a tension between the unreferenced (and often incomplete) histories regarding education disparities and the reality of a complex past. As other theorists have found (e.g. Birkner and Donk, 2018; Brown and Hoskins, 2010) counter-memories in digital spaces challenged the dominant collective narratives. The school officials, activists, bloggers, and others expressed discontent privately over how simplistic the general understanding of the disparities in their cities was, and blamed the lack of historical context for the limited progress on resolving the gaps, at least in part. This frustration generated distrust for news media, led people to call selectively upon incidents from the past as “evidence” (arguing over motivations), and, finally, bred inaction and disengagement.

As a result, citizens complicated these progressive grand narratives from their pasts to such an extent that a counter–collective memory formed alongside the dominating storyline. The counter–collective memory—a term taken from anthropology (Ben-Zion, 2009)—represents a parallel grouping of collective memories that socially become a force of dominance in a community as institutional recollections fade and journalistic spaces shrink. In these constructions, citizens, especially those whose memories formal news collectives have typically excluded, challenge the progressive ideology and pose discursive possibilities for reconfiguring a city’s identity. As online interactivity becomes normalized and institutionalized, citizens gain agency in public versions of remembering through a local discourse.

While the decline of local newsrooms created an opportunity for counter-memories to offer a corrective to a community’s understanding of its past, these outlets still shaped public discourse and maintained the places’ collective memories. When the memories contained in education reporting did emphasize dominant historical narratives, it was challenged, creating questions over whether a shared historical memory for a specific place was achievable. The resulting struggle over the “right” history to remember, and the “right” collective memory to share, led to divisions within public discourse that often derailed policy discussions. Who has authority over a place’s collective memory becomes contested as the pluralistic community finds voice in mass publication online. In places with strong and entrenched ideologies like in these progressive cities, the very core identity falters and becomes threatened.

Conclusions

History works to build community, but can just as easily divide it. This dataset demonstrated how complicated evoking history in public discourse could be as memory’s construction and resurrection is politicized. Ongoing battles often resulted in more polemic dialogue mired in controversial historical understandings. These narratives become just as fragmented and incomplete as Edy (2006) argued journalism’s first draft of history is and did not always prove useful or productive. Furthermore, these counter–collective messages remained counter in their composition, with the dominant collective being reified by institutional authorities, including media but also local governments. Offline spaces afforded more nuanced discourse, calling for actual progress, especially reform, according to interviews. This sideline work helped to change the dominant narratives, but often few professionally mediated reports chronicled these efforts. Until those in power in these places engage with these counter-memories—collective or otherwise—in a more comprehensive way, we fear little real systemic change will happen.