When a District Calls for Commitment: Parents and Teachers Responding to Majoritarian Narratives in District Policy

Educational policy both shapes and is shaped by dominant constructions of educational inequity. This article explores how such constructions are reproduced and disrupted during policy enactment through a case study examining one district’s promotion of their new literacy-based grade-retention policy. Drawing on Critical Race Theory and critical policy analysis, we analyzed data generated from video-cued interviews with 20 parents and teachers, in which they viewed and reacted to a district-created video promoting the policy. We illustrate how the video constructed a race-evasive, individualist majoritarian narrative that redirected responsibility for increasing literacy from the district as an institution to parents and families. Then, we consider how parents and teachers responded to the video’s narrative. This analysis both illustrates how many participants (re)produced this majoritarian narrative and how a subset of participants challenged this district framing. These findings illustrate how educational policy can reproduce majoritarian narratives that justify and perpetuate educational inequity.