The Case of Richard Dunlap
While revising a materialist analysis of Pennsylvania school funding inequality for an educational leadership journal, the editors asked that I cut my opening anecdote. They thought it would be too controversial. So I’m publishing it here. What Richard Dunlap did in Upper Darby continues to inspire fear and discomfort. The reason, I think, is that he found a pressure point in our society that connects to a lot of its contradictions around segregation, property value, and race when it comes to school.
•
Superintendent Richard Dunlap must have touched a nerve.
In 2017, the Upper Darby School District School Board approved a five-year contract extension and raise for Dunlap, signaling approval of his work as superintendent of the eighth largest school district in the United States. Upper Darby serves 12,000 students. Not only is Upper Darby large, but it is diverse.
According to the most recent Civil Rights Data Collection through the Department of Education, the district has 66.2% of students on free or reduced price lunch, a typical measure of poverty. Demographically, according to civil rights data, the district is composed of 46.4% Black, 29.9% white, 14.7% Asian, and 6.7% Hispanic students.
By all accounts, overseeing such a large and diverse district would be a challenge, but by summer 2017 Dunlap was doing well. Then things changed. Less than a year after the Board gave him a raise, they suddenly all but fired him.
First he was put on administrative paid leave. A few months later, the same school board that voted to extend his contract and increase his pay voted 6-2 to ask him to retire, offering him a comfortable severance package. They also asked him to sign a non-disclosure agreement preventing him from discussing the situation. What happened?
According to a report in the Philadelphia Inquirer:
The decision [to fire Dunlap]...was at least partly rooted in a dispute over a redistricting proposal for the system’s crowded schools...Dunlap had been promoting a plan that would have given him the discretion to move students to schools outside their neighborhoods to correct imbalances in class sizes throughout the district. Rather than hard and fast, the lines separating attendance areas would become “fluid.” (Boccella, 2016)
Basically, Dunlap crossed a very sensitive line. School district boundaries are laden with social force. Families put a lot of financial and emotional stock in the neighborhoods they move to. Where they live comes to bear on their most important spiritual and material assets: their family’s housing and their children’s schooling. When it comes to diverse suburban areas like Upper Darby that are both proximate to a large city (in this case Philadelphia) but also outside that city, intense divisions course through the community.
People want good schools for their children. They want to live in a safe neighborhood. They want affordable housing that, ideally, creates a financial benefit for them. But what “safe” and “good” and “affordable” mean for different populations can differ drastically along class, racial, and cultural lines.
Upper Darby’s state representative to the Pennsylvania Legislature, Margot Davidson, put it this way: “[the district] is and has been...segregated for decades,” and the article says Dunlap’s plan “would have changed that.” Indeed, Dunlap’s decision could be read as an attempt to redistribute educational resources in the district. He wanted to build a new school in “mostly nonwhite Bywood neighborhood rather than a site closer to the predominantly white Drexel Hill.”
Further, Dunlap’s plan would have equalized class sizes. “[S]ome of the elementary schools in the more affluent Drexel Hill area have class sizes as small as 14 to 16 students, while some schools elsewhere in the township have almost twice as many.” Parents in favor of Dunlap’s idea confirm this redistributive project:
Kathleen Johnson, a parent who children attended Bywood School, said she strongly supported redistricting and was upset by the board’s action against Dunlap, who “was trying to even it out and make things fair and square...I think Drexel Hill families do not want the kids from the other sides of the tracks to come over there,” Johnson said. “Because of its different nationalities, they feel they’re going to bring their schools ratings down.” (Boccella 2016)
But school ratings weren’t the only thing on the minds of more affluent and white residents. Upper Darby’s mayor Thomas N. Micozzie “said his worry was the plan’s impact on real estate values.” He claimed, “the community didn’t want it.” After a series of “secret school board executive sessions,” the article says Dunlap was “banished.”
Dunlap, a former Marine, talked too seriously about crossing school catchment boundaries. Crossing these lines is one of the only ways to redistribute educational resources like class size in Pennsylvania.
But in a balance of forces like Upper Darby’s where inequalities of class, race, and ethnicity emerge through various housing and school practices, sensitive spots around these inequalities develop. Dunlap found that sensitivity, pushed it, and faced a backlash. Either on purpose or inadvertently, he found a pressure point in the balance of forces of the Upper Darby social structure.
The pressure point in this case was the site of such high tensions that even talking about a change (in this case school-siting and making catchment lines more fluid) can get a well-liked superintendent fired. I wanted to talk to Dr. Dunlap when teaching about his experience in Upper Darby, but while he said he wanted to he couldn’t due to the non-disclosure agreement the school district made him sign. I believe he is now directing the sports program in another regional school district.