Only STEM Can Save Us? Examining Race, Place, and STEM Education as Property

The rhetoric about science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education in urban schools reflects a desire to imagine a new city that is poised to compete in a STEM-centered future. Therefore, STEM has been positioned as a critical part of urban education reform efforts. In various US cities, schools labeled as failing are being repurposed as selective STEM-intensive academies to build a STEM education infrastructure. In Memphis, Tennessee, this process makes visible issues with educational inequity, exacerbated by school choice and gentrification processes. In this article, I use whiteness as property, a tenet of critical race theory, to examine STEM education in Memphis as a case of urban STEM-based education reform in the United States. I describe claiming STEM education as property as a 2-phase process in which middle-class Whites in urban areas participate to secure STEM education by repurposing failed Black schools and to maintain it by institutionalizing selective admissions strategies.