Organizational Discourse and Race: How Race Is (or Isn’t) Being Invoked in Charter Management Organizations

• In Event: Roundtable Session 28
  In Roundtable Session: Choice and Organizations

Abstract

Current trends in educational policy reflect a contradictory treatment of race. Specifically, reformers explicitly refer to race by calling attention to racial disparities in academic outcomes while simultaneously abandoning race-conscious policies. This research study examines if this broader discourse pattern of both highlighting and minimizing race is mimicked at the organizational level by charter management organizations (CMOs). Specifically, a critical discourse analysis of various documents and videos distributed by two CMOs is conducted to infer if CMOs explicitly or implicitly invoke race in distinctive ways. Initially analyses suggest that CMOs do replicate the broader trend of racialized discourse in education that both attends to race while simultaneously minimizing its primacy.

Author

• Laura Elena Hernandez, University of California - Berkeley