Culture, Power, and Pedagogy(s) in Market-Driven Times: Embedded Case Studies of Culture and Teaching in Three Urban Charter Schools in Harlem, New York

• In Event: Promising Scholarship in Education: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

Abstract

Based on a year of extensive interviewing and participant-observations with twenty instructional leaders across thirteen charter schools, as well as twenty-six teachers in three purposefully selected charters, research indicated that a once heterogeneous charter sector in Harlem has shifted in fifteen years to reflect homogenizing tendencies associated with the rise of private charter management organizations (CMOs) and punitive accountability policies. At the intersection of such shifts were teachers and charter school leaders who struggled to make sense of the changing sector around them, some of whom were longstanding participants but yet found themselves marginalized in the very movement they helped to start. As they struggled to maintain and negotiate core aspects of their instructional approaches, many noted the ways in which their respective schools drifted away from early goals. In an effort to yield more competitive outcomes in the form of testing, many participants often 'traded-off' on the innovative and diverse approaches they hoped the charter sector would welcome. An expanding charter sector, shaped by a rather small bloc of private managers, therefore, has brought shrinking diversity in approaches to teaching and learning, a significant irony (and consequence) for children of color typically marginalized by rigid cultural practices associated with bureaucratic schools.
Thus, on the ground level, fieldwork in Harlem revealed a heterogeneous group of participants whose goals for participating in the charter sector were shaped by a multitude of factors, including community-based reformers from the Harlem neighborhood, disillusioned educators of district schools, circumstantial participants looking for job opportunities in an otherwise stagnant labor market, young novices from education-service programs, and increasingly private investors and entrepreneurs from outside the public school sector altogether. Each group offered different rationales and articulated diverse instructional goals, for how best to educate children, particularly poor children of color.
But while important differences were evident on the ground level, larger trends were taking shape in the provision and structure of charter management at the macro level, trends which increasingly homogenized practices via promotion of charter consolidation, replication, and uniformity, most often urged by private management groups with access to political and private capital. These groups, moreover, were traditionally from outside the public school sector, were most hostile to traditional public school entities such as teachers' unions, were keen on corporate models of management and production, often embracing "the bottom line" logic of test score production. In the span of fifteen years, therefore, there was a discernible structure to Harlem's charter market, with nearly seventy-percent of all charters controlled by five private management companies, and whose leaders and educators embraced technocratic orthodoxies of testing and data-driven practices. The diffusion of such practices, moreover, increasingly threatened diversification in instruction across all schools.

Author

• Terrenda Corisa White, Teachers College, Columbia University