Reprivatizing the Family: How "Opt-Out" and "Parental Involvement" Narratives Support School Privatization

• In Event: 70.050 - The Media and the Neoliberal Privatization of Education: Understanding, Critiquing, and Resisting Capital's Current Agenda for Education

Abstract

Re-Privatizing the Family: How “Opt-Out” and “Parental Involvement” Narratives Support School Privatization
To speak of the “neoliberal privatization of education” is discursively to acknowledge a distinction between “public” and “private,” which “privatization” works to erode. Critics of school privatization interpret this erosion as a politically regressive process, which consolidates resources and power in the hands of the few. An effective seawall between these realms, critics often imply, would support a more just distribution of power and resources. In the words of Diane Ravitch, who has been one of the most outspoken and articulate of school privatization’s critics, “public education has been a force for social and intellectual progress, a force to achieve a more just society.” The privatization of schools, she argues, will leave an educational landscape of “haves and have-nots, reinforcing the structural inequalities of American society” (2013, pp 319-21).
Family, and the domestic labor that feminist theorists call “reproductive labor” – the work of reproducing human societies and the relationships upon which they depend, work that includes raising and educating children – constitutes another aspect of the private. To this panel on neoliberalism and the privatization of schooling, this paper contributes an account of how the re-privatization of the family supports the privatization of schooling. Feminist theory has been addressing the public/private binary for half a century, and a full account of school privatization needs its insights. Following a brief exposition of feminist critique of the public/private binary, this paper explores how the media’s depiction of two kinds of relationships, those between parents and the workplace and those between parents and schools, contribute to the constitution of contemporary understandings of families, markets and public schooling. It critically considers two narratives prominent in the past decade: the tale of women “opting-out” of paid employment, and the case for the importance of “parental involvement” to children’s school achievement. The “opt-out” narrative’s presentation of women/mothers as freely choosing to leave paid employment for the sake of their children, I argue, functions to contain responsibility for child-raising within the family. The narrative legitimates family policies in the US that are anomalous within the developed world in their extreme privatization of responsibility for children’s well-being. Besides letting public policy off the hook for family needs, the opt out story supports the notion that every child has or should have a parent in the household whose time and labor are freely available. Parental involvement discourse taps this supposedly free time and unpaid labor and holds parents accountable for using it to support their children’s school success. It renders parents responsible for provisioning their children with an array of job-oriented “non-cognitive” skills. It privatizes, that is, aspects of child-raising that can legitimately be considered public responsibilities. Where does this leave critics of neoliberal privatization? Although Ravitch’s bright line distinction works as a rule of thumb, the well-being of American parents and children depends on reconceptualizing the work of raising children as a public concern, not a private contract but a political issue through and through.

Author

• Amy B. Shuffelton, Loyola University Chicago