Euphemizing School Choice Policy: The Neoliberal Remaking of Schools in the Name of Racial Justice

• In Event: 44.036 - Neoliberalism, Racism, and School Choice Policy in South Africa, Canada, and the United States

Abstract

Objectives:
In 1977, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu warned that the school functions as an effective site of social reproduction precisely because the school conceals, “by an apparently neutral attitude,” the “fact that it fulfills this function” (p. 57). Schools, by design, mask their role in reproducing social stratification and exacerbating inequality. In contemporary US society, the “infiltration of market-driven truths and calculations into the domain of politics” installs a set of neoliberal- and social justice-infused logics and discourses that euphemizes, or conceals, the racialized and classed assumptions, contours, and outcomes of school choice policy (Ong, 2006, p. 4).
To examine this process of euphemization that contributes to and conceals the intensification of racial inequality through neoliberal school choice policies, I explore everyday life at Milton High School. Milton was a public high school that established a Homeland Security program as a part of the district’s “programs of choice” portfolio. Although the Homeland Security program trained poor and working class youth of color for low-level work in the national security industry, school adults heralded the program as a progressive effort to “eliminate the achievement gap altogether.” Framing the Homeland Security program as a race-conscious commitment concealed the racialized and classed drivers and effects of the district’s school choice policies. Invested in social justice, well-intended teachers consented to and celebrated school choice policies as important avenues toward racial justice and economic security for all students. School adults’ commitment to equality facilitated the creation of school choice policies that reproduced inequality. This paper examines how the readily available discourses school adults reached for masked the school choice policy’s role in maintaining inequality.

Methods:
This analysis of euphemizing school choice policy draws from an ethnography I conducted at Milton during the 2012-2013 school year. This ethnography offered a window into the prevailing neoliberal and racialized logics that organized how school adults conceptualized public school reform and school choice policy. This ethnographic research also revealed the dominant discourses used to euphemize the racialized and classed outcomes of these school choice policies at the district- and school-levels.

Findings:
Through a critical discourse analysis of teachers’ talk, this research study offers two main findings: 1) antiracist discourses framed school adults’ understanding of neoliberal school choice policy as progressive project and 2) this framing, by design, concealed the racialized logics and outcomes of the district’s school choice policy. These findings indicate that the dominant narratives of school choice as increasing democracy and advancing social justice authorized policies that exacerbated social inequities.

Significance:
To date, educational research has examined how redefining “freedom” and “democracy” according to neoliberal principles of market situates school choice as a progressive alternative to the “monopoly” of the public school system. Yet, the case of Milton illustrates how social justice narratives, simultaneous to neoliberal principles, encourage school adults to conceptualize school choice policy as an antiracist approach to school reform. By examining the dominant narratives and everyday experiences that cultivate consent, this analysis provides an entry point for contesting the “good sense” in school choice policy.

Author

• Nicole Nguyen, University of Illinois at Chicago