Broken Promises: Charter Schools as Opportunities for Anti-Blackness

• In Event: 30.038 - Underprepared, Undermined, and Underrated: Policy and Schooling Practices That Inhibit Equitable Academic Success for Students of Color

Abstract

Objectives/Purposes:
Gloria Ladson Billings (2006) has noted that the entrenched legacy of white supremacy saturates public education currently, creating an ‘education debt’ that is articulated in the seductive commonsensical language of the “achievement gap.” This language obfuscates the racialized structural antagonisms that impact public education and narrowly tailors policy prescriptions. In response to these racialized inequalities, policy makers have proffered neoliberal educational restructuring in the form of charter schools as a key mechanism for change (Payne & Knowles, 2009). Charter schools are understood as sites that increase educational opportunity for students and a significant element within the constellation of official anti-racisms (Kingsland, 2005; Malamed, 2006). Yet, while charter schools are positioned as such, racialized inequalities are exacerbated (Author, 2014; Dixson, 2011; Sondel, 2015). In keeping with this year’s theme, this paper revolves around the question how might charter schools invert the promise of equal educational opportunity? By exploring the dispositions of educators, narratives of parents and students, and various artifacts, this paper aims to trace how promises of educational opportunity and equity often go broken, making charter schools opportunities for anti-blackness.

Theoretical Framework:
This paper is framed using critical race theory. The author utilizes CRT’s critique of liberalism (Bell, 2009; Ladson-Billings, 1998) which challenges notions of colorblindness, objectivity, meritocracy and CRT’s notion of whiteness as property (Harris, 1993), which situates whiteness as collapsing into the idea of property, allowing for an exclusive social identity and privileges to be conferred.

Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry:
The author conducted a yearlong critical race qualitative case study exploring the racial politics of charter reform and the reproduction of white dominance in post-Katrina New Orleans.

Data sources:
This inquiry relies on in-depth, semi-structured interviews with parents and students, educators, and policy artifacts.

Results and/or substantiated conclusions:
Findings suggest that charter schools in post-Katrina New Orleans work as circuits of dispossession that delimit educational opportunity for Black students. This dispossession was instantiated in punitive disciplinary practices and culturally irrelevant and un-sustaining pedagogies and curricula. The manifested inequalities were undergirded by dispositions of educators, who espoused dysconscious racist rationalities. This suggests that whiteness as property, particularly Harris’ notions of (1) the right to use and enjoyment and (2) the right of reputation and status property, works as a structuring force in charter schooling. As such, post-Katrina charter schools maintain liberalism’s substantive inequality.

Scientific or scholarly significance of the study of the work:
Charter schools, heralded as progenies of the Civil Rights Movement and bastions of educational opportunity, continue to expand throughout the U.S. and globally. Charters organizations and personnel rooted in neoliberal logics of white supremacy forfeit the promise that education may hold for Blacks, reproducing anti-blackness in the drag of opportunity. This paper adds to the growing literature on the disparate impact charters have on Black communities and aids in our knowledge to re-conceptualize current education policy and thus our policy actions.

Author

• Kevin Lawrence Henry, University of Arizona