Alternative Schools as Dumping Grounds: Latinx Experiences of Disposability in Houston, Texas

• In Event: 66.048 - Public Policy and Educational Practices for Latinx Students

Abstract

Drawing from a year long study in an alternative charter school, this ethnographic research uses a student-centered approach to examine the processes that lead some Latinx youth in Houston, Texas to enter a “second-chance” school. The research reveals how public policy, educational practice, and discourses on testing and “at-risk youth” entangle with one another to produce pathways into alternative schools. The research finds that once in the alternative school, many students describe the sense that they have been ‘dumped’ and abandoned by the educational system. Building on this description of their lives, the project engages with theories of disposability in order to underscore the dynamic and harmful constellation of educational processes that expel, pushout, or reroute Latinx student bodies.

Author

• Hilario Junior Lomeli, The Pennsylvania State University - University Park