The Impact of School Choice and Teacher Decision Making: Accountability and the Reification of Whiteness

• In Event: Moscone Center West Roundtable Session 5
  In Roundtable Session: #TeachingSoWhite: Examining Teachers, Teaching, and Contexts of Whiteness in Education

Abstract

This qualitative study explores how whiteness operates to inform teacher understandings of their role within neoliberal reform in Indianapolis, Indiana. We employ Ehrenreich’s (2002) symbiosis theory to make visible the ways in which whiteness operates in teaching practices, while simultaneously tending to the systemic factors of teacher employment under neoliberal reform. Further, we examine the how teachers embody tensions between policy and practice, rooted in their interpretation and appropriation of institutional structures that ultimately maintain their power in the system, while simultaneously exploiting them. Ultimately, this project makes visible a policy landscape that depends on the exploitation of teachers; and how these same teachers, within their roles, engage racist pedagogies in order to exact the demands of neoliberal reform.

Authors

• Alycia M. Elfreich, Indiana University - Bloomington

• Maureen Negrelli Coomer, Colorado College