School Choice: The Freedom to Choose, the Right to Exclude

• In Event: Moscone Center North Roundtable Session 6
  In Roundtable Session: What's Race Got to Do With It: How Market-Based School Reform Maintains Racial and Economic Inequality

Abstract

1. Objectives
This paper asks how thinking through choice in education---as a key principle of reform and management in education that appeared in the post-Brown period---can help us develop a more capacious and clear understanding of neoliberalism, how it works, its relationship to the continued production of a racialized hierarchical citizenship in the U.S., and what type of public---and state-- we might fight for.


2. Theoretical Framework
The paper draws on feminist and critical race theory (Bell, 2004; Harris, 1993) to trace a critical geneology of choice in education reform.


3. Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry
This paper combines ethnographic fieldwork methods of participant observation and semi-structured interviews with analysis of education policies and reforms that focus on school choice in the post-Brown v. Board of Education era. The author conducted ethnographic research over the course of spanned 18 months (2009-2012) in New York City’s Community School District 3, one of the most racially and economically diverse districts in the nation’s largest school system, yet also among the most segregated and unequal. This paper traces how that these characteristics of District 3---diverse, segregated, unequal, and choice-based---are joined together by design.

4. Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials

The paper draws on ethnographic research, federal, state and municipal policy mandates, U.S. Supreme Court cases, news transcripts, and feminist and critical race theory (Bell, 2004; Harris, 1993).

5. Results /Conclusions
I track the realignment that took place in the post–Civil Rights social structure—specifically after Brown v. Board of Education (1954)—to ensure the repetition of a confined, restricted and racialized hierarchical citizenship despite the winning of equal rights. While the significance of racism to the structured limitations of full citizenship has been increasingly recognized—especially since the election of Donald Trump to the office of U.S. President ushered in what we might consider a post- post-racial period—the continuity of racial hierarchy is often attributed to neoliberalism or White supremacy.

6. Scholarly significance

Choice-based education policies have become increasingly critiqued in reference to neoliberal education reform, which many scholars and activists mark as beginning with the publication of A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform. This scholarship has provided important insights to the ways that choice has been integral to the marketing of privatization mechanisms such as charter schools and to the overt promotion of a consumer-oriented citizenship. However, an uneven emphasis on mechanism of privatization has led many to equate neoliberalism with privatization and a devolution of democracy. The implication of such analyses then, is that education post-Brown and prior to the 1980s was representative of principles of equity and social good, standing in contrast to neoliberal restructuring and privatization, understood as resulting in social harm. I suggest that we might consider Jim Crow as the path that neoliberal restructuring follows in the United States.

Author

• Ujju Aggarwal, The New School