Charter Schools: "Competitive Healing" Inside an Urban Charter School and the Production of Laissez-Faire Racial Ideology

• 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:
Market-based school reforms have urged for choice, competition, and high-stakes production of test scores in order to improve urban schools. Charter schools of late, although conceptualized as experiments in autonomy to foster pedagogical innovation (Shanker, 1988; Budde, 1988), are vigorously tied to market-based rationales and viewed increasingly as mechanisms of competition to engender more efficient educational processes and outcomes (Ni and Arson, 2010). While faith in market competition is generally assumed to offer a more responsive and efficient system of schooling, I explore in this paper how competition was framed as a tension between "responsiveness" to students and "efficiency" for greater test-score production at cheaper costs. As pedagogy in these settings and its relationship to race, culture, and student engagement are often overshadowed, I highlight the racial and cultural dimensions that shaped the framing of competition and the subsequent pedagogical practices in the school.

2. Theoretical framework
I connect theories of neoliberalism, whiteness, and race and culture to examine school actors' construction of "competition" in a privately managed charter school, including perceptions among school actors of student culture as either resources or impediments for reaching the school's competitive goals. While liberal ideas of rugged individualism, hard work, opportunity, and achievement are quite old in American society, theorists have linked these ideas to theories of whiteness and the particular socio-historical experiences of mobility for white ethnic groups (Dalton, 2005). In a context of neoliberal reform, where liberalism is "dis-embedded" (Harvey, 2005) from social goals to alleviate poverty, achieve full unemployment, and enforce civil rights agendas related to racial segregation and anti-discrimination, liberal ideas about competition can produce 'laissez-faire' racial ideologies (Bobo et. al., 1997; Bonilla-Silva, 2006). These ideologies play up 'color-blind' rationales, such as cultural beliefs about African-Americans, to justify patterns of inequality. I extend and connect these theories to analyze the practices of charter school actors and the patterns of punishment and exclusion of low-performing, low-income black and Latino children that emerged.

3. Methods
I use a critical extended case methodology (Burawoy,1998) of a charter school in NYC between 2011-2013. The technique required both an on-the-ground look at school-based practices, and a larger analysis of the shifting rationales about the purpose of charter schools in a community that was undergoing urban revitalization efforts related to gentrification and market reform.

4. Data sources
I rely on in-depth interviews and participant observations of regional directors, managers, school leaders and educators of a charter school. I also made use of school documents, training materials, and reports compiled by city officials and state authorizers.

5. Results
Despite the urgency of "competition" driving school actors to improve student performance, the construct was predicated on explicit role-modeling of white and middle-class groups, and limited the realization of a critical and culturally inclusive praxis. Deficit-based cultural beliefs ultimately rationalized the punitive treatment (and exclusion) of low-performing black children in the school (an estimated loss of students overtime of nearly 30-40%).

Author

• Terrenda Corisa White, University of Colorado-Boulder