Black Families in the Neoliberal School "Choice" Era: CritFamilies and Their Critical Race Protective Family Engagement Practices

• In Event: Educational Leadership Resistance to the Neoliberal Turn in Education

Abstract

In support for school choice policies, millions have been spent ensuring its legislative hold in US schooling. Moreover, supportive arguments from current top-level federal policymakers profess choice policies grant families, namely African Americans, the ability to choose quality schools for their children (Trump, 2017). Despite this rallying support of choice, little attention is devoted to empirical racial inequalities found across schools, from private to charter, that has historically impacted Black children and thus has concerned their families regardless of “choice.” Using critical race theory and race protectionism as complementary frames, this paper illuminates counternarratives from 16 diverse family sets (63 participants, including 44 school-age children) residing primarily in a Midwest urban city where neoliberal school policy has made prolific gains. Data collected (e.g., semi-structured qualitative interviews, school documents, and policies) across three years focused on family engagement ranging from the period of 1995-2018—which overlaps with the neoliberal school choice era framed in this symposium.

Findings suggest deeply rooted in family engagement was the supposition that school racism was endemic, requiring the centering of a child's racial reality in the purview of family school choice. Moreover, all students represented suffered some form of school racism (i.e., euro-centered curriculum, racial bullying, and apathetic teachers) that negatively impacted them and subsequently warranted “racial protectionism” (Mazama & Lundy, 2012) from families— namely parents. Findings merit introducing a new framework, Critical Race Protective Family Engagement, with the result that families that practiced this engagement are referred to as CritFamilies in this study. Because critical race protective family engagement was a complex form of engagement, applicable to the type of school attended and racism experienced, coupled with dominant themes of racial fear and hypervigilance among families, categorized responses of CritFamilies are presented in three distinct engagement practices: 1) racial protective fight, 2) racial protective flight, and 3) racial protective freeze. This new frame can be applied to other racialized periods, however, in connection to the neoliberal school choice era, this paper discusses the implications in lieu of the eras to come and offer suggestions for how school leaders across schools can strengthen their relationship with families by actively dismantling school racism. I propose several possible frames that may help school leaders in this view from culturally responsive school leadership (Khalifa, Gooden, & Davis, 2016) to racial protectionism.

Author

• Jada A Phelps-Moultrie, Michigan State University