Toward a Theory of Schooling as a White Good

• In Event: Discourse and Ideology, Past and Present: Toward a Critical Race-Conscious Policy Awakening

Abstract

This paper offers a novel theory of American Education that reconciles the racially naïve framing of schooling as a public good/private good with the work of critical race theorists who demonstrate the centrality of white supremacy to school politics and practices. I argue that schooling is a white good. First, I trace the troubled genealogy of public and private goods in the field of economics and its entry into the mainstream of educational policy talk in the 1990s. I then develop the theory white goods and their application to schooling. Finally, I conclude by demonstrating how notions of “public” and “private” are actually subordinate categories to white goods in the history and contemporary functioning of schooling in the United States.

Author

• Benjamin J. Justice, Rutgers University
  Presenting Author