Neoliberal Advocacy: District and Parent Special Education Discourses Amid the Crisis of Austerity Urbanism

• In Event: "When a Conjuncture Unrolls, There Is No Going Back": Education and Social Crisis in Chicago

Abstract

Purposes and Frameworks
While neoliberal education reforms have been expanding for decades, this study is situated in a period of urban life after the foreclosure crisis and economic recession of 2008 that Peck (2015) refers to as austerity urbanism. It is characterized by intensifying rollbacks of already neoliberalized programs; deeper funding cuts to programs for marginalized populations; and the devolution of risk, as the pain of extreme budget cuts is dumped downstream on smaller local agencies (Peck, 2015). A 2017 bombshell report (Karp, 2017) revealed that Chicago Public Schools had paid a politically connected firm to conduct an audit of special education, whose findings pushed forward internal procedures that systematically delayed and denied services to special education students. This policy change ignited intense public dialogues and spurred 14 advocacy organizations to request a state investigation. These cost-cutting strategies–done in the name of equity– were among austerity measures that saved the district millions of dollars and elevated bond ratings during a severe fiscal crisis for the city.
This study examines the discourses that emerged in public discussions of these policy changes, engaging the following questions: What discourses do parents, advocates, and district representatives employ in their public discussions responding to the crisis of legitimacy that erupted around the special education scandal? How do they employ, resist, and retool available discourses?

I draw on theories of austerity urbanisim (Peck, 2015), notions of neoliberal multiculturalism (Melamed, 2011), critiques of neoliberal ableism and disableism (Goodley, 2014; Kumari Campbell, 2008), and crip/queer (Kafer, 2011) approaches to disability to analyze the ways that parents and district officials take up, refuse, and intervene on discourses of disability, equity, citizenship, and worth within public dialogues. Following Olmedo and Wilkins (2017), I note how the state has activated parents to neoliberal subjectivity.

Methods
This study uses the tools of discourse analysis (Ball, 2006; Bacchi, 2005) to organize and interpret the discourses that are taken up by participants in public meetings: Board of Education, parent groups, town halls, and a state board of education hearing. I also draw on 15 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with key participants in the public dialogue and my field notes from attending meetings as a researcher, former teacher, and parent of a disabled student.

Significance
Parents of children with disabilities have been studied extensively, but little work has focused on the complexity and contradictions of advocacy in the context of racial neoliberal policy discourses and neoliberal frameworks for participation using a disability studies lens. The study of discourse is deeply important to enacting the resignifying practices that change how we understand disability, disabled people, and our relationships to the project of normalcy (Garland-Thomson, 2005; Hall, 2011). This study contributes to the project of improving our disability advocacy by interrogating the discourses that frame our policies and our responses. In this moment of crisis, advocacy must adapt to push the crisis beyond a compromise that merely restores our childrens’ services, but rather to a more transformative outcome for disabled students and for schools.

Author

• Gia M. Super, University of Illinois at Chicago
  Presenting Author