The Racial Politics of Witnessing for Racial Justice in Education

• In Event: The Promises, Tensions, and Struggles of Witnessing Toward Racial Justice

Abstract

Efforts to privatize k-12 education through market-oriented reforms have been disproportionately driven by white, male, elite political and economic networks undergirded by venture philanthropy (Au & Ferrare, 2014; Reckhow & Snyder, 2014; Scott, 2009; Scott & Jabbar, 2014). The racial and class dynamics of the political influencers, or venture philanthropists (Scott, 2009), who shape the agenda for national education policy stand in stark contrast to the communities these policies claim to support, who are often low-income Black and Latinx students and families. One strategy employed by the funders of these educational privatization efforts to address these racial optics is to racially diversify the leadership ranks. People of color become the narrators or spokespersons for organizations run by white, elite male funders. Organizations deploy this strategy as a political resource in their attempts to manage stakeholder perceptions while the narrator pushes a political agenda of privatizing public education (Hernandez, 2022). This study explores an important and unexamined dynamic: how advocates of privatizing education funding sources complicate the sociopolitical landscape of organizing for educational equity among white and/or privileged parents.

Author

• Talia S. Leibovitz, University of California - Berkeley