What’s Liberation Worth?: Assessing an Anti-Racist Teacher Residency Program Through an Economic Framework

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Thursday 5:25 pm Four Seasons Ballroom 2-3
  In Roundtable Session: Costing the Rubicon: Addressing Methodological and Conceptual Complexities in Cost Analysis (Table 10)

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate tensions between economic evaluation and anti-racist, abolitionist, and critical scholarship (i.e., liberatory scholarship) and to ground these tensions in our economic evaluation of an anti-racist and abolitionist teacher residency program. We lean on constant comparative analysis techniques to juxtapose the epistemological perspectives of economic evaluation and liberatory scholarship, which problematizes capitalistic and neoliberal logics (Robinson, 2021).
Based on our comparison, we are prepared to discuss tensions between the perspectives, including:
1. The notion of scarcity. According to Levin et al. (2017), “economics is the study of the allocation of scarce resources, with emphasis on the term scarce” (p. 3) – but liberatory scholars contend that scarcity “...has other functions. It limits best practices to a chosen set of programs likely to maintain existing power structures while starving programs that are constituent-led, of color, and radical” (Robinson, 2021, p. 9, citing Scott et al., 2020).
2. The willingness to pay principle. “Benefits” are sometimes determined by a willingness to pay principle derived from individuals’ utility or satisfaction. However, it becomes difficult to apply this methodology when many do not value said benefits. For example, how can one determine the benefits of increasing diversity in education when, according to Iyer (2022), advantaged groups may view these outcomes not as a benefit, but as a threat to their power, ways of life, norms, and societal standards?
3. Earnings as valuation. Another way to value benefits is to model the future earnings of an individual with a benefit against the earnings of an individual without the benefit to derive the value of the benefit. However, often excluded in these models is structural racism (and other structural -isms) as a confounding factor.
4. Availability of shadow prices. Many shadow prices that liberatory scholars would want to be valued are not available in the literature. If intangible aspects of social capital can be valued, such as “institutional trust” (Orlowski & Wicker, 2015), then critical notions of property, such as whiteness (Harris, 1993), could also be valued.
5. Benefit to whom? Liberatory scholars are less occupied with economic benefits to corporations or the government, and more interested in economic benefits to communities of color, who have been exploited for centuries to build said corporate and governmental wealth. However, calculating benefits for specific communities is a relatively new framing in economic evaluation (Tran et al., 2022), and to the authors' knowledge, has yet to be done in the context of Black and Brown communities.
Our paper extends existing scholarship by discussing epistemological assumptions underlying economic evaluation. Because grantees are increasingly required to include economic evaluations to meet funder requirements, we aim to offer considerations and reframings of economic evaluation (e.g., drawing from reparations literature), as well as questions for all evaluators to consider in order to examine neoliberalism in their work (as encouraged by Robinson, 2021). We believe this discussion can move economic evaluation research, and the broader field of evaluation, towards theoretical orientations in the service of remedy and repair.

Authors

• Chelsey Nardi, Empirical Education Inc.

• Mayah Waltower, Empirical Education Inc.

• LaCretia Plane, Northcentral University