Interpreting the Crisis of School Choice: Conjunctural Analysis and the Democratic Project of Public Education

• In Event: Complex Contestation: Understanding the Structures and Actors that Manage Dissent in the U.S. K-12 Political Landscape

Abstract

School choice has long been framed as an “American right,” promising parents the freedom to select the best educational option for their children (Orfield & Frankenberg, 2013). While initially introduced as a potential tool to redress racial inequities in schooling, particularly for Black students historically denied access to quality education, school choice has evolved into a dominant educational paradigm that masks deepening racial and economic segregation (Freidus & Ewing, 2022; Scott, 2013; Scott & Quinn, 2014; Wells, 2018). In many urban districts, including Oakland, California—the focus of this study—school choice is no longer debated or even justified; it is treated as a given. This normalization signals a new and under-theorized crisis of school choice, one that cannot be understood outside the broader dismantling of public institutions and the erosion of democratic commitments to collective educational justice.

This article uses Stuart Hall’s (1986; 2012) method of conjunctural analysis to examine the political, ideological, and structural contradictions that define this moment in public education. Conjunctural analysis offers a means to understand crises not as episodic disruptions, but as moments in which previously stable ideological, political, and economic formations break apart and reconfigure. By applying this method to the case of Oakland Unified School District (OUSD), I demonstrate how market logics, austerity measures, race-evasive discourses, and privatization efforts have converged to produce a terrain in which organizing for racially just, integrated public schools is both politically fraught and institutionally unsupported.

Drawing on over four years of ethnographic research with Parents for Equity (PFE)—a multiracial group of middle- and upper-middle-class parents organizing for school desegregation in Oakland—this paper highlights the everyday struggles, contradictions, and setbacks they encountered. Using critical discourse analysis across fieldnotes, meeting transcripts, and public documents, I trace how PFE sought to disrupt patterns of school segregation by piloting integration initiatives (Fairclough, 2023). Yet their efforts encountered resistance across multiple fronts: from white and privileged families protecting access to high-status schools; from low-income Black and Latinx communities wary of displacement and white saviorism; and from district leaders hesitant to take a political stance amid decades of state intervention and fiscal precarity.

This study shows how hegemonic discourses around neighborhood schools, meritocracy, and parental entitlement have become “commonsense,” rendering structural inequality invisible and recasting segregation as a neutral or inevitable outcome. Through a conjunctural lens (Hall, 1986; 2012), I argue that the crisis of school choice is not only about policy failure but about the narrowing of political imagination and the erosion of a public good ethos. The inability to mount a broad-based, cross-racial coalition for school integration in Oakland underscores the challenges of organizing for systemic equity within a landscape dominated by individualism and market rationality.


Ultimately, this paper makes the case that the crisis of school choice is also a crisis of democracy. Public schools—ideally institutions of shared investment and collective possibility—are increasingly governed by logics that prioritize consumerism over citizenship. By tracing how ideologies of school choice are constructed, contested, and reproduced in a specific urban context, this study contributes to ongoing efforts to reclaim public education as a site of democratic struggle.

Author

• Talia S. Leibovitz, University of California - Berkeley