Selling and Resisting English-Medium Schooling in Milwaukee: A Typology of Choice Schools' Marketing Strategies

• In Event: Working From Marginal Spaces: Multifaceted Curricula to Resist Hegemonic Structures

Abstract

Drawing from theories of racial capitalism and language ideologies, we analyze charter and voucher school websites and interview data from a nine-month ethnography on the tensions between bilingual education and school choice policy in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Our findings identify six marketing strategies that choice schools employed on Milwaukee’s South Side, a place with high concentrations of Spanish-speaking, low-income Latinx families and a long history of struggle for bilingual education. We then present one working-class Mexican father’s narrative of school choosing as an example of the ways parents resist the racializing logics embedded within choice-based, marketized school systems. The article provides policy agents with a typology to help generate place-specific analyses of the marketization of language education in multilingual communities.

Authors

• Andrew Hilton Hurie, University of Wisconsin - Whitewater

• Deborah K. Palmer, University of Colorado Boulder