School Choice as Community Disempowerment: Racial Rhetoric and Education Policy

• In Event: Whose Voice And How? Exit, Voice, and Loyalty in Education Politics

Abstract

Depictions of school choice as offering greater individual and local autonomy are widespread, yet they sit uneasily with portrayals of such policies within African American political discourse. School choice is highly racialised. Black activists and elites, in some cases, have campaigned against school choice policies by presenting them as tools of white outsiders to break up and divide the black community. This paper studies the ways in which opposition to publicly funded private school vouchers and charter schools has been used as a cue to signal solidaristic ties to the African American electorate. Although opinion polls have suggested that a majority of African American voters support education vouchers, this paper argues that in a campaign context school choice policies are sometimes framed through the prisms of racial authenticity and community control. Using data drawn from interviews with political operatives and archival research in Newark, New Jersey, this paper demonstrates that school choice can be successfully rendered in campaign rhetoric as a policy of community disempowerment.

Author

• Richard Johnson, Lancaster University