Desegregation Policy and the Hidden History of Chicago’s Neoliberal Education System

• In Event: 066 - Section on Political Sociology Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 09. The Politics of Policy

Abstract

Over the last thirty years, a new public education policy consensus has taken shape among leading school reformers around the watchwords of accountability and choice. Scholars attribute this shift to a new set of ideas and agenda items coalescing around the Department of Education’s 1983 A Nation at Risk report, which decried the failure of America’s education system. While the new reform movement drew from the prominent reform proposals of state officials and private foundations, the dominant model that emerged goes beyond early notions of state accountability, market accountability, and decentralization. Specifically, reformers today often target historically low-performing schools serving a large percentage of black and brown students from low-income households, deeming them incapable of meeting basic standards and imposing sweeping, often punitive school-level changes. Drawing on the exemplary case of the Chicago Public Schools, this paper asks how political and institutional conditions predating the contemporary reform movement contributed to the development and political viability of this new kind of targeted school policy.

Author

• Fithawee Tzeggai, University of California-Berkeley