Geospatial Perspectives on Neoliberal Education Reform: Examining Intersections of Ability, Race, and Social Class

• In Event: Critical Race Theory and the Spatial Analysis: Cases of Praxis to Disrupt Racial Injustice

Abstract

Objectives: We examine the possibilities and challenges of using geospatial and temporal analysis to examine inequities at the intersections of ability, race, and social class in neoliberal urban education reform. Using the massive school closings that occurred in Chicago Public Schools (CPS) in 2013, we examine how spatial data representations (e.g., tables, graphs, maps) can mediate the construction of narratives about Black and Latino students receiving special education services.

Theoretical framework: We draw from Critical Race Theory and Designed-based research to study data representations to construct and contest narratives about the provision of special education services amid neoliberal school-reform debates. Narratives play a crucial role in the ways in which educational policies recruit proponents and gain legitimacy, and often employ data representations to contest or support arguments about people, places, policies and outcomes. A key assumption of our approach is that such data representations are not just “innocent bystanders” in these discursive contexts: they are authored texts, infused with a host of assumptions and perspectives (Lynch, 1990). Thus, data representations can have a great deal of agency in the ways they mediate discourse and the construction of policy narratives that serve to reproduce old or create new unjust geographies.

Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry: We use analytical tools from discourse analysis (e.g., Fairclough, 2003; Goodwin, 2007) to examine properties of data representations that support different narrative elements, and that mediate the description of some of the intersecting spatialities of special education and neoliberal urban schooling policies.

Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials: Our data sources include 4 examples of data representations. The first example is a page from a data briefing made public by CPS in March 2013, to explain the district’s decision to close 54 neighborhood elementary schools. The second example is an interactive web page, which was created the same year by a group of stakeholders engaged in the public debate about school closings. The third and fourth examples are maps created by the researchers based on collaborative design meetings.

Results and/or substantiated conclusions or warrants for arguments/point of view: The multiplied effects of structural disadvantages at the intersection of race, ability, and economic means were invisible in debates about school closings. It is not enough to call for the inclusion of special education “data” in policy debates. Rather it is essential to attend to the kinds of narratives these data enable stakeholders to construct, the ways they foreground some structural disadvantages and make others invisible.

Scientific or scholarly significance of the study or work: This chapter contributes to a growing body of literature on critical race spatial analysis, offering collaborative data design as a valuable context for examining the construction of space, within the contested arena of public education policy. Further, our paper encourage scholars in special education, critical race theory, and political economy to examine how spatial representations can obscure, neglect, or elucidate complex forms of inequities at the intersections of race and ability and their relationship with the production of the urban space.

Authors

• Federico R. Waitoller, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Joshua L. Radinsky, University of Illinois at Chicago