Black Male Achievement Programs and the Neoliberalization of Education Policy in the United States

• In Event: Moscone Center West Roundtable Session 3
  In Roundtable Session: The Politics of Neoliberal Educational Policies: Conceptual and Empirical Examinations of Alternative Educational Visions

Abstract

This paper examines the relationship between the neoliberal takeover of education policy in the United States and the recent proliferation of Black male achievement programs. Within the past decade, Black male achievement programs, such as Oakland’s African American Male Achievement (AAMA), have become popular educational interventions aimed at closing the racial opportunity gap. In contrast to historical racial justice education initiatives like desegregation, programs like AAMA individualize the causes of racial inequality, placing the onus for improvement on Black boys themselves rather than the educational system. Moreover, such programs exclude Black girls, who attend the same underfunded schools and grow up in the same segregated communities as Black boys (Crenshaw, 2015).

With this paper, I will contextualize the rise of Black male achievement initiatives within the history of U.S. education policy in the latter half of the 20th Century (Carter & Welner, 2013). I will analyze Black organizing for school desegregation as a policy platform that had the potential to be structural and gender-inclusive (Siddle Walker, 2018), alongside the transition to more individualistic education models such as charter schools (Scott & Stuart Wells, 2013). I will then investigate the significance of Black male achievement programs’ existence as public-private partnerships and the role of philanthropy in proliferating both school choice policies and the Black male achievement model (Scott, 2009; 2018). I will also explore the relationship between an individualized, market-oriented approach to public education and the racialized gender ideology embedded in Black male achievement programs (Hill Collins, 1990) - bringing an explicitly raced and gendered analysis to neoliberal education policy in the U.S.

Author

• Rachel Anspach, University of California - Berkeley