State Takeover and Charter Expansion: Educational Visions Deferred?

• 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

In the context of contentious public debate on charter schools, educational policy debates have been recast in terms of governance agnosticism with articulations of a commitment to “high quality schools” regardless of whether they are charters or traditional public schools. Despite the seduction of governance agnosticism, this position makes invisible relations of power inherent to questions of governance in education. As charters provide increased autonomy on a number of school-level features such as hiring and firing, budget, curriculum and instruction, and school conduct and discipline, the question of who is in a position of authority vis-à-vis charter approval has implications for which visions of education have the opportunity to be realized and which do not. Although charters create a governance structure with more autonomy at the school level, power asymmetries in whose educational visions secure the approval can be a site for the reproduction of racial inequality. Though school choice is often discussed in terms of greater parent empowerment (Scott, 2013), the salience and growth of particular charter school models signals that what constitutes a school worthy of approval, philanthropic investment, and acclaim is less about parental choice or more about who is in a position of power to make these determinations (Scott, 2009; Reckhow & Snyder, 2014). Therefore, it is important to understand how power is transmitted to privileged parties during the charter authorization process.

Scholars demonstrate that authorizer approval is not racially neutral and illuminate the way race shapes exclusion from governance through application denials (Henry & Dixson, 2016; Henry, 2019). Evidence illuminates that state takeovers are more likely to be advanced in districts with Black and Latino political representation on school boards and city councils, despite similar low performance in white districts (Morel, 2018). This finding of racialized political motivations of state takeover is particularly salient in our sites of investigation: New Orleans, LA and Memphis, TN, where the Recovery School District (RSD) and Achievement School District (ASD) operate as state takeover agencies with implications for Black political empowerment over public education. Previous comparative analyses illuminate the parallels between education efforts in New Orleans and Memphis, which include movement towards a portfolio management model, the establishment of a state takeover agency, and the emergence of alternative teacher certification programs (Rousseau & Dixson, 2016). Given that state takeovers have been prologue to the expansion of charters as a method of improving public education for students of color, this study investigates which educational visions are prioritized in the remaking of school systems made possible by takeovers. We ask: who benefits from the charter market creation process after a state takeover and why? Through a comparative analysis of patterns in the discourse of rejected and accepted charter applications, this paper builds on scholarship that attends to the racial politics of state takeover and charter expansion. The authors also illuminate the extent to which dominant narratives of post-Katrina New Orleans educational policy as a national model shape other majority Black cities in the urban South.

Authors

• Amanda Lu, Stanford University

• Rachel Williams, University of California - Berkeley