Market-Driven Education Reform and the Racial Politics of Advocacy

Abstract

What is the landscape of the racial politics of public education in the age of Obama? To what factors can we attribute the seeming educational policy consensus from Washington, DC, to the states and from philanthropies and policy entrepreneurs in urban school districts? How should we understand opposition to the policy menu? This article examines commonsense understandings in education reform, which are supported by assertions that market-based schooling options are superior for children of color, and argues that a primary reason for the popularity of such reforms is an underexamined advocacy coalition, formed nominally around school choice, while also encompassing several other entrepreneurial educational reforms. The article describes the structure of this network, arguing that its dominance has precluded an understanding of counter advocacy against school choice and related reforms. It then describes several past and current movements that challenge commonsense understandings of the reforms’ currency, as a way of pushing back against the reforms’ expansion. The article also discusses the activities of grassroots community groups in response to market-based reforms and argues that these efforts can help to expand public deliberation on complex matters of educational policy. The article concludes with recommendations for further examination of these efforts to highlight the concerns, strategies, and solutions to educational inequality being articulated within communities of color and with their allies.

Notes

EMOs and CMOs are private, for-profit, and nonprofit organizations that contract with local educational authorities to manage public schools.

These reforms include charter schools; private management of schools and data systems; merit pay for teachers based on value-added metrics; and the alternative preparation of teachers, principals, and school system leaders.

Scholars of the politics of educational advocacy often presume that poor parents of color are politically progressive, and their involvement in market-based reform is purely a “strange bedfellows” situation. This article does not make that faulty assumption; rather, it assumes that there is ideological diversity within high-poverty communities, including the embracing of some neoliberal and conservative tenets.

Signatories included Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights under Law, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., National Council for Educating Black Children, National Urban League Rainbow PUSH Coalition, and the Schott Foundation for Public Education.