The irony of rigor: ‘no-excuses’ charter schools at the intersections of race and disability

Abstract

Across the United States, the ‘no-excuses’ charter school movement featuring strict discipline policies and rigorous academic standards has gained popularity among schools serving poor and working-class students of color. In this article, we examine how Black and Latinx parents of students with disabilities¹ negotiated and experienced these charter school practices of rigor, which disciplined, managed, and regulated students’ social differences. Drawing from a yearlong qualitative research study, we examine interviews with Black and Latinx parents who experienced conflict with charter schools and the school lawyers, along with school artifacts we gathered such as parent handbooks and website information. We found parents experienced what we refer to as the ‘irony of rigor:’ the contradictory double-movement through which students of color with disabilities desired inclusion into ‘rigorous’ charter schools which then excluded them using ‘rigor’ as a central feature of student pushout practices. We present the irony of rigor in three interrelated acts: Act I: the lure of rigor (i.e. what drew parents to charter schools); Act II: the body meets rigor (i.e. how schools disciplined and managed student differences); and Act III: the consequences of rigor (i.e., what happened to students and parents while and after experiencing rigorous practices). We contextualize the irony of rigor within the relationship between disability, race, and neoliberalism.

Keywords:

• School choice
• charter schools
• disability
• race
• discipline
• neoliberalism
• space

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Pauline Lipman, Nirmala Erevelles, and Michael Thomas for their invaluable feedback at different stages of the research project. We are particularly grateful to the Black and Latinx parents of students with dis/abilities in our study who shared their stories.

Notes

1 We use the term disability “not as an individual trait, but rather a product of cultural, political, and economic practices (Davis, 1995). This understanding does not deny biological and psychological differences, but emphasizes such differences gain meaning, often with severe negative consequences (e.g., segregation), through human activities informed by norms (Davis, 2013). Dis/ability is also an identity marker which includes ways notions of ability are relied upon and constructed in tandem with other identity markers (e.g., gender, race, and language) (Gillborn, 2015)” (Waitoller & Thorius, 2016, p. 367).

2 The ugly laws (Schweik, 2009) were municipal ordinances that forbidden the display of disability in most urban centers from 1860 to 1970s. A purpose of these ordinances was to remove unsightly beggars so that cities would seem clean and prime for consumption and capital investment (Schweik, 2009).

3 For an extensive review of neoliberal educational reforms in Chicago see Lipman 2017 and for their impact on special education see Author, 2017.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Notes on contributors

Federico R. Waitoller

Federico R. Waitoller is an associate professor in the department of special education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His research agenda focuses on urban inclusive education and has two strands: teacher learning and pedagogies for inclusive education and market-driven reforms in education. He is the recipient of the Researcher of the Year 2018, Rising Star in Social Sciences Award at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the co-editor of Inclusive Education: Examining Equity in Five Continents by Harvard Education Press. His forthcoming book Excluded by Choice: Students with Disabilities in the Education Marketspace by Teachers College Press is the first book to examine the complex experiences of Black and Latinx students with disabilities and their families with market-driven educational reforms.

Nicole Nguyen

Nicole Nguyen is assistant professor of social foundations at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research examines the relationship between national security and public schooling in the United States. She is the author of A Curriculum of Fear: Homeland Security in US Public Schools (2016) and Suspect Communities: Anti-Muslim Racism and the Domestic War on Terror (forthcoming).

Gia Super

Gia Super is a graduate student in educational policy studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a parent navigating the special education system. Her research interests include school choice for students with disabilities and parental advocacy in the context of neoliberal school reform. Her writing has appeared in Education Policy Analysis Archives.