State disinvestment, technologies of choice and ‘fitting in’: neoliberal transformations in US public education

Abstract

Given state cuts to US public education, overcrowding and underfunding in urban district schools continue to grow. Yet, how parents understand the role of state disinvestment on underfunded and overcrowded public schools remains relatively unexamined. Drawing from an ethnographic study of school choice in Arizona, I explore how a group of white parents from diverse income and educational levels, who exited their child from a district school to enroll in a charter school, articulated state disinvestment in their everyday lives. Findings show that parents blamed local schools for what were largely the effects of state disinvestment. In particular, parents connected underfunding and overcrowding with a lack of district responsiveness to individual concerns to express the view that dire conditions were a personal and not a collective problem. Concurrent with the view that they were ‘were forced to choose’ a charter school due to a lack of district responsiveness, parents developed the belief that choice makes education more equal, especially for students who don’t ‘fit in’ to the district school. In total, findings highlight how technologies of choice enter into local cultural and material struggles to transform the relationship between parents and schools from a social to an economic one.

Keywords:

• State disinvestment
• school choice
• neoliberalism
• parents
• fitting in

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank the participants in this study for their time, their trust and their insights. I would also like to thank Ashley Graboski-Bauer for compiling statistics tied to state disinvestment and Marguerite Fillion Wilson for her thoughtful feedback on this manuscript.

Notes

1. The names of all persons, schools, and districts used in this paper are pseudonyms.

2. States with strong charter laws or strong charter legislation allow for a greater number of charter schools to develop and to operate independently from public school regulations. Weak laws characterize those states in which fewer charters are allowed to develop and in which charters must follow the same guidelines as the district public schools.

3. IEP plans are stipulated under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) for students diagnosed with one or more of 13 specific conditions; closely related are 504 plans stipulated under the Rehabilitation Act and the American with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990, which pertain to students with any cognitive, mental, or physical condition qualifying under the provisions of the ADA. IEPs and 504 plans should be created and implemented free of charge for students and lay out accommodations and services that must be made by the school in order to support the learning of qualified students, in the least restrictive environments possible. While the stipulations for developing and implementing IEPs and 504 plans are similar, those for IEPs specify more stringent expectations of schools. Both types of plans are still used to accommodate K-12 students.

4. Intra-district open enrollment policy allows students to select and attend a school within the assigned district regardless of their residence. Because of the limited number of openings in more desirable district schools, students who participate in intra-district open enrollment are usually required to participate in a lottery to enroll. Subsequent to unitary rulings, which remove desegregation mandates from a district that is deemed unitary (Smrekar 2009), race-neutral open enrollment policies increased due to the 2007 Supreme Court ruling in Parents Involved in Community Schools (PICS) v. Seattle School District that eliminates the use of race-conscious admissions in districts with unitary status (Smrekar 2009) or for districts planning to pursue unitary status.

5. Formal social networking happens through access to public information, i.e. websites, brochures, and published records of test scores.

6. Body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) is a body-image disorder according to which an individual becomes preoccupied with a real or imagined defect in their appearance.

7. See Wilson and Scarbrough (2016) for an example of ‘fit and niche discourses’ in the context of private schools.