A good investment? Race, philanthrocapitalism and professionalism in a New York City small school of choice

Abstract

Incorporating data from two years of ethnographic teacher-research, this article explores how a curriculum of “professionalism” resonates with teachers and students in a small New York City school of choice. Using the literature on Critical Whiteness Studies and philanthrocapitalism in the context of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s education reforms, the paper critiques the ways that the increasing privatization and corporatization of schools in the US reinforces racism and inequality. The discussion concludes by outlining instances where students and teachers resist market-based pedagogies of professionalism, and discusses the importance of critical intellectualism and humanizing pedagogy in a climate of market-based reforms in education.

Keywords:

• race and education
• neoliberalism and education
• school choice
• economics of education
• urban schools

Acknowledgements

I thank those who participated in the Social Life of Achievement panel at the 2010 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, where I presented and received valuable feedback on a first version of this paper. Additionally, I thank Denise Blum and Char Ullman for including me in this special issue. Unfortunately, I use pseudonyms for College Prep teachers, students, and families and cannot name them here, but I thank them for their patience and insight in regard to this study. I also wish to thank Denise Blum, David J. Brown, Laura S. Brown, Nadine Bryce, Clifton Colmon, Sharon Givens, Liz Knauer, Christopher Loperena, Kofi Ofori, Naomi Reed, Teresa von Fuchs, Char Ullman, and those who anonymously reviewed this article, for their insightful and critical commentary. I am grateful to Lane Stilson and Orson Robbins-Pianka for invaluable statistical assistance. This manuscript also benefited from the ongoing mentorship and support of Keffrelyn Brown, Peter Demerath, Kevin Foster, Edmund T. Gordon, Douglas Foley, and Joao Costa Vargas.

Notes

1. I refer to this school as “CPA” in a previous article (Brown 2011).

2. In this paper, when referring to College Prep’s version of performed professionalism, I use “performative professionalism” and “professionalism” interchangeably.

3. I capitalize racial markers (i.e. White, Black and Brown) in order to highlight race as a central aspect of my analysis. In making this choice, I index the socio-historical construction and continued maintenance of race, racial meaning, and racial privilege in the United States. I also capitalize these terms to refer to the specific ideologies or practices related to racial concepts or identities (see Collins [2004, 17, 310] and Vargas [2006, 249] for related discussions). I also use ethnic markers in this article, such as “African-American” and “Latino.” These terms often overlap with racial markers in the United States, and represent other ways that subjects are sometimes, but not always, identified.

4. According to a 7 April 2011 New York Times article, Mayor Bloomberg asked Ms Black to resign three months after her appointment due to her unpopularity and incompetence. He replaced her with deputy mayor Dennis M. Walcott (Barbaro et al. 2011, A1). State Commissioner David Steiner, who gave Black the waiver to be Chancellor without any background in education, resigned as well.

5. At each grade team, college office, and enrichment office meeting, I showed staff members an initial list of questions. This was developed largely from Demerath’s (2009) school-wide questionnaire in Producing Success, which focused on the school experiences and emotional well being of students in the context of a school’s competitive culture of achievement. The questionnaire was subsequently expanded with my own revisions as well as feedback from school staff members. The revised questionnaire focused on three general areas of students’ lives: “Background and Home,” “School” and “Outside of School.” Students responded to a series of unstructured and structured questions that explored their experiences in regard to their peers, their families, their teachers, and their aspirations. After entering questionnaire data into an Excel spreadsheet, I conducted bivariate analyses in order to establish relationships between dependent variables (such as grade level or gender) and independent variables (such as students’ opinion of school professionalism points, or students’ goals or aspirations) (LeCompte and Schensul 1999).

6. In accordance with the Institutional Review Board at the University of Texas at Austin, all interviews were held in confidentiality, and the names of interviewees have been changed by mutual agreement.

7. Free Application for Federal Student Aid.

8. While it is not my intention to conflate the racial experiences of non-White communities in the United States, in this section I find it useful to theorize the experiences of both Black and Brown students at College Prep through the lens of Blackness. This serves to highlight the somewhat binary formation of race at this school; e.g. White vs. non-White, privilege vs. need, professional vs. unprofessional, teacher or funder vs. student, etc.

9. Although College Prep does not use Ruby Payne’s (1996) A Framework For Understanding Poverty, this discourse resonates with her theories, as well as with other recycled “culture of poverty” discourses that trace back to Lewis (1959) and Moynihan’s (1965) deficit-based arguments. The idea of a “culture of poverty” continues to be heavily contested in the social sciences, because it tends to “blame the victim,” and lacks any structural critique. For example, see Good and Eames (1996), Foley (1997) and Valencia (2010) for critiques or the recycled “culture of poverty” in anthropology and education.