Neoliberal contradictions in two private niches of educational ‘choice’

ABSTRACT

This article brings together ethnographies of two privileged educational settings in the United States – a private school in California’s Central Valley following the progressivist Sudbury model, and an affluent New England boarding school’s summer enrichment program. Each of these institutions serves as an alternative to and/or extension of publicly accessible education institutions during a neoliberal era of marketization and growing educational inequality. By comparing findings from ethnographic studies of each institution, we find that both celebrate open access and socially responsible pedagogical values in ways that obscure mechanisms of exclusion and an entrenched individualist ideology. We discuss two particular contradictions that manifest in both settings: first, a discourse of openness and inclusivity that belies the ways in which access is mediated by constructions of who best ‘fits’ the special learning community; and second, an outspoken allegiance to socially engaged values of diversity and democracy that belies the ways in which these values are commodified and appropriated for students’ individual advantage(s). In comparing such sites, we argue for the importance of tracing the mechanisms of advantage in under-researched ‘niches’ of the dynamically shifting and unequally accessed neoliberal marketplace for educational opportunity.

KEYWORDS:

• Discourse
• educational disparities
• ethnography
• neoliberalism
• privilege
• school choice
• studying up

Notes

^1. Names of people and institutions in this article are pseudonyms. In order to mask the identity of Jarrett Academy, some descriptive details have been kept vague, and a few details about the structure of the summer program have been composited with other elite New England boarding schools’ summer enrichment programs.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marguerite Anne Fillion Wilson

Marguerite Anne Fillion Wilson is an Assistant Professor of Human Development at Binghamton University. Her research and teaching focus on understanding the relationships between cultural constructions of childhood, language socialization, power, pedagogy, and the intersecting identity formations of gender, race, and class.

Burke Scarbrough

Burke Scarbrough is an Assistant Professor of English Education at the University of Minnesota Duluth. His research interests include pedagogies and politics of diverse learning contexts, the literacy practices of historically marginalized youth in and out of school, and the role of summer learning in youth development and educational inequality.