Choices or Rights? Charter Schools and the Politics of Choice-Based Education Policy Reform

Abstract

Simply put, charter schools have not lived up to their advocates' promise of equity. Using examples of tangible civil rights gains of the twentieth century (e.g. Brown v. Board, Lau v. Nichols) and extending feminist theories of invisible labor to include the labor of democracy, the authors argue that the charter movement renders invisible the labor that secured civil protections for historically marginalized groups. The charter movement hangs a quality public education-previously recognized as a universal guarantee-on the education consumer's ability to navigate a marketplace. The authors conclude that the neoliberal agenda of positioning choice as the best mechanism for securing an education rolls back the rights that were already secured through the labor of democracy.

The Political Economy of Subprime Educational Policy: A Critical Analysis of Charter Schools in Black Communities

“…Subprime Education: Charter Schools & Evidence of Injustice. A growing body of evidence indicates that the autonomy of charter schools may be leveraged in ways that compromise educational quality and access for students belonging to groups protected by the significant civil rights gains in education from the latter half of the twentieth century including the landmark court case of Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka and legislation such as the Bilingual Education Act (BEA) and Individuals with Disabilities Act (IDEA) (Eastman et al, 2017). As subprime mortgages are defined by higher interest rates applied to a loan when the borrower is qualified for more favorable terms, I argue that educational opportunities that increase access on the basis of lower quality, subpar, and exploitative terms are “subprime”.…”

‘The kind of things we’ve heard keep people in the district’: White racial exclusion and the evolution of school choice policies in Portland Public Schools

“…School choice intensifies racial and economic inequality, since parents rely upon homogeneous social networks to make decisions about where to send their child to school, thus exacerbating existing patterns of segregation (see Ball et al, 1995;Billingham and Kimelberg, 2013;DeSena, 2006;Reay and Ball, 1997). Neoliberal education policies fundamentally shift the responsibility for desegregation from the state to individual families, reducing civil rights to a consumer choice (Eastman et al, 2017;Scott, 2013). Rather than holding the state accountable for racial segregation and resource inequities, the neoliberal approach transforms these problems into a 'more racially slippery private' issue (Taylor Webb and Gulson, 2011).…”