Market Movements and the Dispossessed: Race, Identity, and Subaltern Agency among Black Women Voucher Advocates

Abstract

Critical educational researchers in the United States and elsewhere are missing something essential in their inattention to considerable support among Black urban women for market-based educational reforms, including vouchers. While the educational left has engaged in important empirical and theoretical work demonstrating the particularly negative impact of educational marketization on the disenfranchised, not enough attention has been paid to the crucial role the educationally dispossessed have actually played in building these otherwise conservative reforms. Engaging with Michael AppleÕs arguments concerning processes of identity formation within conservative movement-making, we can begin to conceptualize the importance of subaltern groups in market-based educational reforms. Yet ethnographic work conducted with Black voucher mothers, school officials, and community leaders in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, shows that this subaltern process of conservative formation does not always occur in the manner theorized by Apple and his colleague Anita Oliver, in which ideologically relatively unformed parents and families are ''pushed'' to the Right by an intransigent state. Although the conceptual tools they provide are the foundation of our ability to imagine a more compelling theorization of dynamics and social actors in Milwaukee, significant conceptual-not to mention empirical-work remains to be done. In this essay I renovate Apple and OliverÕs arguments concerning conservative modernization in order to make them more resonant with the processes of race, gender, subaltern identity formation and agency evident in my ethnographic field research with low-income African-American women choosing vouchers Thomas C. Pedroni is an assistant professor of secondary social studies methods, educational foundations, curriculum theory, and qualitative research methodology at Utah State University. His recent research has centered on issues of identity formation and subaltern agency among urban low-income predominantly African-American and Latino parents within otherwise largely conservative coalitions for publicly financed private school vouchers. His research interests also include the development of composite critical and post-structural approaches in educational theory and research, the identification of persistent exclusionary power/ knowledge regimes in state-level educational reforms, and the analysis of the increasing colonization of the global educational sphere by neo-liberal and managerial forms. Address correspondence to Thomas C. Pedroni,

Everyday Politics of School Choice in the Black Community

“…In assessing the political valences of these parents’ stories, Camille Cooper (2009) finds that the Black women she interviewed in Los Angeles evinced a “politics of educational care” and represented the “power of positionality” (Cooper 2005 pp. 379, 174), while Pedroni (2005) argues that Black mothers fighting for school vouchers in Milwaukee exhibited a “subaltern agency” that left “the door open for rearticulating marginalized families’ educational concerns to ultimately more effective, meaningful, and democratic education reform” (p. 85). I engage these studies further in the analysis of the data.…”

“…Finally, “agency” is not a term that comes directly from pro-school-choice politics, but is instead an analytical concept employed in studies of school choice (Pedroni 2005; Rofes 2004). It is a term that scholars have long endeavored to define and clarify (Cohen 2004; Emirbayer and Mische, 1998; Hunter 2013; Sewell 1992; Stephens et al, 2011).…”

School choice or the politics of desperation? Black and Latinx parents of students with dis/abilities selecting charter schools in Chicago

“…In conclusion, positioning Black and Latinx parents of students with dis/abilities as empowered individuals and rational consumers dehistoricizes and decontextualizes their agency (Pedroni, 2005). It ignores that such agency operates within inequitable material and discursive relations of race, class, and ability that inhabit neighborhoods and schools (Pedroni, 2005).…”

“…It ignores that such agency operates within inequitable material and discursive relations of race, class, and ability that inhabit neighborhoods and schools (Pedroni, 2005). Under these circumstances, any examination of parents of color engaging with school choice needs to account for the historical conditions in which these parents have experienced public schools in urban centers (Pedroni, 2005).…”

“…It ignores that such agency operates within inequitable material and discursive relations of race, class, and ability that inhabit neighborhoods and schools (Pedroni, 2005). Under these circumstances, any examination of parents of color engaging with school choice needs to account for the historical conditions in which these parents have experienced public schools in urban centers (Pedroni, 2005). In the case of Black and Latinx parents of students with dis/abilities, this examination needs to focus on how the restructuring of the urban space and the intersecting ideological work of whiteness, smartness, and goodness have created normative school spaces that push parents to engage with the politics of desperation rather than with school choice.…”