Navigating Politically Muddy Waters: Charter Management Organizations and Their Efforts to Craft a Counternarrative

Abstract

In the face of growing critiques, charter management organizations (CMOs) increasingly contend with criticism as they maintain their presence in districts, particularly with school board members who often serve as gatekeepers for charter authorization. Yet, little is known about how CMOs navigate these politically muddy waters in local settings. The localized political maneuvers of CMOs are the central focus of this case study, which demonstrates how CMOs in one city deployed strategic discourse to buffer anticipated critiques and assuage concerns though questions as to the equitable and democratic character of their actions and rhetoric remain.

The Money Chase: The Role of Racial Innuendo and Marketized Discourse in Courting Private Dollars

“…While this outreach includes a range of relational and marketing tactics, some scholars have examined its embedded discourse-the ideas, representations, and argumentation implicitly or explicitly conveyed in acts of communication-and how it may reinforce or adapt ideologies that perpetuate inequities in these exchanges. Notably, discursive investigations have revealed that charter outreach often contains racial and cultural messages that can discourage certain nondominant groups from attending a charter school (C. Lubienski et al, 2012) or advances deficit-laden depictions of communities of color as charters seek to create a sense of urgency for the interventions their organizations are purported to offer (Dumas, 2013;Hernández, 2016Hernández, , 2022a. To date, much of this literature has examined how discourse is conveyed for families navigating choice settings; yet, how these depictions are crafted for donors, who typically inhabit positions of economic and social power and are critical actors in charter growth, remain comparatively less understood.…”