Understanding the Alternative Schools Movement

Levin, Malcolm; Duke, Daniel L.

doi:10.2307/3202318

Cited by 3 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…While some of the early alternative schools did not survive, the district has continued to maintain institutional support for alternative programs over the years. This support has frequently emerged in response to the activism of local parents, community members, and educators (see Levin, 1979; O’Rourke, 2012; Shuttleworth, 2010; Winsa, 2012). Shuttleworth (2010) points out that this high level of community and parent involvement in district-level policy development is unique in the field of public educational alternatives.…”

Section: Alternative School Contextsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Currently, the Toronto District School Board hosts 42 alternative schools and programs, making Toronto home to the largest number of publicly funded alternative schools in Canada, and arguably within North America (Bascia and Maton, 2015). A small handful of these alternative schools are top-down initiatives developed and sponsored by the district; however, most schools resulted from the grassroots thinking, organizing, and activism of local community members, parents, students, and educators (see Beattie, 2004; Levin, 1979; O’Rourke, 2012), who have sought to create school structures that are more responsive to students’ creative, intellectual, and identity-based needs than traditional schools that have tended to prioritize economic efficiency in school design and outcomes.…”

Section: Alternative School Contextsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Mobilizing public alternative schools for post-neoliberal futures: Legacies of critical hope in Philadelphia and Toronto

Maton

Nichols

2018

Policy Futures in Education

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Starting in the late 1960s, alternative schools were established in many public school districts across North America. These programs tended to embrace humanizing ideals and sought to center self-expression, creativity, and non-hierarchical values in school governance models. While alternative schools persist today, many now embrace a range of historically situated values—often layering market-based ideals onto the language and structures of their humanizing commitments. This article explores the historical entanglements of public alternative schools, humanizing pedagogies, and market-based ideals in the Philadelphia and Toronto contexts in order to consider what structures of the past might be of use in reimagining public education for the future. In so doing, we argue that such programs, when augmented by a commitment to critical hope, offer generative possibilities for reimagining and redefining schools for the post-neoliberal future.

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Section: Alternative School Contextsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Alternative School Contextsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mobilizing public alternative schools for post-neoliberal futures: Legacies of critical hope in Philadelphia and Toronto

Maton

Nichols

2018

Policy Futures in Education

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“…In this article, we problematize the process and practices associated with the establishment of the Africentric 1 Alternative School (AAS) that opened in September 2009 in Toronto, Canada. The provision of "alternative" schools in Toronto emerged as part of a broader movement in the 1960s and 1970s around community "free schools" and co-operative parent teacher elementary schools (Levin, 1979). In the 1980s, alternative schools were used by different parent, language, and cultural groups to control, and make more culturally relevant, their children's schooling, as a challenge to "an Anglocentric, Protestant and bourgeois regime" (Delhi, 1996, p. 78).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Not Just Another Alternative School

Gulson

Webb

2015

Educational Policy

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In this article, we problematize the establishment of an Africentric Alternative School in Toronto, Canada. We argue that policy, and race and racializations cannot be understood outside of, or immune to, neoliberalism. We contend that policy is a form of racial biopolitics, and race is now produced through neoliberal markets, in conjunction with earlier, liberal categories. We conclude that neoliberalism has produced new forms of racial biopolitics; whereas the state is much less overtly involved in producing and arranging racializations. Instead, neoliberal education policy has transferred or downloaded these forms of racial biopolitics onto populations which are now “free” and “empowered” to produce and maintain variable raciologies.

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“…[to] help connect schools to communities and, potentially, foster placeconscious teaching and learning" (Gruenewald, 2003b, p. 621). There is a lineage to these schools back to the libertarian and progressive strands of the "free school" movement that was private and communitybased, and manifest in various articulations of "alternative schooling" in North America and Europe (Francis & Mills, 2012;Levin, 1979). One group of schools that emerged were "tax-supported" alternative schools, and Levin (1979) suggests:…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%