Unusual Allies: Elite and Grass-roots Origins of Parental Choice in Milwaukee

Carl, Jim

doi:10.1177/016146819609800204

Cited by 23 publications

(5 citation statements)

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“…Yet the legacy of desegregation in Milwaukee is a highly tainted one (e.g., Carl, 1996;Dougherty, 2004;Fuller, 1985). In the hands of White politicians and school officials, the primary aim of Milwaukee's desegregation efforts eroded from guaranteeing educational opportunity to African American students into a superficial compliance with the desegregation decree, one that typically maximized the benefits of the desegregation system for White students.…”

Section: The Genesis Of African American Voucher Support In the Post-...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In his own historical analysis of Milwaukee's choice plan, Carl (1995Carl ( , 1996 pointed to complexities that seem to fit less comfortably within the initial theorization of the key ideological tendencies within conservative modernization that we have delineated.…”

Section: Facing the Complexity Of ''Strange Bedfellows''mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…According to Carl, local neoliberal education reformers, on the one hand, believed that the extension of private markets into the state's education systems would bring improvement in educational attainment and profitability. On the other hand, local neoconservative educational reformers privileged private schools for their supposed traditional academic curriculum, religious training, and strict discipline (Carl, 1996).…”

Section: Facing the Complexity Of ''Strange Bedfellows''mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, Carl (1996) also acknowledged that ''not all proponents of vouchers in Milwaukee can be described as agents of the conservative restoration'' (p. 268). Rather, Carl outlined a ''conditional alliance'' between state-level neoliberal reformers and Milwaukee-based supporters of a handful of independent community schools:…”

Section: Facing the Complexity Of ''Strange Bedfellows''mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Articulating the privatization agenda in education to these parents' ''good sense'' and perceived interests would enable the Right to tip the scales of educational power away from an alliance of liberal groupsFincluding unions, civil liberties organizations, antiracist groups, and feminist and environmental organiza-tionsFand toward the amalgamation of groups pursuing conservative modernization in education. Given the Wisconsin political climate of the late 1980sFin which progressives wielded very little powerFcoupled with a long and historic movement among African American parents in Milwaukee for community-controlled schools that would protect their children from the sometimes reprehensible racial practices of Milwaukee Public Schools, Milwaukee presented itself as an ideal battleground upon which the conservative alliance might win crucial ideological battles over the character, form, and funding of education in the United States (Carl, 1996). Such a victory would also have promising implications for further-reaching conservative goals involving the broad privatization of the public sphere and the ''deresponsibilization'' of the state (Leys, 2002).…”

Section: Living Tactical Identitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Conservative Alliance Building and African American Support of Vouchers: The End of Brown's Promise or a New Beginning?

Apple

Pedroni

2005

Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education

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A new kind of conservatism has evolved and has taken center stage in many nations, one that is best seen as “conservative modernization.” Although parts of these conservative positions may have originated within the New Right, they are now not limited to what has traditionally been called the Right. They have been taken up by a much larger segment of government and policy makers and have also even been appropriated by groups that one might least expect to do so, such as African American activists in cities like Milwaukee. In this article, we examine a growing phenomenon: the growth of seemingly conservative sentiments among some of the least powerful groups in this society. Perhaps the most significant organization to emerge has been the Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO). It has mobilized around voucher advocacy for urban working-class communities of color. BAEO has attracted significant attention not just for its iconoclastic alignment with conservative educational reform, but also for accepting funding from far-Right foundations. This article analyzes the complexity of the discursive and sociopolitical space that BAEO occupies. The organization's awareness of its critics, allies, and the limited range of educational options within which low-income African American families must act belies the notion, put forward by some, that BAEO is simply a front organization for the educational Right. Nevertheless, BAEO's importance to the larger rightist project in education cannot be overstated. At the core of our analysis is a concern about what is at stake for all of us if a rightist educational agenda succeeds in redefining what and whose knowledge is of most worth and what our social and educational policies are meant to do. Yet, no matter what one's position is on the wisdom of BAEO's strategic actions, this case provides a crucial example of the politics of how social movements and alliances are formed and reformed out of the material and ideological conditions of daily life. A critical but sympathetic understanding of groups such as BAEO may enable us to avoid the essentialism and reductionism that enters into critical sociological work on the nature of ongoing struggles over educational reform. It can provide a more nuanced sense of social actors and the possibilities and limits of strategic alliances in a time of major conflicts over educational reform during a period of conservative modernization.

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Section: The Genesis Of African American Voucher Support In the Post-...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Facing the Complexity Of ''Strange Bedfellows''mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Facing the Complexity Of ''Strange Bedfellows''mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Facing the Complexity Of ''Strange Bedfellows''mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Living Tactical Identitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

Conservative Alliance Building and African American Support of Vouchers: The End of Brown's Promise or a New Beginning?

Apple

Pedroni

2005

Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education

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Toward a Theory of the Political Construction of Empty Spaces in Public Education

Walters

2011

Frontiers in Sociology of Education

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

Pedroni

2005

Urban Rev

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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,

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Unusual Allies: Elite and Grass-roots Origins of Parental Choice in Milwaukee

Cited by 23 publications

References 0 publications

Conservative Alliance Building and African American Support of Vouchers: The End of Brown's Promise or a New Beginning?

Conservative Alliance Building and African American Support of Vouchers: The End of Brown's Promise or a New Beginning?

Toward a Theory of the Political Construction of Empty Spaces in Public Education

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

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