Unsettling Choice: Race, Rights, and the Partitioning of Public Education - Softcover

Aggarwal, Ujju

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1517915678 ISBN 13: 9781517915674

Verlag: University of Minnesota Press, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

How the Great Recession revealed a system of school choice built on crisis, precarity, and exclusion

 

What do universal rights to public goods like education mean when codified as individual, private choices? Is the “problem” of school choice actually not about better choices for all but, rather, about the competition and exclusion that choice engenders—guaranteeing a system of winners and losers? Unsettling Choice addresses such questions through a compelling ethnography that illuminates how one path of neoliberal restructuring in the United States emerged in tandem with, and in response to, the Civil Rights movement.

 

Drawing on ethnographic research in one New York City school district, Unsettling Choice traces the contestations that surfaced when, in the wake of the 2007–2009 Great Recession, public schools navigated austerity by expanding choice-based programs. Ujju Aggarwal argues that this strategy, positioned as “saving public schools,” mobilized mechanisms rooted in market logics to recruit families with economic capital on their side, thereby solidifying a public sphere that increasingly resembled the private—where contingency was anticipated and rights for some were marked by intensified precarity for poor and working-class Black and Latinx families.

 

As Unsettling Choice shows, these struggles over public schools—one of the last remaining universal public goods in the United States—were entrapped within neoliberal regimes that exceeded privatization and ensured exclusion even as they were couched in language of equity, diversity, care, and rights. And yet this richly detailed and engaging book also tracks an architecture of expansive rights, care, and belonging built among poor and working-class parents at a Head Start center, whose critique of choice helps us understand how we might struggle for—and reimagine—justice, and a public that remains to be won.

 

 

Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ujju Aggarwal is assistant professor of anthropology and experiential learning at The New School. She is coeditor of What’s Race Got to Do with It? How Current School Reform Policy Maintains Racial and Economic Inequality.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Minnesota Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2024
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1517915678
• ISBN 13: 9781517915674
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 179
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchbär; info@buchbaer.de; ; Weberstr. 67; Osnabrück; 49084; Deutschland