Neoliberalism and Education

Rearticulating Social Justice and Inclusion

Kalwant Bhopal, Farzana Shain, Kalwant Bhopal, Farzana Shain

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138182530
• eBook ISBN: 9781317294931
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

Neoliberalism and Education: Rearticulating Social Justice and Inclusion offers a critical reflection on the establishment of neoliberalism as the new global orthodoxy in the field of education, and considers what this means for social justice and inclusion. It brings together writers from a number of countries, who explore notions of inclusion and social justice in educational settings ranging from elementary schools to higher education. Contributors examine policy, practice, and pedagogical considerations covering different dimensions of (in)equality, including disability, race, gender, and class. They raise questions about what social justice and inclusion mean in educational systems that are dominated by competition, benchmarking, and target-driven accountability, and about the new forms of imperialism and colonisation that both drive, and are a product of, market-driven reforms. While exposing the entrenchment, under current neoliberal systems of educational provision, of longstanding patterns of (racialised, classed, and gendered) privilege and disadvantage, the contributions presented in this book also consider the possibilities for hope and resistance, drawing attention to established and successful attempts at democratic education or community organisation across a number of countries. This book was originally published as a special issue of the British Journal of Sociology of Education.

Interrupting the interruption: neoliberalism and the challenges of an antiracist school

Assaf Meshulam^a and Michael W. Apple^b,c

^aDepartment of Education, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer Sheva, Israel; ^bDepartment of Curriculum and Instruction, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, USA; ^cDepartment of Educational Policy Studies, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, USA

The article examines a US public elementary bilingual, multicultural school that attempts to interrupt the reproduction of existing relations of dominance and subordination across a variety of differences. The school’s experiences illuminate the complex reality of schools as a site of struggle and compromise between at times contradictory interests, agents, and ideologies and the powerful forces in the (racial) state and civil society that make educating for social equality and justice difficult to accomplish. The article considers the concessions the school has made, and how and why, even in this most antiracist of schools, issues of race and racism persist.

Introduction

The bottom-up struggles of creating and defending an education for a democratic and more socially just society are especially difficult today. There is an intensified neoliberal assault on public education. Any socially committed educational endeavor in the public system faces ongoing budget and resource cutbacks and constraints, inbuilt biases within the state, and the increasing commodification of education and its accompanying alterations in commonsense (Apple 2006). Yet in the face of all of these pressures, some counter-hegemonic institutions survive. They do so through a combination of partial victories, what may seem to be necessary compromises, and, at times, partial losses. But they do last.

In this article, we examine a public elementary school in the United States that is well known for its attempt at building and then defending a socially transformative education that seeks to challenge existing relations of dominance and subordination across a variety of differences. Opening its doors in 1988, this school is particularly distinguished by two flagship programs: its dual bilingualism (English and Spanish) program, and its grounding in critical multiculturalism. The latter in particular is organized around an overtly antiracist set of goals. Yet even with such goals, the school lives in the real world. Its experiences can tell us a good deal about a number of the challenges facing critical education today. It can illuminate how schools act as a site of constant struggle and compromise between different, at times contradictory, interests, agents, and ideologies. And, at the same time, it can demonstrate some of the powerful forces in the (racial) state and civil society that make educating for social equality and justice difficult to accomplish, even in a school that is deeply committed to interrupting the reproduction of the unequal structure of class and race relations within the school itself.

As we shall document, even with the school’s strong commitment to and struggle for inclusion – racial, cultural, political, social – in both its pedagogy and curriculum, racializing forms arise. Despite the predominance in numbers of African-American students at the school from the outset, African-American identity as a distinct community has been subsumed, while African-Americans have been marginalized in school governance and staff representation. This process has been intertwined with the erosion of the school’s antiracist program due to the neoliberal and neoconservative challenges to such curricula in public education. This combination has led to a complex reality in which the partial victories involving innovative curricula that promote and support the transformation of unequal power relations are accompanied by partial losses in which cultural, racial, and class inequalities are reproduced.

The article begins by presenting the historical and socio-political contexts to the establishment of the school and the background to its bilingual, multicultural, antiracist agenda. We examine the features of the school that have made it a pioneer on the educational landscape in the United States, in particular its antiracist multiculturalism program and the collaborative curriculum development process it hinges on. We then consider the challenges to implementing the school’s antiracist vision due to neoliberal demands and pressures to which the school is subject. We examine the complex factors and dynamics in the concessions the school has made, and consider how and why, even in this most antiracist of schools, issues of race and racism persist.

Methods

The findings presented in this article are from a larger study on multicultural, bilingual schools educating for democracy and social justice in different national, political, and cultural contexts (Meshulam 2011). The school was selected based on its reputation as an example of ‘thick’ democratic education pursuing social justice and equality. The names of the school and participants are withheld to protect their anonymity.

Ethnographic methods were used to collect data during two months of intense research in the school in 2009. Twenty semi-structured, open-ended individual interviews with the school’s principal, teachers, a multi-racial group of parents, and founding members, past and present, were conducted. The research also included in-class and out-of-class observations (classroom activities, teacher meetings, school council meetings, recess activity, field trips, and various extracurricular activities) and document analysis, in particular a number of books composed by school staff and community activists summarizing the first four years of the school’s operation. All interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed, and all collected data were triangulated and organized to attain a thick description of the central themes of the study. The interviews focused broadly on questions about: the socio-political and historical contexts of the school’s establishment; its structure and governance; its vision and goals, particularly regarding bilingualism, multiculturalism, and antiracism; its pedagogy and curriculum; and the kind of critically democratic identity the school seeks to cultivate. Added to the interviews and observations was a detailed examination of documents related to the history of the school and the social context of the city in which it sits.

The socio-historical contexts of antiracist schooling

Any substantive understanding of the socio-historical contexts on which we focus here must rest on two interrelated realities about the racial structuring of the United States. First, powerful forms of segregation persist in US society in general; and in particular in public schools, which are more segregated than ever (Orfield 2009). Second, race itself and racializing policies and practices, inside and outside education, are primary factors accounting for this segregation in education: ‘Issues of race and racism permeate US culture – through law, language, politics, economics, symbols, art, public policy – and the prevalence of race is not merely in those spaces seen as racially defined spaces’ (Ladson-Billings 2004, 5). Decades after the US Supreme Court’s significant Brown vs. Board of Education decision in 1954, in which official segregation was ruled unconstitutional, the public school system continues to be a space in which unequal race relations are sometimes challenged but, by and large, also reproduced and reinforced.

How this works out, however, is always conjunctural. As Stuart Hall (1996) reminds us, race and racialization – and how the state operates as a racial state – are not always the same, nor do they operate in the same ways in every context (see also Mills 1997). The contexts of this particular city and school clarify why Hall’s point is important and requires that we spend time critically examining their racial history.

The city in which the school is located, as well as its public education system, provides a fine example of the complex socio-historical conditions in which schools of this type function. An industrial Midwest port city, it has traditionally drawn immigrants from across the world as well as within the United States, who have brought with them cultural and social diversity. By 2008/09, the year in which the school was researched, the city’s population was 40% White, 38% Black, 15% Hispanic, 3% Asian, and about 1% Native American (US Census Bureau 2008).

Yet, despite a strong tradition of social progressiveness and activism, the city also has been notorious for its deep-rooted segregation and racial inequality. This gives credence to Mills’ (1997) argument that social democracy is based on a racial contract, a contract that can be weakened and even withdrawn when the ‘Other’ enters into the geographical and political space. Thus, racism, discrimination, and inequity prevail to this day, suffered most acutely by African-Americans, but also by the city’s Latino/Latina population (Miner 2013).

Two prominent socio-political movements in the city served jointly as the breeding ground and setting for the school and its antiracist, multicultural, bilingual agenda: the battle, since the 1960s, of civil rights activists against segregation in housing and education; and the Spanish-speaking community’s demand and struggle for bilingualism in public education. Despite the 1968 enactment of a federal open housing law and the passage of a local ordinance essentially making segregated housing illegal, residential segregation in the city continued. Real-estate agents, city zoning laws, and lending institutions prevented African-Americans from moving into White neighborhoods, while suburbanization led to the abandonment of the inner city to African-Americans and other minoritized people.

An intensification of neighborhood segregation was the result, which inevitably produced and exacerbated segregation in the city’s schools. Because the city was so segregated geographically, its schools did not integrate following Brown. Only in 1976 did a federal court rule that the city’s schools were illegally segregated and order their immediate integration, and only in 1979 did the public school-board follow this up with a five-year desegregation plan. Yet, when the school first opened in 1988, the city was ranked amongst the top five most racially segregated cities in the United States (Year One 1989). This led to even further mobilizations, especially within the African-American community (Miner 2013).

Parallel to the efforts to desegregate neighborhoods and schools, a wide mobilization around the need for bilingual education in the city’s schools emerged within the Latino/Latina community. In 1968 the Bilingual Education Act was passed, allocating federal funding to ‘encourage local school districts to try approaches incorporating native-language instruction’ (History of Bilingual Education 1998, 1). This legislation and the city’s failure to implement it served as the impetus for protests and walk-outs by Mexican and Puerto-Rican parents and students, who demanded the establishment of Spanish–English bilingualism programs in the city’s schools. In addition, a movement emerged to build new high schools in minority communities, with a coalition forming between African-Americans, Mexican-Americans, and White working-class groups towards this cause. Such joint mobilizations are unusual in many parts of the United States, where inter-ethnic solidarity is often made more difficult by dominant groups’ ideological work using racializing discourses to enhance differences.

At the city and state levels as well as within the affected communities, the promotion of antisegregationism, bilingualism, and critical visions of multiculturalism gained political momentum. Yet in spite of its growing strength, this activism did not have a meaningful impact on segregation in the city’s public school system or on educational equality in the schools. The system remained unequal, segregated, and seemingly indifferent to the needs and rights of the minoritized populations it served.

In the 1986/87 school year, one year before the school opened, the Grade Point Average for Black high-school students was 1.46 and for Hispanic students 1.67 out of a possible 4.0. The completion rate for entering ninth-graders in the city stood at 46% for Blacks and 49% for Hispanics, as opposed to 62% for Whites (Year One 1989). Against this backdrop of sweeping social and political activism alongside ongoing inequalities and racism in public education, a strong dual (Spanish–English) bilingual, multicultural school was envisioned: ‘We started to dream about a school that would provide the highest quality education for our children, Black, White, and Hispanic,’ explained a community parent and representative (Year One 1989, 68).

Building a collaborative, community school

The school opened its doors in September 1988 as a public pre-K–5 elementary school (ages 4–10) in a working-class neighborhood populated by the communities most impacted by the city-wide discrimination and inequality. Its continued racial and cultural diversity and integration, despite a ‘parade of change’ in its demographics over the decades (Tolan 2003), have always been unique in the city. The 2000 census data portray the neighborhood as ‘one of the city’s – and state’s – most integrated’ neighborhoods, ‘one of just four in the state with the most equal proportions of black, white, and Hispanic residents’ (Tolan 2003, VIII). This has been critical to both the success in mobilizing the community to fight for the school’s establishment and the school’s ability to serve and promote diversity. In its first year of operation, 42% of its students were Black, 37% Hispanic, and 21% ‘Other.’ Approximately 90% of the students qualified for free lunch (Year One 1989). Twenty years later, in the 2008/09 school year, the diversity remained although the demographics had shifted. The majority was now Latino/Latina (59%) – a crucial point in the account of how ‘race’ works that we give later in this article. This was followed by 19% African-Americans and 12% White, with the remainder Asian-American and Native-American. Seventy-four percent of the students qualified for free or reduced lunch.

The school, in its previous incarnation, was ‘slated to be razed’ in 1988, and turned into an ‘Exemplary Teaching Center’ by the school district (Year One 1989, 68). Valuing the neighborhood’s unique diversity, a small group of teachers, parents, and community activists organized to resist this plan, and proposed establishing instead a ‘whole language, two-way bilingual, multicultural, site-based-managed school.’ The path from proposal to opening the school was not without arduous political struggle, in the face of initially strong resistance from the school-board and district administrators. But the timing was right. The community activism was supported by the success of two political battles being waged in the city at the time, pushing the school-board to eventually back the initiative. The one struggle revolved around allowing site-based management and a whole-language model, two approaches the school-board endorsed. A second source of pressure on the board was the growing criticism of its apparent unwillingness to engage in dialogue with African-American parents and their demands for an independent school district that would be controlled by the city’s African-American community. The conjunction of these two struggles led the school-board, fighting for its own political legitimacy, to pass the proposal to establish the school.

The school’s two-way bilingualism and, even more in some respects, its overtly critical multicultural curricula and pedagogy are what distinguish it from many others. From the outset, there was a firm conception of the school’s mission, expressed in its “Our School Vision” document as follows: to educate students in Spanish and English ‘through a program of academic excellence’ and to construct a multicultural program founded on an antiracist perspective. A central requirement of the two-way bilingualism model the school adopted is a mixed, preferably balanced, number of native-English-speaking and native-Spanish-speaking students. This not only ensures meaningful exposure to diversity, but, through peer learning, empowers the Spanish-speakers to develop multicultural identity and self-esteem (Skutnabb-Kangas and García 1995) and ‘deep academic proficiency and cognitive understanding through their first language to compete successfully with native speakers of the second language,’ thereby equalizing the cultural power relations (Baker 2006, 270; Thomas and Collier 2002). The need to balance between Spanish-speaking and English-speaking students eventually led to the busing-in of Spanish-speakers from outside the neighborhood.

Fundamental to the school’s identity and mission is sustaining the organic connection and collaboration with parents, the local community, grassroots movements, and social organizations, which grounded ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction – Educational inclusion: towards a social justice agenda?
• 1. Interrupting the interruption: neoliberalism and the challenges of an antiracist school
• 2. Fighting for the ‘right to the city’: examining spatial injustice in Chicago public school closings
• 3. Just imaginary: delimiting social inclusion in higher education
• 4. Re-articulating social justice as equity in schooling policy: the effects of testing and data infrastructures
• 5. Beyond the education silo? Tackling adolescent secondary education in rural India
• 6. Pakistani and Bangladeshi young men: re-racialization, class and masculinity within the neo-liberal school
• 7. Disability and inclusive education in times of austerity
• 8. Transforming marginalised adult learners’ views of themselves: Access to Higher Education courses in England
• 9. Home education, school, Travellers and educational inclusion
• Index