Public education in the United States: The production of a normative cultural logic of inequality through choice
Item
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Title
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Public education in the United States: The production of a normative cultural logic of inequality through choice
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:f4408c0603c4:11763
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identifier
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12465
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Creator
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Aggarwal, Ujvil,
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Contributor
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Ruth W. Gilmore
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Date
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2013
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Cultural anthropology | American studies | Womens studies | choice | inequality | neoliberalism | public education | raced and classed motherhood | urban studies
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Abstract
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Public Education in the United States: The Production of a Normative Cultural Logic of Inequality Through Choice is a historically informed ethnography that examines how choice emerged in the post-Brown v. Board of Education era as a key principle of reform and management in public education and became central to how rights, freedom, and citizenship were structured, constrained, and imagined. Scholarship within education studies has identified choice as a predicament of neoliberalism as privatization. Yet as my research examines, the inequalities associated with privatization mechanisms like charter schools are an exaggerated indexical representation of a much deeper and older problem. My research extends the historical trajectory through which we understand neoliberal restructuring and traces the ideological and material contours of a post- Brown realignment between the state, the structuring of rights, and the market---a realignment that extends beyond the realm of the private. This dissertation is based on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in New York City's Community School District (CSD) 3, one of the most racially and economically diverse districts in the nation's largest school system. CSD 3 is also one of the most segregated districts in New York City and one of the districts that provides the most choice-based programs and policies. In my ethnography, I examine the ways that low-income and middle-income parents navigate and negotiate selecting a public non-charter elementary school for their child. I trace how situated claims to universal rights as choices facilitate the continuance of a tiered citizenship and the production of what I term a "normative cultural logic of inequality." My research interrogates how this logic narrates inequality in education as resulting from "bad" yet "fair" choices that are qualified by a lack of individual initiative, informed decisions, and capacities of parental care. My findings suggest that rather than these explanations, the differential accumulation of living in what Ruth Wilson Gilmore has termed the forgotten or abandoned places of a racial state are central to understanding how similar desires---of wanting the very best for one's child---result in very different outcomes.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Anthropology
