Innovating (In)equality: Philanthropy, Federal Policy, and the Racial Politics of K-12 Education

Abstract

Dissertation Advisor: Tomiko Brown-Nagin Erica S. Sterling

Innovating (In)equality: Philanthropy, Federal Policy, and the Racial Politics of K-12 Education

Abstract

Titled “Innovating (In)Equality,” the dissertation uses archival research to tell a new story about how school choice became embedded in the discourse and politics of school reform; it interrogates the intersection between philanthropy, federal policymaking, and the racial politics of K-12 education. In doing so, the dissertation explains how school choice came to drive the agendas of the federal government and the Ford Foundation from the 1960s onward. The dissertation shows, in particular, how federal bureaucrats and philanthropists, education researchers and practitioners theorized and developed non-judicial alternatives for large city school systems still segregated despite Brown v. Board of Education (1954). But what began as a thought experiment to achieve desegregation and protect the vitality of American cities in the 1960s began to splinter in the early 1970s. As Black communities in Boston, Massachusetts, Washington, D.C., and Berkeley, California, asserted their control over institution building, as the Nixon administration repurposed the function of education research, and as the Ford Foundation no longer funded alternative schools, the rhetoric of innovation and choice in school reform discourse became untethered from the project of desegregation. As concern about failing U.S. public schools captivated the country in the early 1980s, school choice was cemented as a centerpiece of federal education reform efforts during the Reagan years and beyond. Liberal and conservative, and public and private actors shaped choice experiments in the 1960s and 1970s. “Innovating (In)equality” shows how choice emerged less as a manifestation by the Right to subvert desegregation; rather, it presents as nuanced expressions of access, equity, and power.