Abstract
In this article, based on an ethnographic study in Sundale City, Arizona, I use an interpretive and anthropological approach to policy analysis to highlight how social actors interpreted the national charter school debate to enact local school choice policy development in their everyday lives. Specifically, findings from this study provide a contextualized portrayal that illustrates how an economic rationality of schooling and an absence of information on school choice policy served to polarize and fracture the potential for citizens to collectively grapple with and address local educational issues democratically.
Introduction
In 1986, the Task Force on Teaching as a Profession outlined principal reforms that called for “sweeping changes in educational policy” (p. 3). More specifically, their report, A Nation Prepared: Teachers for the 21st Century, The Report of the Task Force on Teaching as a Profession, commissioned in response to an earlier report, A Nation at Risk (1983), recommended policy changes that would, “restructure schools to provide a professional environment for teaching, freeing them to decide how best to meet state and local goals for children while holding them accountable for student progress” (p. 3).
Around the same time, Ray Budde, a public school teacher, administrator, and instructor of educational leadership at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst developed an outline for improving public schools by reorganizing them. The principal idea behind his work, Education by Charter: Restructuring School Districts (1988) was based on granting educational charters to teachers to allow them the freedom and autonomy to innovate educational programs by exempting them from many state and local regulations.
In 1988, Albert Shanker (at the time president of the American Federation of Teachers, also a member of the Task Force on Teaching as a Profession) presented a version of Budde’s charter proposal to the National Press Club in Washington. John Rollwagen, CEO of a supercomputer manufacturer and chair of the Committee of Citizens League in Minnesota, heard Shanker’s address on charters and brought the idea back to Minnesota. Following, in 1991, Minnesota wrote the first charter law and a year later, Minnesota opened the first charter school in the US.
According to the US Department of Education, a charter school is: a publicly funded school that is typically governed by a group or organization under a legislative contract (or charter) with the state or jurisdiction. The charter exempts the school from certain state or local rules and regulations. In return for flexibility and autonomy, the charter school must meet the accountability standards outlined in its charter. A school’s charter is reviewed periodically (typically every 3 to 5 years) by the group or jurisdiction that granted it and can be revoked if guidelines on curriculum and management are not followed or if the standards are not met. (NCES, 2014)
In the 21st century, educational reform policies continue to prioritize school restructuring in the form of charter schools. In July 2009, as part of the $4 Billion Race to the Top, the US Department of Education provided competitive opportunities to develop “innovative” reforms—funding priority was given to states whose proposals included charter school expansion (Miron and Dingerson, 2009). As of the 2011–2012 school year, 43 states and the District of Columbia have passed charter school legislation (NCES, 2014).
Despite what might appear to be a seamless and linear series of national reforms to restructure schools under the guise of innovation, an interpretive and process-oriented approach to policy highlights that the charter school movement is a deeply uneven political process (Braun et al., 2011; Levinson and Sutton, 2001; Shore and Wright, 2011). According to Shore and Wright (2011), policies are “windows onto political processes in which actors, agents, concepts and technologies interact in different sites” (p. 2). One specific way to analyze how policies work as political processes is to identify and consider opposing knowledge claims, which compete to create, consolidate or eliminate “new rationalities of governance and regimes of knowledge and power” (p. 2). One example would be analyzing how opposing political and economic rationalities leverage the national charter school debate to frame competing policy agendas.
Another way to challenge the taken-for-granted view of policy as a logical plan unilaterally implemented in all targeted contexts to solve a problem (Nielsen, 2011; Shore and Wright, 2011) is to analyze how social actors engage with policy at a local level in their everyday lives. An example would be analyzing how different social actors interpret and enact policy, “that is the recontextualisaton […] of the abstractions of policy into contextualized practices” (Braun et al., 2011: 586) that may or may not reflect the original intent of the policy.
In this article, based on a larger ethnographic study of school choice in Sundale City, Arizona, I use an interpretive and anthropological approach to highlight how social actors recontexutalized the meaning of local school choice policy development in their everyday lives. Specifically, this contextualized portrayal provides a nuanced analysis to illustrate how an economic rationality of schooling served to polarize citizens in Sundale City and to shape local school choice policy development.
Conceptual framework
Diverse forms of school choice: a historical overview
Although charter schools are increasingly conflated with the concept of school choice, school choice precedes the development of charter schools and has always been a topic of debate framed by strong political and ideological positions (Stulberg, 2004). For example, in 1962, economist Milton Friedman, an advocate of school vouchers and a strong opponent to Keynesian economics, introduced school choice as a market-based approach to public education (Friedman, 2002). In contrast, during the same timeframe, politically progressive White parents and community members who were part of the United States counterculture founded “free” and “community” schools (Stulberg, 2004).
During the 1970s, school choice in the form of “magnet” schools became a part of many public school districts across the United States. Originally, magnet schools were developed as a voluntary measure towards desegregation, but during the 1980s and since, they “became increasingly decoupled from desegregation goals” (Stulberg, 2004: 13).
Open enrollment, a more recent form of school choice policy, allows students to participate in inter-district school choice. Open enrollment policy usually requires students to participate in a lottery, competing for enrollment in schools that have a finite number of openings. A common rationale for open enrollment is to provide students with a choice, in particular students who live in low-income neighborhoods where schools are generally known to be substandard due to the relationship between property taxes and school quality.
The fact that so many types of school choice—vouchers, community schools, magnet schools, open enrollment and charter schools—are all collapsed under the same policy name, school choice, contributes to the wider obfuscation and oversimplification of the historical and political processes that shape school choice policy at both the national and local level.
Interpreting choice: economic choice and the charter school debate
The charter school debate is based on two primary polarized discourses, which compete to shape school choice policy. In one discourse, opponents to charter schools argue that choice represents a market approach to educational reform that advances the privatization of public education (Fabricant and Fine, 2012; Lubienski, 2003; Saltman, 2007). Proponents argue that choice provides underrepresented students with an opportunity to select and attend better quality public schools, since they are no longer limited to enrollment at their neighborhood schools (Chubb and Moe, 1990; Finn et al., 2003; Hoxby, 2003).
Although the charter school debate represents the opposing and competing knowledge claims of opponents and proponents to charter schools, both sides use choice to make their argument: opponents contest choice, proponents advocate choice. This is because choice is at the heart of the discursive-material struggle to reorganize social relations and institutions according to a neoliberal rationality (Sum, 2009). Neoliberalism, which refers to a market-based political and economic rationality, aims to restructure society through changes to taxation, deregulation of trade and labor, commodification of the public sphere, restructuring of social institutions, and so on (Brown 2006; Davies and Bansel 2007; Harvey, 2005).
In theorizing the ways in which late 20th and early 21st-century political and economic changes affect the relationship between the state and its citizens, Biesta (2004) argues that when choice represents a key word within an economic language, it loses its potential as a political term to reflect the role of citizens to actively engage in a process of democratic deliberation for the common good. As an example, he states, “parental choice in itself can hardly be called democratic if it is not part of a wider democratic deliberation about the aims and the shape of education in society” (Biesta, 2004: 238).
Debra Meier (1995), a progressive educational reformer who restructured large urban school districts in East Harlem to form small schools, similarly cautions that while “choice may offer the only way to create schools that can experiment with the radically new pedagogical practices being wisely recommended by educators” (p. 100), we must “shape the concept of choice into a consciously equitable instrument for restructuring public education” (p. 99).
Significant to this paper, the preceding examples highlight that choice is an organizing instrument, which social actors interpret and enact to advance a particular political and or economic rationality; in other words, one that can have different and competing meanings. When choice is used as a primary organizing instrument to restructure and reshape social relations and contexts according to market logic, choice is divested from an ethos of social collectivism and democratic deliberation.
The charter school debate limits the democratic potential of choice by automatically assigning an economic and binary logic to the meaning of choice, thus limiting the opportunity for citizens to deliberate alternative meanings as well as the significance of choice to public education for the common good. Smith (2001) argues that: Each side of the polemic limits the terms of the debate. In the first instance [of proponents of school choice], parents’ and students’ status as citizens is overlooked in favor of their status as consumers; in the latter instance [of opponents of school choice], their capacity for human agency and self-determination is devalued in favor of public oversight. (p. 6)
The ethnographic context
Arizona is in the lowest quartile for funding public education. In 2010, the state received significant national attention for passage of Senate Bill 1070 (SB 1070) and House Bill 2281 (HB 2281); both bills serve to penalize, and, ultimately, eliminate diversity. SB 1070, one of the most significant recent anti-immigrant laws, is widely criticized because it advances racial profiling. HB 2281 eliminated the highly successful Ethnic Studies program in a large school district in southern Arizona.
Arizona has also led the nation in the advancement of charter schools due in part to its strong charter school laws (Murphy and Shiffman, 2002) and status as a “right-to-work” state (Convertino, 2016). Strong charter laws allow the public charter schools in Arizona significant autonomy, which are overseen by the state authorizer of charter schools (a separate entity from the state department of education).
During 2007–2010, the racial and ethnic composition of Sundale City, a large city in Arizona where the present study took place, was approximately 69.7% White, 5% Black, 2.7% Native American, 2.9% Asian, 0.2% Pacific Islander, 16.9% other races, 3.8% two or more races, and 41.6% Latino (of any race). The median household income was $30,981 with a per capita income of $16,322. Primary sources of employment included higher education, tourism and technology industry (United States Census Bureau, 2010).
Midtown High School (MHS), a non-profit start-up charter school in Sundale City, was the primary research site in this study. MHS was granted charter in March 2003; the school opened in September 2004. MHS has no admission criteria and is open to all students regardless of residence. MHS is not part of any school district in the region and acts as an autonomous institution, which is common for charter schools in Arizona due to its strong charter laws but is often not the case in other states with charter schools (Malloy and Wohlstetter, 2003). In fact, local school districts vehemently opposed charter schools but not school choice per se, as evidenced in the proliferation of school choice policy in the form of open enrollment.
At the time of this study, MHS was comprised of approximately 180 students representing all 33 zip codes in Sundale City. While small in size, it was the local charter school with the greatest student racial and ethnic diversity (50% White; 35% Latino; 5% Black; 5% Asian American; 5% American Indian). Out of this intake, 40–45% of students qualified for free or reduced-price lunch, a national indicator of socioeconomic status based on household income. In contrast to the 10–12% district average, 20% of students at MHS qualified for an Individual Education Plan (IEP). (IEPs, as well as 504 plans, are educational plans mandated under the Individuals with Disabilities Act, 1990, for individuals with disabilities that meet the federal and state regulations for accommodations or special education.) Male and female students were evenly distributed. In contrast to the diverse student body, the faculty and staff were predominantly White and from lower middle-class backgrounds; two school faculty members openly identified as gay and lesbian. The majority of teachers, administrators, and staff were career public school employees who chose to leave traditional district schools to build and develop MHS from the ground-up (Convertino, 2016).
During the same three-year time frame that I collected data for this study, school districts in Sundale City began to implement open enrollment policies; districts’ reasons for adopting open enrollment differed. Several districts claimed that open enrollment policies represented a 21st-century approach to educational reform that increased educational excellence through competition. In contrast, Valley Unified School District (VUSD), the largest, oldest and most diverse district in the region (61.3% Latino, 24.1% White, 5.6% Black, 3.8% Native American, 2.6% multiracial, and 2.5% Asian American), adopted an Open enrollment policy in response to the overruling of federal desegregation mandates. The overruling, which stated that desegregation in VUSD schools had been achieved, purported to maintain the district’s “unified” status by allowing students to apply to a school of choice through open enrollment policies.
In this ethnographic context, dire funding for public education, no union protection, discriminatory legislation, the autonomy of charter schools from district schools, as well as the use of district open enrollment to rationalize the end of desegregation mandates were some of the key factors that mediated local school choice policy development.
Methodology
Ethnography is a systematic approach to understanding social realit(ies) based on extensive observations and deep descriptions of how social actors are situated, their everyday practices, and the meaning they make of those practices (Wolcott, 2008). With a central focus on practice and context, ethnography provides a robust methodological framework to explore the particularized meanings of policy enactments. In addition, as a “practice of cultural interpretation,” ethnography “helps us to ‘see’ the ways policy works as cultural practice” (Levinson and Sutton, 2001: 4) by “exploring how the small details of everyday life are part of larger processes of social and political transformations” (Wright, 2011: 30). In this article, I draw on findings from a three-year ethnographic study of school choice in Sundale City to discuss how social actors made sense of competing knowledge claims inscribed in the broader charter school debate, thus recontextualizing school choice policy texts within their local contexts. The guiding research question was: How does the broader charter school debate influence the ways in which social actors produce the meaning of local charter school reforms in their everyday lives?
Purposive sampling and multiple data collection methods were used in this study. Since this was an ethnographic study, participant observations represented the principal method of data collection (Wolcott, 2008). Participant observations were conducted weekly during the three years of data collection (2007–2010) in a variety of contexts including classrooms, multiple fieldtrips, open house meetings, student showcases, lunch, hallways, whole school meetings, and student performances. Focused life history interviews (Seidman, 2013), which were the second principal means of data collection, took place with eight parents, eight teachers, and eight students. Interviews involved multi-generational education and labor histories as well as open-ended questions on topics like public education and school choice. In addition, semi-structured interviews were conducted with educators and administrators from a local school district, the state authorizer for charter schools, and a local news reporter. These interviews were particularly helpful in providing a range of perspectives that included an overview of school choice at the state, district, and local levels. Focus groups with four different groups of 15 students enrolled at MHS were conducted to ensure that I obtained the greatest representation of student voices possible. Parent surveys provided a method for cross-checking what I was learning about parent perspectives from the parent interviews. Archival data from a local daily newspaper and a local weekly newspaper were primary sources for contextualizing how the local media represented educational issues relevant to the topic of this study. During the three years of data collection, I used the following categories to sample local newspaper articles and editorials: school choice, charter schools, open enrollment, educational reform, public forum, choice, and customer. The editorials in the daily newspaper provided insight into the views of local citizens on these topics in the local context. In addition, I used the same categories to sample national media sources, in particular Education Week and national radio programs, like National Public Radio, to gain an overview of national perspectives on school choice policies.
For data analysis, I used constructivist grounded theory (Charmaz, 2006). Constructivist grounded theory represents a systematic approach to analyze and understand the “everyday meanings, underlying assumptions, and practical concerns of those who live and act in these worlds” (Emerson et al., 2011: 198). I began the process of analyzing data during data collection, which included a reiterative sequence of transcribing data, closely reading data, line-by-line open coding of data followed by line-by-line focused coding of data. During focused coding, I cross-referenced codes and wrote memos; memos served as the foundation for developing theoretical themes and categories grounded in the data. With a focus on the social and interpretive construction of meaning making, constructivist grounded theory prioritizes processes rather than causes and the practical concerns of social actors in local contexts rather than generalizable cases (Emerson et al., 2011). As such, the findings in this study do not represent generalizable claims but rather a particularized portrayal of the “socially constructed character of lived realities […] and the interactional constitution of meaning in everyday lives” (Holstein and Gubrium, 2011: 341) as they relate to wider political, social, and economic forces.
Findings
In the early stages of data collection, I was particularly interested in exploring participants’ understandings of school choice and charter schools. Because Arizona has a comparatively high enrollment of students in charter schools, I was surprised to discover that local social actors knew very little about charter schools and open enrollment. In fact, during one participant observation at Midtown High School (MHS), a student approached me and asked, “Who are you?” After I explained to her who I was and that I was at MHS doing research to understand charter schools and school choice, she looked at me with surprised confusion and stated, “This is a charter school? I didn’t know that.”
Over the duration of this study, I learned that what local social actors primarily understood about charter schools and school choice reflected two competing local discourses, which based on an economic conception of schooling, were both similar to and different from the broader charter school debate. In one discourse, local social actors circulated “bleeding,” “creaming,” “luring,” and “siphoning” claims to position district schools in opposition to charter schools based on a “bottom-line” view of public education. In the second discourse, local social actors, in particular parents, made “private” choices to enroll their child in a local charter school based on the claim that local public schools were “bad.” In what follows, I outline and discuss these two primary discourses, which cloaked in an economic rationality, served to polarize and fracture the potential for citizens in Sundale City to collectively grapple with and shape the local meaning and significance of choice in order to address local educational issues democratically.
Bleeding, creaming, and siphoning claims
During the three years that I collected data, local press coverage of school choice focused heavily on Open enrollment policy in the context of the largest and oldest district in Sundale City, VUSD. Although VUSD alleged that the open enrollment policy was intended to maintain the district’s “unified” status (since federal desegregation mandates had purportedly been met), local press coverage stated that VUSD was using school choice as a way to “staunch the bleeding as students continue to leave the district” (Arizona Daily Star, 2009). Specifically, by allowing students and parents the opportunity to choose a district school based on the “the right fit,” regardless of address, several newspaper articles highlighted how VUSD would use school choice to provide “personalized” public education, thus preventing local charter schools from “siphoning,” “bleeding,” “hemorrhaging,” or “luring” students away from the district (Arizona Daily Star, 2009, 2010). In these data, a bottom line approach to schooling created the conditions for an economic version of choice to shape open enrollment policy in the contexts of district schools.
Alongside newspaper claims that local charter schools were luring students from VUSD, the superintendent from VUSD, a White female, told me during an interview that charter schools were “creaming” the top students from the district schools because they could “choose their students.” She also told me that charter schools “didn’t take special needs students; they can send them away anytime they want,” whereas, the district took “everyone and offers all services to all students.” As a consequence, she claimed that the district bore the financial burden to provide for students with special needs and that charter schools didn’t “really meet the constitutional expectation of a free and appropriate public education for all children.” Even though the majority of local charter schools at the time of this study had no admission or selection criteria and many charter schools, including MHS, had a higher than district average number of students with IEPs and 504 accommodations, the superintendent’s claims about local charter schools resounded with what I heard from parents, teachers, and community members, who used a similar economic rational to position charter schools in opposition to district schools.
The local claim that charter schools “lured” the brightest students away from the district was due in large part to press coverage of Foundations, a local public charter high school that received national and local recognition for academic excellence. Because of the otherwise limited press coverage and limited knowledge of charter schools in Sundale City, local perception of charter schools was based almost exclusively on Foundations. In fact, it was within the same multi-page article on the academic merits of Foundations that I noted a definition of what a charter school is. The definition, which was buried in a very small square to the side of the page, began with the question, “Did You Know?” Following the question in tiny print, a bulleted list provided general details about charter schools in Arizona, for example, “charter schools are public, state-funded schools that were created through legislation in 1994.” The list also indicated that Arizona “has long been a leader in the charter school movement” and that charter schools cannot charge tuition. There was no explanation of what was meant by the charter school movement or how the reference to tuition was relevant to the explanation (Arizona Daily Star, 2008).
Since the local daily newspaper provided one of the primary outlets for local citizens to become informed about local public education, the focus on Foundations served to shape local opposition to charter schools. For example, the writer for an editorial page in a weekly local newspaper wrote, It was front page news in May when Newsweek magazine named Sundale City’s Foundations charter school the top public high school in the entire country. […] I’ve never been a big fan of the charter-school concept, mostly because I believe (quite correctly) that it was started by a Republican state Legislature as a screw-you to teachers’ unions, the members of which are at the front lines of the child-rearing battles these days (all too often standing in for parents who are too busy, too selfish, or too absent) and have a tendency to vote Democrat. Charter schools are, by legislated definition, public schools so they siphon off funds that would go to traditional public schools. […] But that’s OK; charter schools, we’re told, give parents a choice (as though parents haven’t always had a choice). What it does, in actuality, is give parents a choice without the parents having to make any sacrifices. The Me Decaders are all grown up.
In sum, social actors used a bottom-line approach to recontextualize school choice development through the local translation and enactment of bleeding, creaming, and luring claims, which stemmed from an absence of information and/or misinformation about school choice policy. Such district and media-driven claims positioned charter schools as ideologically and politically opposed to district schools while failing to recognize and interrogate how economic versions of choice in the form of open enrollment also represented neoliberal school choice policy.
Bad public school claims
Concurrent with siphoning, luring, and creaming claims, a competing discourse circulated to claim that local public schools were “bad.” In this study, the “public schools are bad” discourse was most prevalent in local newspaper coverage and in parent accounts of their experiences with local district schools. Even though local press coverage served to shape opposition to charter schools because charter schools took funds away from district schools, local press coverage simultaneously positioned district schools, in particular VUSD, as desperate and broken. Some of the headlines, topics, and characterizations that served to frame VUSD as bad included: “promoting students despite widespread failure;” “faltering academic tradition;” “not credible;” “fiscally compromised.”
In the absence of robust information on charter school policy, local social actors recontextualized negative portrayals of VUSD found in the press to make the claim that public schools were bad. For example, the parent of a student enrolled in Foundations stated in an article on school choice, But as far as providing an exceptional education for kids who would be bored stiff in public schools, Foundations is unique and invaluable. I know this, because my kid is a student there. […] Students receive the education most Americans probably wish the public school system would provide for all kids. Maybe it’s disconcerting to see that such an education can be provided.
In other examples, parents with students enrolled in MHS talked about their negative experiences with local district schools. Cate, a White single mother with two students enrolled in MHS told me during an interview that her two children had attended five different district schools prior to their enrollment in MHS. Cate explained that she had moved her kids from one district school to another multiple times due to the fact that none of the schools would respond to her concerns about her son, who had echolalia (a speech disorder), tactile defensiveness (a sensory processing disorder), and asthma. She indicated that the lack of responsiveness was due in large part to overcrowding. In second grade, Chris was one of 45 students in an integrated classroom. When Cate asked Chris’s second grade teacher to hold him back so that he could “catch up,” her request was denied because there was no space for him to stay in the classroom for another year.
In light of her prior experiences with district schools, Cate told me that she liked “choice” because she “was never happy with the VUSD schools.” She further stated that she thought there were a lot of charter schools in Sundale City because local schools were bad. About this she stated, I think the reason we see so many schools like that in Sundale City is because people are not happy with VUSD school system and I don’t know what it would be like in different citites, if they have a better school system, a better school system than what they do here but I’m not happy with VUSD at all and I know from what we read in the paper that not many people are happy with VUSD right now.
Conclusion
Findings from this study help us to understand some of the ways in which social actors interpreted and enacted school choice policies in their everyday lives. In particular, this contextualized analysis provides a nuanced representation of how a lack of robust information on the meaning of choice and an economic version of schooling shaped local school choice policy development. Due to an absence of local information and misinformation, local social actors translated competing claims to enact a local debate that was both different and similar to the use of choice in the national charter school debate.
In sum, findings in this study suggest that school choice policy-making continues to be cloaked in economic and ideological terms that serve to distort information, polarize the public, and thwart the opportunity for democratic deliberation. Consequently, I argue for educational research, which serves to rescue and reimagine “political relationships between government and citizens” (Biesta, 2004: 237) from the stronghold of an economic rationality. To do this, we need more research that uses an interpretive approach to policy in order to better connect policy-making with democratic discourse and civic engagement so that citizens are not left to make their own private choices with no public discussion or deeper understanding of how economic and political rationalities use policy-making as a means to reorganize and restructure social relations and institutions.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.