Abstract
Scholars who document neoliberal trends in education argue that privatization and corporatization in schools is dehumanizing and discourages democratic participation. These scholars assert that neoliberal education policies heighten social inequity by emphasizing individualism, marketability and colorblindness without interrogating social structures of power. Can qualitative documentation of the effects of neoliberal policy in education “talk back” to these trends? Can ethnographically mapping the complex effects of neoliberal trends on teaching and learning serve to heighten teachers' sense of agency and resistance? This paper documents the ways that teachers construct their identities in reaction to reading the author's critical ethnography of their school. Data were gathered for this paper in teacher interviews following two years of collaborative ethnographic fieldwork at the College Preparatory Academy, a small public high school in Brooklyn, New York that created its own in-house nonprofit organization in order to solicit funds from private donors. Using Derrick Bell's interest convergence theory, I critique competitive models of philanthropy in education and explore whether collaborative and critically engaged ethnography can serve to expose the tension between public and private interests in education, and can encourage teachers to challenge and critique these borders.
Introduction
From 2008 to 2010, I conducted ethnographic interviews with 45 faculty and staff members at the College Preparatory Academy (College Prep), a traditional public school in New York City, where I was also a teacher. The school, whose student body is predominantly Black and Latino, created its own in-house nonprofit organization in 2008, which I call “the Foundation”, in order to solicit funds from the private sector, most notably a corporate firm, which I call “the Firm”. Due to the Foundation, College Prep's website thanks five foundations, seven elected officials, 34 companies and organizations for their charitable donations to the school, and also thanks more than 300 individuals who have each donated US$5000 or more. Through its 93% graduation and 97% college matriculation rates for Black and Brown urban students, 78% of whom receive free or reduced price lunch, College Prep markets itself through advertising, media and benefits as both needy and deserving of predominantly White funders' generosity. I have re-interviewed 11 of the 45 staff members whom I originally interviewed for the project about their impressions of the manuscript in order to solicit their thoughts and critiques. My findings, detailed below, demonstrate the ways in which some staff members begin to construct critical identities in relation to reading the ethnography of the school. While their insights are partial, and not necessarily transformationally resistant, they demonstrate emergent resistance through problematizing the school's model (Solorzano and Delgado Bernal, 2001). These staff members' insights encourage qualitative researchers in education to explore how collaborative and critically engaged ethnography can encourage teachers to challenge and critique the racialized and classed tension between public and private interests.
Leander (2002) defines an “identity artifact” as an instrument that interactants use to shape the identity of a material or group. Here, I share community members' reactions and demonstrate how participants used this manuscript as an “identity artifact” to inspire necessary critical conversations. This speaks to the importance and value of collaborative and innovative ways of writing ethnography, but also to the importance of anthropologists sharing the ownership of the stories we tell with the communities in which we work. I use Bell's theory of interest convergence to conceptualize the ways that participants talked about the school's model, which relied on the charity of philanthropists for resources (Bell, 1980).
I argue that, in the case of College Prep, participants defined themselves both within and against the norms of the institution. They used the ethnography to explain the frustration and difficulty of authoring a teacher identity in the context of conflicting discourses that are ostensibly “social justice” but also essentialize students and teachers to gain resources in the name of students' upward mobility. Those whom I interviewed illuminate the tension between alleviating and perpetuating racial capitalism and poverty in education through casting themselves as being both inside and outside the “total institution” of the school (Goffman, 1961; Robinson, 1983). I argue that engaging in these critiques encourages participants to identify, challenge or question the borders between private interests and the public good, and to formulate a critique of the ways in which the school's model upholds White supremacy.
Themes that seemed to emerge most commonly across feedback interviews were identity construction/agency, marketing and humanization. The ways that participants defined themselves in relation to the manuscript demonstrate that educators, administrators and policymakers might shift the focus in school reform away from quantitative results and competition for private resources. Instead, they might move towards deepening the possibility for human connection, community engagement, positive self-identity development for students and what media scholar Lillie Chouliaraki calls “agonistic solidarity” (2011). Chouliaraki defines agonistic solidarity as a kind of altruism that is grounded in an awareness and appreciation for the diversity of experience as well as a common sense of injustice at human vulnerability, inequality and oppression.
Walking the line: research on teachers and teaching in a neoliberal context
College Prep's model of racialized philanthropy is not new in the United States. Many historically Black colleges, universities and centers of education were originally funded by privileged, White philanthropists who attempted to define “acceptable” social change and maintain private or corporate interests during and after reconstruction (Anderson, 1988; Watkins, 2001). Yet in 1983, A nation at risk, a report authored by President Ronald Reagan's National Commission on Excellence in Education, argued that “a rising tide of mediocrity” in public schools was threatening the country's competitiveness in the global marketplace. Many schools experienced increasing pressure to partner with corporations, nonprofits and philanthropists, who supposedly had expertise on how to improve education (Molnar, 2005). Mainstream media and education policy portray private sector funding, competition and choice as aiding in urban schools’ success rates because they provide the resources that the failed state does not (Hall, 2005; Rose, 1999).
Many scholars have noted the heightened influence of the private sector in US public schools since A nation at risk (Hursh, 2009; Lipman, 2011; Ravitch, 2011; Saltman, 2010; Stern, 2013). This pattern has been especially apparent in urban regions of the United States, where researchers in Chicago, New Orleans, New York and Philadelphia, for example, have documented the problematic and racialized effects of the privatization, marketization and charterization of public schools (Buras, 2011; Brown, 2012; Cucchiara, 2013; Lipman, 2011). Because it is based on a capitalist (competitive) model, scholars agree that increased private sector influence tends to heighten, rather than ameliorate, racial and class inequalities. In other words, as schools compete for funding, for students, for “grades”, or for high-stakes standardized test scores, some schools must “fail” so that others can “succeed”. Thus, private sector influence on public schools tends to exacerbate White supremacy, and tends not to lead to educational or social equity.
I refer to this increased private sector influence in public schools as “neoliberal” because it demonstrates a reiteration of classic liberal economic theories first put forth by Adam Smith (1776) and Thomas Hobbes (1651), and later by Chicago School economists Freidrich Hayek (2008) and Milton Friedman (1962, 1955). Neoliberal economic theory focuses on minimizing the role of government (in other words, extreme deregulation) in order to maximize the ability of the free market to run its course (Friedman, 1962). The underlying logic of neoliberal economic theory is that competition on a free market should lead to progress and innovation. According to neoliberals, the state should enable, rather than constrain, private-sector influence (Baltodano, 2012). Philosophically, individuals are defined as inherently selfish and self-serving, and are motivated to operate more effectively in competition as “entrepreneurial actors” than as a collective (Brown, 2003). Inequality is accepted as endemic to the human condition. This is the logic, then, of the state actively enabling private-sector influence and competition in public schools (Baltodano, 2012).
The meaning and localized iterations of neoliberalism, however, are contested and ever-shifting (Hyatt et al., 2015). I argue that the particular neoliberal policy shifts I reference in this article can be viewed through the lens of what critical race theorist and legal scholar Derrick Bell refers to as the “interest-convergence dilemma” (Bell, 1980). The principle of interest convergence, a tool that Bell uses for critical historical analysis (in his case, to analyze the implications of the 1954 Brown vs. the Board of Education ruling) holds that the interest of Black people in achieving racial equality will only be accommodated when it converges with the interests of White people. In other words, according to Bell, the outcome of Brown was not about Whites conceding to Black demands; Black people had been protesting for the right to an equal education for 100 years prior. Nor was the decision about equality, since this was ostensibly covered in the Plessy vs. Ferguson ruling. Rather, Whites in policymaking positions saw the economic and political advantages at home and abroad that would come about as a result of desegregating schools (e.g. America's struggle to win international support in the fight against communism, to offer reassurance to Black veterans returning home from WWII, and to further industrialize the southern United States, since segregation was seen as a barrier to further industrialization). Today, we can similarly apply the interest convergence principle as philanthropists and social entrepreneurs invest in education for Black and Brown urban children (Buras, 2011). Often under the auspice of social or racial justice, these investors and reformers uphold White supremacy by shaping policy and by capitalizing on the lives of Black and Brown children (Buras, 2011, Brown, 2015). Neoliberalism, then, partners with White supremacy, capitalism and patriarchy to uphold a system that heightens inequity.
As qualitative researchers, it is important that we interrogate the implications of education reform based on neoliberal logic, and take on what Weis and Fine (2012) call a “critical bifocality”, considering how people's everyday actions inform the “big picture” and vice versa. In other words, through a lens of critical bifocality, we link structure to agency, micro to macro and accumulation to dispossession. This way of seeing informs the questions that I ask here: how does increased private-sector influence affect the actions and identity construction of teachers, and how do teachers use an interest-convergence-informed critique to make meaning of these reforms? How do those in public schools conceptualize resistance or complacence to neoliberalization, as it is intertwined with capitalism and White supremacy? How is power negotiated in this particular political economy (Lipman, 2011), and how is social justice defined and contested in this space? These questions help us to think about how people's everyday actions, as they articulate with neoliberal policy shifts, serve to further or contest the inequity of opportunities and resources.
While teachers are clearly creating identities of resistance to neoliberal reforms in the United States and globally (see Angus, 2012; Costigan, 2013; Dovemark, 2010; Huff, 2013; Picower, 2011; Vassallo, 2013; Webb et al., 2009), many scholars also note teachers' internal dissonance as they attempt to teach for social justice or equity within a consistently more inequitable, commodified and marketized environment. For example, Welmond (2002) documents the extreme difficulties that teachers in Benin have in defining their identities due to the contradictory demands that are placed on them in the context of globalization. Sonu (2012) theorizes the ways that teachers and students perform and conceptualize social justice differently in front of authorities and administrators versus behind closed doors, again, leading to a feeling of internal discord. Webb et al. (2009) argue that some teachers, in order to resist what they deem the “neoliberal panopticon”, engage in certain kinds of fabrications or performative pedagogies that allow them to operate using two kinds of scripts – one to meet standards when they are supervised and another to resist neoliberal reforms. While not ideal, they state, the kind of ideological schizophrenia that results is a necessary alternative to complacence, given the reality. Carlone et al. (2010) see the elementary level science teachers in their study as “tempered radicals” who “work the system” in order to teach in ways that are consistent with reform-based science, and Montaño and Burstein (2006) note that the bicultural Chicana educators in their study have difficulty maintaining what they see as social justice commitments beyond the classroom, but are able to continue to engage in what they see as social justice teaching with informal, organic networks of support along racial or cultural lines.
While I add to the literature cited above that demonstrates teachers' struggles to create unified and cohesive identities in a neoliberal environment, I show how their use of this ethnographic “identity artifact” helped them to reflect on and name their politics. Teachers questioned the motives of the school's funders in helping them and their students, noting the ways in which funders benefited and students lost. I demonstrate the ways in which critical teachers at College Prep used the ethnography as a way to support what they saw as a social justice ideology, and to deeply consider their own roles in the struggle towards social (read: racial and class) and educational equity. In many ways, their use of this identity artifact reflects what Gramsci conceptualized as the difference between good sense and common sense: common sense is an uncritical acceptance of hegemonic ideologies, and it differs from good sense, which draws out and elaborates on what people feel but may not know or articulate (Gramsci, 1988: 323). Good sense, then, becomes an active and critical form of awareness and a way of constructing knowledge. This is why Gramsci states that everyone is a philosopher – everyone has the potential to cultivate good sense and critique hegemony as they construct their identities. Thus, critical ethnography as an identity artifact has the potential to inform not only teachers' future praxis through inspiring good sense, but also education policy and reform more generally.
Research methods
I taught English and simultaneously conducted ethnographic research at College Prep for two years (from 2008 to 2010); these were my fourth and fifth years as a teacher in New York City public schools. In addition to conducting participant observation, shadowing eight students, disseminating a schoolwide student questionnaire, and facilitating Freirean cultural circles, I interviewed 45 members of the school staff (including administrators, security guards, guidance/college office staff and deans of discipline), 14 alumni, 14 parent/guardians and 10 students. I transcribed the interviews and moved from open to focused coding as themes began to emerge (Emerson et al., 1995; LeCompte and Schensul, 1999). For example, the categories that I name in this article – teacher identity construction and agency, marketing and humanization – all arose out of close readings of field notes and interview transcripts, and inductively noticing first that quite a few teachers expressed an overall discomfort with their roles at College Prep, especially when it came to their participation in building relationships between the Firm, the Foundation and the school. From here, I noticed that teachers conceptualized this in terms of certain constraints in their own agency, but also in terms of a tension between the way in which the school's focusing on marketing tended to inhibit the possibility of more nuanced or vulnerable relationships between teachers, students and funders, and tended to essentialize students into marketable (and quite problematic) race and class categories. This led to the codes I created.
Between 2011 and 2014, I reached out via email or Facebook to each teacher whom I had initially interviewed to see if they were interested in reading the manuscript and conducting a follow-up interview either in person or via Skype. Of those school staff members, I still had relevant contact information for 38 individuals. I stated that I was interested in their perspectives on the manuscript, and would use their thoughts on it to make changes to the manuscript itself, or to write an afterword to the book version of the ethnography. Of those 38, 11 were interested in participating in the follow-up interview process. I sent them the manuscript, as well as any published articles from the data, and I followed up with each staff member within a month. Semi-structured interviews were audio recorded and usually took between an hour and an hour and a half (Spradley, 1979). The follow-up interviews were part of the collaborative nature of the project. Throughout the process of gathering data for the ethnography, I had communicated to participants that I valued them as co-researchers, trying to let my interviewees tell their stories as naturally as possible, while I guided the process. While I do not highlight the voices of all 11 participants here, the themes that I highlight in this article were reflected across most interviews. Here I have chosen to draw out the most representative quotes.
College Prep
College Prep is located in a six-story, newly renovated building in a neighborhood in a central area of the city, close to several subway trains, city commerce buildings, corporate offices, shops, cafes and restaurants. The school shares a building (and thus, the cafeteria, gym and library) with two other schools. Thanks in large part to the school's Foundation, there were ample resources available to teachers and students, including a fully staffed college office, standing and mobile computer labs for students' use, four copy machines for teachers' use, an unlimited supply of paper, and LCD projectors and interactive whiteboards for use with classroom desktop computers.
The school appears a warm and welcoming place to its visitors. Parents whom I talked to often mentioned that when they first walked in, they felt like they were in a private or charter school. Some commented on the corporate feel of the building. I agreed that there seemed a stark difference between College Prep and other public schools I had taught in or visited in the past, both in terms of tone and in terms of resources.
Insights from the ethnography
In the ethnography, I demonstrate how the school draws on racialized, classed and gendered narratives of need, privilege and meritocratic social mobility in order to court funds from predominantly White, elite, male donors (Brown, 2015). I argue that teachers at the school were expected to be “neoliberal saviors”. I define the neoliberal savior as a figure that, instead of helping students to find God or literacy (as we see in many of the well-known narratives that engage White teachers or missionaries in non-White communities), helps students to market themselves in a neoliberal and White supremacist context. In the school's fundraising materials, college matriculation for all of the school's “at-risk” (or in College Prep terms, “college-fragile”) population is equated with social justice and the pursuit of educational equity. The school's marketing materials are also grounded in meritocratic ideals of college matriculation as a way to attain upward mobility. I also demonstrate the “underlife”, or unforeseen effects of the school's image management project: staff, students and their families at times play into, and at times resist, conforming to the school's public image.
For example, College Prep staff members explicitly taught “professionalism” to students using a point-based metric. “Professionalism points” at College Prep factored into students' academic grades, and counted for approximately 10% in each class. Professionalism is a set of performances that index a punctual, dutiful and diligent worker who is also an individual achiever. From the perspective of College Prep staff, grading students on their professionalism was supposed to make them “college ready”. While some students adhered to the school's expectations of professionalism, others overtly resisted, claiming that professionalism points were unnecessary, deficit-based or infantilizing. The students who consented to performing professionalism were most often chosen by teachers to participate in extracurricular activities, and are also most often chosen to publicly represent the school at benefits or in the short film that advertises College Prep to its funders. Those who refused were often denied access to these opportunities. Professionalism became one way that predominantly White teachers were expected to ascribe a deficit to – and discipline – predominantly Black and Brown students in the interest of creating an image of marketability to funders. Student professionalism was assessed in a gendered, raced and classed way. For example, female students were often deemed “unprofessional” for talking too loudly, or for making adjustments to their uniforms (white or blue collared shirts and khaki or black pants) that seemed to some staff members to connote hypersexuality. Male students were often deemed “unprofessional” for wearing hoodies, do-rags, making other improvisations on the uniform or speaking in ways that somehow linked them in teachers' eyes to stereotypical or commodified versions of masculinity in the “hood”, the hypersegregated, urban ghetto. Just as some students resisted school-sanctioned professionalism, teachers sometimes resisted taking away, or even mentioning, professionalism points in their classrooms. Aligning with Bell's notion of critical analysis, those who refused to comply with giving or working towards professionalism grades saw the way that this metric, ostensibly designed to give students more access to power, worked to further the interests, ideologies and power of funders' knowledge, communities and backgrounds, while at the same time vilifying some students' knowledge, communities and backgrounds (Bell, 1980).
In addition to managing its image through marketing materials, the school also enhanced its marketing through holding benefits; I attended, along with 10 of my colleagues and seven “high-achieving” students, the school's fourth annual spring benefit, which was held at the corporate office of one of the firms that funded our school. Approximately 125 of our school's biggest financial supporters attended. In a meeting before the benefit, Sebastian Thomas, the head of the Foundation, instructed us on how to dress (“like teachers”), what to eat (“not a lot”; we were supposed to focus on talking up the school to funders), how to walk around the room (“in groups no larger than two”) and to refrain from drinking anything at the open bar. Blown-up articles about College Prep adorned the walls, as did charts and graphs advertising the school's 93% graduation and 97% college matriculation rate for seniors. The White, female keynote speaker at the event called College Prep “a miracle”. Working with students who succeed despite the most challenging circumstances, due wholly to their hardworking teachers, College Prep was truly, she said, a beacon of social justice. I played my part that night, as did the other students and staff members who attended. As a school, College Prep reaped the reward of so carefully managing our image; at the end of the evening, guests dropped checks into a designated box outside the door. In a follow-up email to school staff, Mr. Thomas expressed that the benefit had raised 34% of the Foundation's annual budget. The benefit was the organization's second-highest source of income behind the Robin Hood Foundation, a charitable organization in New York City that attempts to fight poverty through venture philanthropy. Again, the dynamics of the benefit were raced, classed and gendered, furthering a problematic social hierarchy that places predominantly White male funders at the top, and predominantly Black and Brown students at the bottom. Predominantly White teachers participated as the link between funders’ dollars and students, helping to make both the school and its students deserving of funders’ charity and thus, marketable both to funders and to the neoliberal world beyond College Prep. It is clear that while funders are doing some good, it is, again in Bell's terms, in their best interest to do so (Bell, 1980). Not only are they lauded for their generosity, they can play a role in constructing the educational ideology of the school as well as enjoy a tax write-off.
The curriculum of professionalism and the school's fundraising materials are two examples of College Prep's equation of social justice with students' individual and collective marketability. Throughout, the ethnography argues that College Prep's philanthropic model engages the language of social justice but depends on the raced and classed hierarchies of need and privilege to exist. Its curricula and fundraising materials avoid a critique of racial or class inequity, instead emphasizing that through the performance of marketable virtues, individuals can exceptionalize themselves from race, class or gender oppression. In drawing out the tension between the school's image management and everyday teaching and learning practices, as well as closely critiquing how College Prep students, staff and funders employ the vocabulary of social justice, the ethnography illuminates a rarely exposed side of the debates on the philanthropy and privatization of public education. It demonstrates that while some staff, students and families are aware of the importance of college matriculation and marketability for upward social mobility, some also enact critiques of this ideology. The follow-up interviews that I conducted speak to, and in some cases seem to strengthen, teachers' critiques of neoliberal reforms in education.
Follow-up interviews: identity construction and agency
As I sat across from Mr Matthews, a Black teacher in his empty classroom in 2012 (the year before he left the school to teach abroad), I reminded him about a few of the topics we had covered during his first interview in 2009 – he had been very positive about the mission of the school, and the direction in which it was going. He responded, pausing dramatically between each sentence: “I know. I just feel really jaded now. I have woken up.” Although we both laughed at his dramatic pauses, the sentiment was very serious. Like other teachers whom I interviewed, Mr Matthews came into College Prep energized and idealized by the school's mission to send African American and Latino students from traditionally underserved communities to college, but after remaining at College Prep for some time, became discouraged with how the ideology of the neoliberal savior contributes to the dehumanization of students and staff, and pathologizes students' communities. Mr Matthews, along with other staff members, remarked in my follow-up interviews that he was appreciative of the ethnographic critiques I was making of the savior mentality and was interested in deepening them, especially in the context of what was expected of teachers in relation to “saving” students.
When I asked Mr Matthews to describe his role at the school, and whether it had changed at all since our last interview, he mentioned that he had taken on more responsibility – he took over for Mr Jackson, another Black teacher who left the school, in leading the young men's empowerment group, which took up many of his evenings and weekends, and he was teaching ninth-grade history. “I have to manage [the young men's group] and teaching”, he said, “what is expected of teachers here is interesting in terms of your critique of the school and the business model…this place…[has] somewhat unrealistic expectations for [what] adults in the building [should] produce.” He mentioned that reading critiques from other teachers helped him to further define his life plan, which was to move towards becoming an administrator and then start his own school for young men. Other staff members whom I spoke with echoed Mr Matthews' critique – it seemed that for staff, reading the ethnography affirmed their discomfort with the idea of being cast as “savior” teachers. They used the manuscript as an identity artifact to define themselves against this trope.
Pushing this point further, Mr Matthews added that he noticed the pervasiveness of the savior mentality in College Prep's mission: I don't even feel like the school mission is something students are supposed to believe in and uphold. To me it's like, [the mission is] something that [funders and some teachers] believe in. So it feels good that I am donating to some, you know, “underprivileged” or “underserved” kids – which is a crock as well because … there are a ton of salaries that parents make, all the way from six-figures to living in a shelter … [the mission] allows the school to make money.
Drawing on Althusser (1971), Hall and Du Gay (1996) explain identity construction as a point of “suture” or temporary attachment between, on one hand, discourses that interpellate subjects, and on the other, subjects that invest in the position. Mr Matthews expresses discomfort at being interpellated as a neoliberal savior by the institution because this identity position automatically ascribes a raced and classed deficit to students. He tried to invest in the identity position of an asset-based pedagogue who strives to recognize the diversity of the student body, as well as scaffold students to take pride in their communities and identities. Yet he recognizes that the hierarchical model of the institution depended on interpellating teachers, students and their communities in a circumscribed way in order to ensure the comfort of the predominantly White, elite funders and corporate philanthropists who contribute money.
Mr Jackson and Ms Sands (who was promoted from being a teacher when I left the school in 2010 to being the principal of the school when I re-interviewed her in 2013) echoed this concern in a different way, both critiquing what they called the “hero” mentality of some staff members. “There can only be one great white knight”, said Mr Jackson, in agreement with my racialized critique of the school's market-oriented savior mentality. Ms Williams, another Black teacher who had left the school, commented that College Prep, like many other New York City schools, does not respect the expertise or experience of parents. Both she and Mr Jackson felt that the issue of pushing Black and Brown parents out worked in tandem with the school's reliance on White funders' generosity, as well as with the construction of the White neoliberal savior. As these teachers voice their critiques of the school's competitive and capitalistic model, they are also making a clear critique of the intersection between White supremacy and capitalism.
Follow-up interviews: marketing, commodification and “generosity”
Mr Matthews' concern and construction of self in resistance to the school's interpellation of him was heightened by how he saw the money from donors as being used: “it's a game. I feel like…it's a game [played] especially with Black and Brown children that we are going to experiment with your child.” Ms Williams, in her interview, agreed, “[donors] are funding an experiment.” As an example, Mr Matthews spoke about a nearby public school whose theme and curricula were centered around boating: Who needs to know how to – like, really? If I want to think about a school mission, and about how we want to educate students who are low skilled, are not performing at grade level when they enter the ninth grade, why am I taking you on a sailboat so you can figure out how to navigate a ship? I understand there is a need for extracurricular activities, but … I feel like you are just playing around; it's like we are throwing money at you and we are throwing money at the problem, but we are still keeping you in your place, because we are not giving you the tools you need to really function [at the college level]. You know how to cruise a boat, and then you'll maybe go to [City College] and get your associate's degree. But put that in [a donor's] child's school? No. Why isn't my child taking an advanced math class? SAT prep. Don't give my child scuba diving.
The fact that these experiments on Black and Brown children are funded by charity reinforces the hierarchical racial and class project of the institution; in Bell's terms of interest convergence, funders maintain privilege and power while ostensibly acting in the interest of the school and its students (1980). Mr Matthews stated: We as a school expect that once a child graduates and they go to college the family and the student is forever indebted to the school in terms of “look what we did for your child”, as opposed to “look what your child did for himself or herself” … [when I was in high school], it was like, my parents always congratulated me, it was always intrinsic, you know, that I was motivated and I wanted to do this, and I never felt indebted to my school. My understanding of public education is that everybody deserves it. This is my right. And I was like…I don't feel like I need to thank you because everybody should get this regardless.
Also interesting about Mr Matthews' comments above, however, is the level to which he seems to emphasize meritocracy as the only viable alternative to funders' responsibility for students' success. Students' achievement is divorced from the social context in which it occurs and is still not attributable to the support of their families or the assets of their communities. Mr Matthews embodies a contradiction here: while he critiques many facets of neoliberalism in theory, his words still, to some extent, represent the meritocratic discourse of one becoming the individual “economic entrepreneur” of one's own life.
Principal Sands, too, spoke about the complicated relationship that she felt she had to maintain with those who sit on the school's board. We need more resources, she explained, because there is so much more work to be done at the school. She did not want to impress funders, she said, by “putting shininess” on everything. Rather, she wanted funders to be impressed by reality. She stated that in her experience, board members seemed more interested in quantitative results than on the ways in which teachers were “doing really thoughtful work and loving kids”. While she said that she was thankful for the people who give their money, and she knows that they honestly believe they are doing something good, It is not all about my children…I think what the people funding our school miss is being able to see it visibly change…it's weird that we send a child to India for six weeks and they have never really seen the face of the person that makes that possible for them…And then I'm wondering: do they care? Is it important to them? Is that kind of outcome important to them, or is it more to keep the quantitative data outcome looking good?
I asked Mr Matthews how he was able to reconcile his deep critique of the institution and its interpellation of him and his students with coming to work every day. He said, “it's like, you don't want to bite the hand that feeds you.” Mr Matthews told me that he had conversations with former Principal McCarren about his problems with the school's construction of students and teachers for the purpose of enhanced marketability. “It seemed like she agreed”, he said, “but I don't even know if she even knows how to go about making these changes – or she agreed, but not publicly because she doesn't want to lose her support amongst the staff, so I think it's kind of been like, what can you do, right?” He names the ways here that teachers' and students' interests may not actually converge with those of funders, and alludes here to some of the internal dissonance that he experiences in the context of neoliberal reforms.
Mr Battle, a Black teacher, and Ms McGoldrick, a White teacher, both no longer at the school, also made critiques of the school's racialized marketing. Mr Battle stated: It's not so bad to try to get these donors, but it's how you try to solicit the donors and it's how you try to change the image of kids to get the money. People should be trying to give money to the school because they are helping out a school that shows promise, but promise is not always just, “I am going to take the 10 most articulate kids and put them in a room”…The image part, for donors should be, well, don't you want to just help out a school…? Is [the problem] privatization, or is it the underlying racism? Is the privatization underlying the racism?
Follow-up interviews: humanization and solidarity
Some teachers connected professionalism at College Prep to the influence of charity and marketization, aligning it with yet another way in which teachers do not “see” their students. When I re-interviewed Ms Caldwell, the White teacher who participated in our cultural circles, she said: The teachers with a more color conscious or whatever consciousness they have –with more of a critique of Whiteness – they are just more critical in general and they build tighter relationships with kids. [It seems like] there are two ways of building relationships with kids [at College Prep]. It's like you build relationships with them, or you determine how professional or unprofessional they are. They are caught in the middle of like – they have close relationships with students because they are critical, and one of their values is in building relationships with kids… What are students' realities, and what is the reality that is being pushed by the school? And like those two things don't match up…For a teacher to feel like their job is fulfilling, then those things need to match. I decided I was gonna leave but it was very difficult for me to make sense of why the school just wasn't feeling right to me … Part of me knew that if I was a student there, I wouldn't be happy … it's this idea that students are supposed to feel so grateful to be there.
As Ms Sands said when I re-interviewed her, in order to be an effective teacher, one has to thoughtfully engage with children. As principal, she hopes to develop College Prep into a school where this can take place. At this point, she said: We settle for “give me the script for how I should interact with [the name of one of the funders] when I go to the Firm”, and the student is like, “I feel armored now”. They've got their armor on. And the funder feels like they've got their armor on … I think it would take some work to get us to a place where…the children took their armor off, or in this case, really, the board, the funders, and had an open dialogue. I don't even know what our funders would do if they heard a child tell them their real story. I would love to see what happens in that moment. I come from a lot of privilege, and I have to believe that I can play an authentic and integral and worthwhile role in this struggle. So if I said something like, for wealthy people to be funding education or any other kind of issue like that's inherently problematic, then that would not be reflective. I wouldn't be owning my own stuff, and I would be wanting to feel better than other privileged people or people who have a little more privilege than I do. I would be distancing myself from that group. So I want to believe that wealthy people can be movers and shakers, but it's like anyone who wants to be effective has to be a part of this critical reflective dialogue.
Conclusion
In ethnographically documenting how privatization, marketization and White supremacy affect the everyday practices of students and teachers at College Prep, and in soliciting feedback from staff, I hoped not only to write a more collaborative ethnography, but also to engage participants in naming and finding ways to subvert the racial project of the institution. Staff members attempted to resist uncomfortable identity positions (Leander, 2002) and engaged with me in powerful critiques of the ways that identities are produced and reified through discursive practices.
Mr Jackson remarked that, in his mind, “I don't think people at the Foundation knew that students were aware of how to play this game. You know, I don't know. I am very conflicted over it. Because I played the game too, in some ways.” Everyone plays the game, but few find pleasure or fulfillment in it. Perhaps, said Ms Meehan, there might be an alternative possibility: “is there a way for people who have resources to give … to think of themselves in solidarity with the people that they are sharing with, as opposed to feeling so good about themselves for sharing or giving?” While she said that she did not know how to create this, she thought it might be a worthwhile consideration.
Some believe that competition in education inspires innovation, and that success in the world outside can only come from continued exposure to a competitive and “professional” environment. In other words, we cannot change the reality of the world, with all its inequities. Students, they feel, should learn to navigate that. While it may be true that competition can inspire people to try harder, it is more important that we cultivate the ability to deeply connect with and learn from others. All students – not just a few – should enjoy access to the resources that are available at College Prep as a result of the Foundation and the Firm – or the resources that are available to students in more elite schools as a result of property taxes, alumni donations or branding.
If students and philanthropists can converge with an interest in equity, this could have clear implications for policy. For example, currently, at both local and national levels (from increased charterization and private sector involvement in urban schools across the United States to emphasis on high-stakes standardized test scores to Race to the Top), competition and inequity seem to be underlying systemic values. As I allude in the beginning of this manuscript, this is because White elite interests – and White hegemony – are served by entrepreneurial, philanthropic and ostensibly antiracist agendas. The teachers and administrators quoted in this study, as they develop a “good sense” critique, imply that a shift away from this ideology is needed at the policy level so that all teachers and students in all schools have access to good education, resources, opportunities and support. Teachers, students and schools should not have to prove their deservedness to a charitable giver in order to gain access to an educational experience that should be guaranteed regardless.
Still, the participants whom I re-interviewed seem to align with the idea that we might work against dependence on problematic philanthropic relationships, but that where they exist for the time being, we might work towards making them more humanizing, proximate and engaged (Richey and Ponte, 2011), and capitalizing in better ways on donors who may have good intentions. Participants seemed well aware of the ways that altruism, without critique or dialogue, can prevent us from truly “seeing” other people. Giving can actually heighten the power of the giver while diminishing the power of those who are in his or her debt, leading to further social inequity.
Principal Sands stated: I really do think it is about love. It's about loving the children as people and it's about loving them so much so that you want what's best for them. And what's best for them so often doesn't look like what your track was. I think it's more than just what you've written. I'm never going to say it's not about race because it's always about race. But I do really think I've come to believe that it's about loving other people and about loving them really well … you put other people before yourself … you put your children before yourself.
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.