Research

Probably the most significant concern underlying my research has been the erosion of public confidence in public schools as a site of potential democratization in American society.  Public sector institutions, including schools, are increasingly threatened by a transfer of ideological commitment away from the public sphere and toward the perceived corrective efficiency of the market and the private sector.  While I am certainly not the first to recognize and document this shift, I have undertaken fairly novel research in understanding the complex process through which this shift has occurred.  My work documents complicated ideological negotiations between powerful groups in society advocating market reform in education (e.g., major foundations) and enclaves of marginalized groups (e.g., low-income urban communities of color) who have attempted to further an agenda of educational self-determination and community control of schools through the spaces they perceive within market discourses.

I have argued in two books that while the gospel of the market is in ascendancy, marginalized groups in society, and particularly marginalized urban groups, continue to express their legitimate grievances with public education as they have experienced it. The potential fusing of their legitimate grievances with market discourses that would further erode the public sector represents a profound threat to the project of utilizing the public sector to democratize access to quality education and a variety of other social goods. Using forms of critical discourse analysis, these volumes sketch the overlaps and tensions between the educational visions of marginalized students and families and those of powerful market-oriented educational forces in U.S. society that purport to be allied with them. With the analysis couched in a sober recognition of the dangers that the present attacks on the public sector represent, the two books accomplish some of the critical empirical and conceptual groundwork that is necessary in order to renew the increasingly fractious relations between those social actors—teachers, communities of color, critical researchers, and labor unions—most likely to defend and expand previous social democratic victories enshrined in the public sector.

The first book—Market Movements: African American Involvement in School Voucher Reform—was published in May 2007 in Routledge’s Critical Social Thought series and received the 2009 Critics Choice Book Award from the American Educational Studies Association.  Employing the conceptual frameworks of critical and post-structural theorists both within and outside educational disciplines, Market Movements analyzes two years of ethnographic work I conducted with urban low-income African American families participating in an otherwise conservative coalition for school vouchers in Milwaukee. Market Movements recently received an exceptionally positive and comprehensive review from Berkeley researcher Dr. Janelle Scott in the online journal Educational Review.

Another book for which I am the volume editor—Educational Markets and the Dispossessed—is in press with Teachers College Press. With chapters from some of the foremost researchers in the educational field, including Angela Valenzuela, Michael Apple, Catherine Lugg, Pauline Lipman and others (and four of my own chapters), the book examines the appeal and the possible dangers of market-based educational reform for Latinos, African Americans, and LGBTQ communities.

Beyond these two volumes, I have published 20 article-length manuscripts, seven in peer-reviewed journals and the others as chapters in edited volumes. Research themes in these manuscripts include conceptual work in constructing composite critical and post-structural approaches in educational theory and research, assessment of new directions in curriculum reform at the high school level, examination of the persistence of exclusionary power/knowledge regimes in state-level urban educational reforms, and analysis of the increasing colonization of the educational sphere by neoliberal and managerial forms.

For example, Michael Apple and I co-authored an article that appeared in a special edition of Teachers College Record marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision. In the article we situated the phenomenon of African American investment in vouchers within the legacy of African American struggles for access to quality education and educational self-determination and discussed the likely long-term deleterious effects on the educational well-being of marginalized urban populations of African American investment in neo-liberal and neoconservative educational reform movements and subject positions. This article has since been reprinted by Dr. Yong Zhao in a Chinese collection of key texts in American educational research, with the East China Normal University Press.

Another piece that I initially authored for a Greenwood volume entitled Defending Public Education: Schooling and the Rise of the Security State has recently been reprinted in a volume published with Teachers College Press.  In this chapter I trace out governance strategies of a managerial state attempting to reconsolidate its power in light of globalization. I conclude that discursive shifts in notions of parent, child, community, and neighborhood within a set of Milwaukee Public Schools policy documents signal the post-welfarist state's attempts to "steer at a distance" through the normalization of white, middle-class cultural models.

Although my own research has focused on the urban contexts of Milwaukee and Detroit, I am increasingly drawn to the work that Pauline Lipman and others are undertaking in reconceptualizing the relationship between global restructuring and urban restructuring, particularly as this connects to various avenues in urban school reform. Lipman has demonstrated in High Stakes Education and elsewhere how global neoliberal priorities are shaping urban development, typically in ways that further marginalize urban populations that are already among the most educationally and socially dispossessed. As my ethnographic and policy-oriented research in Detroit evolves, I have begun collaborating with Lipman and other urban educational scholars in various parts of the globe in laying out a new direction in critical urban education studies that emphasizes the global dimensions of issues in urban education at the same time that it develops a more egalitarian policy and research agenda. This new direction in my evolving research priorities is taking shape in the form of a new project with Lipman which we have titled “The Divergent Production of Social Inequality in Two American Metropolises: Neoliberal Education and Economic Development Policy in Chicago and Detroit,” with Lipman’s focus on Chicago and mine on Detroit.  The first paper resulting from the project was presented at the 2010 Annual Meeting of the International Sociological Association in Gothenburg, Sweden.

In this project, Lipman and I argue that little attention has been paid to the intersection of education policy and contested neoliberal urban development.  Our paper foregrounds this intersection in Detroit and Chicago, and speaks to the heterogeneity of urban inequalities within neoliberal forms of economic restructuring.  Whereas urban developers in Chicago jockey to position the city as a center of global finance on par with London and New York, Detroit, with its relatively monolithic development around the auto industry, continues to shed jobs and population with little prospect for new capital investment.  The result is an interesting contrast in forms of inequality production. Chicago's gentrification, service sector economy, and racially-inflected struggle over the right to the city differ markedly from Detroit's increasing desolation and racial homogeneity, in which urban agriculture and prairie landscapes rise against a backdrop of abandoned auto factories and skyscrapers. 

My present work analyzes Detroit’s neoliberal policy complex in relation to education, drawing on documentary analysis and interviews pertaining to the crafting of policy.  Recognizing the devastating impact of massive home foreclosures, urban flight to first tier suburbs, rampant segregation and poverty, and the closing of many public schools due to declining enrollment, I draw on ethnographic work in public schools and their neighborhoods in urban Detroit and surrounding inner ring suburbs to demonstrate the ways in which nostalgia for the city among suburban whites, rituals of place-making, and their intersection with the racial imaginary and issues of territoriality play out in broader struggles over the city and the metropolitan region’s resources, schools, cultural representations, and power.

COMPLETE CV