Unsettling Choice: Race, Rights, and the Partitioning of Public Education

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How the Great Recession revealed a system of school choice built on crisis, precarity, and exclusion

What do universal rights to public goods like education mean when codified as individual, private choices Is the problem of school choice actually not about better choices for all but, rather, about the competition and exclusion that choice engendersguaranteeing a system of winners and losers Unsettling Choice addresses such questions through a compelling ethnography that illuminates how one path of neoliberal restructuring in the United States emerged in tandem with, and in response to, the Civil Rights movement.

Drawing on ethnographic research in one New York City school district, Unsettling Choice traces the contestations that surfaced when, in the wake of the 20072009 Great Recession, public schools navigated austerity by expanding choice-based programs. Ujju Aggarwal argues that this strategy, positioned as saving public schools, mobilized mechanisms rooted in market logics to recruit families with economic capital on their side, thereby solidifying a public sphere that increasingly resembled the privatewhere contingency was anticipated and rights for some were marked by intensified precarity for poor and working-class Black and Latinx families.

As Unsettling Choice shows, these struggles over public schoolsone of the last remaining universal public goods in the United Stateswere entrapped within neoliberal regimes that exceeded privatization and ensured exclusion even as they were couched in language of equity, diversity, care, and rights. And yet this richly detailed and engaging book also tracks an architecture of expansive rights, care, and belonging built among poor and working-class parents at a Head Start center, whose critique of choice helps us understand how we might struggle forand reimaginejustice, and a public that remains to be won.

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Author Bio

Ujju Aggarwal is assistant professor of anthropology and experiential learning at The New School. She is coeditor of Whats Race Got to Do with It How Current School Reform Policy Maintains Racial and Economic Inequality.