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Charter management organizations (CMOs) have increasingly had to respond to questions surrounding their organizations—particularly in the context of the broader social awakening around systemic injustices and evidence of their racially inequitable practices. This study investigated how CMOs counteracted criticisms and managed perception by characterizing their organizations as socially and racially conscious. It compared social media content for one CMO population during two time periods that surround the 2016 election: 2014 to 2016 and 2017 to 2019. Findings suggest that the CMOs have increasingly characterized themselves as socially conscious, but their attentiveness to issues of race and racism remained temporally and topically bounded. The article concludes with a discussion of how CMOs’ evolving discourse may influence public perception and considers how CMOs perpetuate a form of neoliberal multiculturalism that normalizes market reform under the discursive cover of a bounded articulation of equity and racial justice.

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The purpose of this article is to investigate the multiple political histories that have coalesced to produce support for or resistance to the Oakland Unified School District’s full-service community schools policy. It analyzes oral history interview data from eight stakeholders who represent the district’s major constituencies to explore the reasons why each individual, positioned differently within the larger district system, may or may not support a seemingly democratic, community-based reform. Through their voices, the article explains how different constituencies can interpret an urban district’s policies and form community-based coalitions that either further or obstruct a democratic, equity-minded reform.

Reformers today maintain the use of civil rights rhetoric when advocating for policies that address educational inequity. While continuing the legacy of earlier civil rights activists, the leaders invoking this rhetoric and the educational platforms they promote differ greatly from previous decades. Not only does this new crop of reformers differ demographically, they also tend to promote market-oriented initiatives like the expansion of charter schools and other school choice initiatives, which embody market logics alongside a sharp retrenchment from the public sphere. While scholars have revealed how these policies generate questionable outcomes for students and communities of color, few have considered the manner in which marginalized racial groups are characterized and framed amidst these reforms and cries for civil rights. In this empirical paper, I use Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to analyze how race-based constructions complicate the use of civil rights rhetoric in today’s increasingly marketized educational context. Specifically, I investigate how two educational leaders discuss race within comments about education and its connection to civil rights. The findings suggest that the leaders allude to race without explicitly naming it in the context of civil rights discourse. In addition, their civil rights invocations exist alongside subtly constructed, negative racial narratives that they articulate in the context of their statements. Given these findings, this paper ends with a discussion of these seemingly incompatible discourses. In particular, I interrogate how these racial constructions reflect the characteristics of colorblindness and how this, in turn, may undermine policies the aim to address racial inequity.