‘Waiting for Superman’ to save black people: racial representation and the official antiracism of neoliberal school reform

Dumas, Michael J.

doi:10.1080/01596306.2013.822621

Cited by 35 publications

(34 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…Similarly, Buras (2011) examined the racial, economic, and spatial dynamics of charter school reform in post-Katrina New Orleans to highlight how race is pathologized in the "strategic assault on black communities by educational entrepreneurs" (p. 296). Other researchers go beyond an examination of specific policies to consider how racial representations are crafted and circulated more broadly in reform movements (Dumas, 2013;Patel, 2016). For instance, in his critical reading of the racial representations advanced in the documentary Waiting for Superman, Dumas (2013) argues that the filmmakers reify the logics of neoliberal school reform by reproducing stereotypical understandings of Black families and students as disinterested and culpable for their lack of educational advancement-making it so that only school choosers and those Black families willing to take responsibility for their actions are sympathetic.…”

Section: Race and Civil Rights Under Market-oriented Policies: A Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Complicating the rhetoric: How racial construction confounds market-based reformers’ civil rights invocations

Hernández

2016

EPAA

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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.

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Section: Race and Civil Rights Under Market-oriented Policies: A Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Complicating the rhetoric: How racial construction confounds market-based reformers’ civil rights invocations

Hernández

2016

EPAA

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“…To be sure, the hero teacher narrative is also common among teachers who have never applied to or considered TFA (Cann, 2013;Dumas, 2013). As pop culture tropes, these conceptualizations of individual (usually white) heroism in education have broad appeal and may shape the assumptions of many people, whether or not they work in education or policymaking.…”

Section: Well As In Documentaries Likementioning

confidence: 99%

Legitimizing the Dilettante: Teach For America and the Allure of Ed Cred

Clement¹

2018

BRE

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“…Yet, it explains them as the result of individual and group choices (Omi & Winant, 2015). Dumas (2013) wrote.…”

Section: Neoliberalism Race and Dis/ability And The Restructuring Omentioning

confidence: 99%

School choice or the politics of desperation? Black and Latinx parents of students with dis/abilities selecting charter schools in Chicago

Waitoller

Super

2017

EPAA

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Abstract:In this paper, we focus on the city of Chicago to examine how Black and Latinx parents of students with dis/abilities 1 engage with school choice. Using analytical tools from 1 We used the term dis/ability with a slash "to denote dis/ability not as an individual trait, but rather a social construction-the product of cultural, political, and economic practices. This understanding does not deny biological and psychological differences, but emphasizes such differences gain meaning, often with severe negative consequences (e.g., segregation), through human activities informed by norms. Dis/ability is also an

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‘Waiting for Superman’ to save black people: racial representation and the official antiracism of neoliberal school reform

Cited by 35 publications

References 3 publications

Complicating the rhetoric: How racial construction confounds market-based reformers’ civil rights invocations

Complicating the rhetoric: How racial construction confounds market-based reformers’ civil rights invocations

Legitimizing the Dilettante: Teach For America and the Allure of Ed Cred

School choice or the politics of desperation? Black and Latinx parents of students with dis/abilities selecting charter schools in Chicago

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