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Copyright by Amy E. Brown 2011 The Dissertation Committee for Amy Elizabeth Brown Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Strings Attached: Performance and Privatization in an Urban Public School Committee: Douglas E. Foley, Supervisor Edmund T. Gordon João Costa Vargas Keffrelyn Brown Nadine Bryce Strings Attached: Performance and Privatization in an Urban Public School by Amy Elizabeth Brown, B.A., M.S.T. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2011 Dedication To the Brooklyn public school students, parents and teachers who showed me how to be curious enough to pursue difficult questions, and brave enough to engage the answers. Acknowledgments This dissertation would not have been possible without ongoing support from family members, friends, and teachers, in and outside of LSA. I thank my immediate family, David, Laura and Sarah Brown, as well as my Bubby, Sarah Shumofsky for consistently lending spiritual and physical nourishment, support and encouragement through this journey. Thanks to Frank Alagna and John Meehan for providing me with an incredible Rhinebeck writer’s retreat, where I gained motivation and mental space to see this project through. Although I use pseudonyms for LSA staff, students and families and cannot name them here, they were an invaluable source of friendship and support. I thank my “chosen” family members in the United States and abroad for helping me to maintain focus, but also for reminding me to laugh through both the easy and the challenging times in my teaching and research: Samuel Adewumi, Jody Agostinelli, Alex Argo, Anouk and Hugo Bidot, Stephen Blizard, Kashaundra Bossier, Sarah and Kevin Bunch, Lourdes Cardriche, Rachel Ciporen, Clifton Colmon, Case Dorkey, Lanaya Irvin, Panch Nishan Khalsa, Elizabeth Knauer, Joel Kretschman, the León-Bejarano family, Marie-Stéphanie Lohner, Kerrie Mitchell, Emil Nassar, Christopher Orr, Claire Pelham, Teresa Peña, Dennis Seine, Sarah Scherer and Teresa von Fuchs. I thank my Texas family: Tifani Blakes, Mónica Jiménez, Linda and Mason O’Neal, Naomi Reed, Roger Reeves, and Toreono “Pax” Thomas, for helping to make Austin a physical and intellectual home away from home. Thanks to my Austin writing/ “work sesh” partner, Christopher Loperena, whose friendship, energy and scholarship were (and are) an inspiration. I thank Kevin Foster, Rene Valdez, and the Fulmore Young v COBRAs for many stimulating conversations and for the basketball and soccer games that kept my head clear as I wrote during the 2010-11 school year. Thanks to supportive colleagues in the anthropology department, who pushed my thinking further in academic and social settings, especially Mohan Ambikaipaker, Emmet Campos, Alysia Childs, Alix Chapman, Gwendolyn Ferreti, Hafeez Jamali, Nedra Lee, Elvia Mendoza, Courtney Morris, Mubbashir Rizvi, Lynn Selby, and Tane Ward. Many thanks to the anthropology department staff at the University of Texas at Austin for their patience and support: Chris Cooke, Adriana Dingman, Chris McNett, Heather Nathanson-Flowers, Billy O’Neil, Andi Shively, and Gabby Yearwood. I thank Nadine Bryce for the brilliant teaching and mentorship that inspired me to explore anthropology, and for reminding me that it is never too early to begin the thinking / writing process. Thanks to Orson Robbins-Pianka and Lane Stilson at NYU’s Stern School for needed statistical guidance. I thank my teachers at the University of Texas at Austin, including, but not limited to my dissertation committee members: Edmund T. Gordon, João Costa Vargas, and Keffrelyn Brown, for encouraging me to pursue this project, and for modeling critical and engaged scholarship. Lastly, I thank my dissertation supervisor and mentor, Douglas E. Foley, for his relentless honesty, support, encouragement, and confidence in my scholarship and in this dissertation. vi Strings Attached: Performance and Privatization in an Urban Public School Publication No._____________ Amy Elizabeth Brown, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2011 Supervisor: Douglas E. Foley This dissertation breaks new ground in qualitative educational research by looking closely at the community and curricula of a well-resourced seven-year-old public high school in a New York City borough, which I call the Legal Studies Academy (LSA). This school created its own nonprofit organization in order to accrue private donations. Its most important “funder and founder” is an elite Manhattan law firm. The relationship between the firm and the school is emblematic of the direction that many urban public schools in the United States are moving: toward increased dependence on private funds to secure the resources deemed necessary for quality twenty-first century education (Anyon 1997; Lipman 2004; 2005). My project explores how the privatization of public institutions affects definitions of social justice and good education in the United States. I document the ways that students and teachers in the LSA community both reproduce and contest school norms. My methods in this two-year study included: teacher-research, participant observation of teachers and students, extensive interviews with teachers, students and parents, conduct of a summer book club / cultural circle, and vii analysis of data from a schoolwide student questionnaire. I also examine materials the school uses to solicit donations from its funders in relation to cultural constructions of urban students and their teachers in literature and the media. I explore what students’ and teachers’ daily practices of resistance or conformity to these cultural constructions might reveal about the place of democracy, humanization, character education, and critical pedagogy in U.S. public schools that depend on private or corporate philanthropists for resources. This ethnography nuances the often polarized debate around issues of achievement in education in the context of the demands of a global economy by documenting how the daily practices of students, families and teachers reflect on a social structure of education and achievement that, in the United States, ever more unequivocally aligns one’s identity and success with marketability. On a larger scale, it inspires critical questions about the place of democracy and citizenship as juxtaposed with inequities furthered by global racial capitalism. viii Table of Contents Chapter 1: An Introduction......................................................................................1 Chapter 2: Making Ourselves Marketable: Climate Control, Image Management, and Neoliberal Public School Reform in New York City ....22 Chapter 3: The Façade Cracks: Panoptic Professionalism and its ‘Underlife’ .....77 Chapter 4: ‘Nice White Lady’: Troubling the Trope of the ‘Great White Hope’ in Urban Classrooms ..................................................................................123 Chapter 5: ‘At-Risk’ Revisited: Troubling the Trope of the Black Urban Adolescent Girl...........................................................................................177 Chapter 6: Market Identities, Activist Possibilities: Social Justice Pedagogy in a Neoliberal Era......................................................................................229 Conclusion...........................................................................................................279 Bibliography........................................................................................................294 Vita ....................................................................................................................308 ix Chapter 1: An Introduction During the second (and final) year of my teacher-research at the Legal Studies Academy1, a small, law-themed public school in a New York City borough I served on the school’s hiring committee for new English teachers. The demonstration lesson of one white interviewee, Ms. Seton2, provides a frame for my ethnographic analysis of contested notions of race, gender, social justice and upward mobility in a racially segregated urban school in the context of neoliberal capitalism. Ms. Seton interviewed for a position in the English department of our school in May 2010. She gave her lesson in a ninth-grade English class that I co-taught that year with Mr. Rodino, a white3 28-year-old originally from the southern United States. The principal, Ms. McCarren; the head of the English department, Ms. Sands; an English teacher, Ms. Elliott; and the head of the ninth-grade team, Mr. Matthews also observed the lesson. All of the adults in the room were white, with the exception of Mr. Matthews, who is African-American. All of the students in the room were black or brown. Demographically, LSA aligns with much of the literature that documents the race and class segregation prevalent in U.S. educational institutions (Bowles and Gintis 1976; Massey and Denton 1993; Wacquant 1994; Anyon 1997; Kozol 2005; Oakes 2005), and 1 In accordance with the Internal Review Board at the University of Texas at Austin, I have changed the school’s name. All names that appear in this manuscript are pseudonyms; most were self-selected by participants in order to protect anonymity. Age, gender, race/ethnicity, class, and position remain unchanged. 2 In order to limit readers’ confusion, I refer to staff members and parent/ guardians by last name, and students