CHAPTER FOUR School Choice: Raced Rights and Neoliberal Restructuring UJJU AGGARWAL It’s a Tuesday afternoon in February 2012 and Tasha has arrived early for a workshop that is organized at the Head Start center where her four-year-old child attends preschool. The workshops are held every Tuesday afternoon and focus on public school access for low-income parents. This is the first time that Tasha, an African American woman in her 20s who lives in southern Harlem, has come to the weekly gathering. There’s a drip in the classroom sink that, alternating with the “bloop” of the small fish tank, provides a percussion-like background as she waits. Soon, two more women trickle in. Like Tasha, both Nicole and Edith have children who currently attend the Head Start center. Nicole is an immigrant from Ghana who had been living in temporary housing. Edith migrated from the Dominican Republic and lives down the block from the Head Start center, in a neighborhood called Manhattan Valley, just south of Harlem. Next year, their children will exit the Head Start center and enter kindergarten. In preparation, both women take time out of their schedules to regularly participate in the weekly workshops. They have been meeting together since October.1 This Tuesday, the rose-colored tiles that cover the floors take on a darker hue, as there is not much sun that makes it through the cinder block glass windows of the preschool. Outside is Aberdeen Avenue, and the thick glass provides a barrier between the small children inside and the “big kids” outside who attend the two middle schools across the street. The middle schools are housed in one building, Adam Clayton Powell (ACP), which takes up the radius of an entire block. Edon is the honors middle school program for the school district. The other school, STRIVE, serves “general” student population. As a reviewer for a popular 88 | U JJU AGGA R WA L education website put it, the “single middle school serving two different student populations … at times seems to have a split personality.” The mental health diagnosis results from the structures inside the school, which ensure that Black and Latino students are separated from their largely White and also Asian counterparts; a separation that is rationalized by standardized tests, which are said to measure academic ability.2 And so it happens, on Aberdeen Avenue as elsewhere in the United States, more than half a century after Brown v. Board of Education (1954) that these two groups of students, who see each other every day, rarely meet. They don’t eat lunch together, and more recently, after complaints from Edon students and their parents resulted in different dismissal times for the two schools, the chance for interacting out of school is even less likely. Aberdeen Avenue, once deemed a “gang” area and associated with STRIVE students, has been changing over the past years as the neighborhood has gentrified. Yet remnants of earlier years remain and there are still security cameras outside the preschool, providing a veneer of safety. And it is the precariousness, or lack of security, for the futures of their children that has brought Tasha, Nicole, Edith and the other mothers from the Head Start center together. In this case, precarity has little to do with the security cameras or surveillance. Rather, for the women of the Head Start center, precarity is grounded in the contradictions of universal rights coupled with the differentiation that racial capitalism requires and exemplified by the scene across the street at ACP. The weekly workshops that Tasha has walked into are an attempt to fortify the provisional refuge that the Head Start Center provides for its families. While they wait for others to arrive, the women settle themselves into the small wooden chairs made for the three-year-olds who occupy the room during the day and start sharing updates with one another about the school tours they have attended. The tours the women speak of are for public elementary schools and, in some ways, might be understood as an articulation of precarity, anchored by polices of school choice. The district, New York City’s Community School District 3 (CSD3), is among the most racially and economically diverse districts, yet it is also among the city’s most segregated and unequal (Kucsera & Orfield, 2014). Too, it is among the districts in New York City that provides the most choice, or options, for parents about where they might send their child to elementary school. At the time, choice policies for elementary schools in District 3 included magnet programs, dual language programs, gifted and talented programs and schools, district-wide choice schools, charter schools and general education programs. Parents shop for schools and schools shop for parents. And as part of the district’s promotion of school choice, several schools required prospective parents to attend school tours in order to obtain an application for admission. After listening to Nicole and Edith’s detailed assessments, Tasha interjects, “Wait a minute, can I ask a question? What are these meetings about?” In response, S C HOOL C HOIC E | 89 Nicole and Edith share what they do together every week. The members of the group work to help one another find good schools for their children and to make sure all schools are good and serve the community. They learn about their rights and about the schools in the district. They share their observations and frustrations and also develop ways to support one another. One tactic they developed was going to visit schools in teams. The idea behind the action being that school staff and administrators might think twice about dismissing a group as opposed to an individual; that members might build a stronger collective assessment of a school; and, that they might find greater strength in and defend one another. “Going together is better,” Nicole adds, “because the schools in the district are racism and discrimination. They do not want families who are not rich and White—they do not want our children.” As a facilitator of the group, I was encouraged by Nicole’s straightforward response and analysis. But returning to my field notes later, the same statement gave me pause: the schools are racism and discrimination. Whether intended or not, Nicole’s construction seemed to clarify the contradiction that joins public education and American exceptionalism: that each have come to symbolize democratic promise and as works in progress, while yet unfulfilled, their shortcomings can be overcome. Yet as Nicole’s comment clarifies, racism is not an aberration of public education or U.S. democracy, rather, it is their function. In response to Nicole’s explanation, Tasha notes, “So … what’s new … I mean haven’t they always done that? I mean, you know … that’s the way it’s always been …. So are they doing something different now?” While such a question might be easily dismissed as indicative of an apathetic disposition, over the course of several years of conducting outreach as a community organizer, I met many parents who asked similar questions: Why care? What’s new? Isn’t that the way it’s always been? Throughout this work, one lesson I learned was the need to understand what questions like these were actually explaining rather than asking. That is, instead of signaling indifference, they required close attention. Tasha’s question is also indicative of Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s observation that, “for African Americans there is nothing new in realizing, once again, second-class status …” (Gilmore, 2007, p. 214). Indeed, as Gilmore notes, “while repetition is part of the deadly drama of living in a racial state, the particular challenge is to work out the specific realignments of the social structure in a period of rapid change” (ibid.). Taking a cue from Gilmore, and from Tasha, in this chapter I draw on ethnographic research, federal, state and municipal policy mandates, and feminist and critical race theory to track the realignment that took place in the post–Civil Rights social structure—specifically after Brown v. Board of Education (1954)—to ensure the repetition of a confined, restricted and racialized hierarchical citizenship despite the winning of equal rights. 90 | U JJU AGGA R WA L While the significance of racism to the structured limitations of full citizenship has been increasingly recognized—especially since the election of Donald Trump to the office of U.S. President ushered in what we might consider a postpost-racial period—the continuity of racial hierarchy is often attributed to neoliberalism or White supremacy. But how do we understand these systems to work and how might this understanding impact the significance of what we fight for? I propose that thinking through choice in education—as a key principle of reform and management in education that appeared in the post-Brown period can help us develop a more capacious and clear understanding of neoliberalism, how it works and its relationship to the continued production of a racialized hierarchical citizenship in the United States. N E O L I B E R A L I S M : B E YO N D P R I VAT I Z AT I O N Neoliberalism has become the ubiquitous and simultaneously ambiguous explanation for all forms of racialized inequality and often shorthand for privatization. This is particularly true when it comes to public education. Indeed, in the context of the erasure of public schools in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, the swift move to charter-ize public schools in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, and the rapid pace of school closings accompanied by the aggressive expansion of charter schools in cities such as Chicago, Detroit and New York; education scholars and activists have drawn heavily on what Naomi Klein (2003) has termed disaster capitalism as well as David Harvey’s (year) articulation of accumulation by dispossession to analyze aggressive privatization trends.3 For many of us working for educational justice, accumulation by dispossession has provided a critical theoretical tool through which to forge timely analyses of the reinvigoration and expanded use of mechanisms such as charter schools and voucher programs to structure the dispossession and increased segregation of low-income communities of Color (see Lipman & Hursh, 2007; Saltman, 2007). However, an uneven emphasis on mechanism of privatization has led many to equate neoliberalism with privatization and a devolution of democracy. Within educational studies, many mark the Reagan administration’s 1983 report, A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform, as a key turning point toward neoliberal restructuring in education. As education scholar Michael W. Apple (2001) notes, A Nation at Risk encouraged the production of a new political rationale in education where democracy was increasingly equated with a marketplace and citizens came to be understood to be consumers. Likewise, Lesley Bartlett, Marla Frederick, Thadeus Gulbrandsen and Enrique Murillo (2002) argue that A Nation at Risk signaled a progressive shift away from equity—codified by Brown v. Board S C HOOL C HOIC E | 91 of Education (1954)—and toward an “intensified injection of market principles such as deregulation, competition, and stratification into schools” (Bartlett, Frederick, Gulbrandsen, & Murillo 2002, p. 1). The implication of such analyses then is that education post-Brown and prior to the 1980s was representative of principles of equity and social good, standing in contrast to neoliberal restructuring and privatization, understood as resulting in social harm. Yet rather than a devolution of democracy, we might consider that for some, democracy has always been constrained. Indeed, as geographer Clyde Woods (2017) reminds us, how we read harm, or disaster, depends on our point of view. By emphasizing the cyclical nature of crisis in capitalism, Woods intervenes then, in the dominant discourse that narrates neoliberalism as a turn, or shift, and instead traces the dialectical relationship between freedom struggles and the reconstitution of regional power blocs. What’s missing then, for Woods—what’s at stake—is not a question of representation but rather how a collective positionality grounded in material reality necessarily informs how we read the past in the present and thereby, how we struggle. Beginning then, from this subject-position, requires us to look to the disaster before the onslaught of privatization schemes and extend, temporally and analytically, how we understand, locate and track the trajectory of neoliberal restructuring in the United States. Further, Jamie Peck, Nik Theodore, and Neil Brenner (2009) remind us that what neoliberal restructuring actually looks like in a given place is path-dependent, meaning that already-existing political and economic structures as well as cultural contexts and histories impact what is rolled back and rolled out in different places at different times. I suggest that we might consider Jim Crow as the path that neoliberal restructuring follows in the United States. Specifically, I propose that if we identify two key characteristics of neoliberalism as including a consumer-oriented citizenship and the organization of publicly owned assets or goods according to market-based logics, then a closer look at educational policy reforms demonstrates that these characteristics are decidedly not reliant on privatization mechanisms. Rather, as I trace below, they have been deeply entrenched within the realm of the public long before the 1980s and A Nation at Risk. Extending this timeline can help us understand, more generally, how neoliberal restructuring in the United States emerged in tandem with—and in response to—the winning of Civil Rights. Far from a defense of privatization, in this chapter I draw on interventions made by scholars including Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Leela Fernandes, each of whom has illuminated the urgency to shift from a singular focus on privatization to a deeper examination of the public in order to identify, with greater precision, the continuities and distinctions of how inequality is produced and how state power is exercised (Gilmore, 2007; Fernandes, 2018). If we do not attend to this specificity, Fernandes (2018) notes, we succumb to, and participate in, the totalizing effect 92 | U JJU AGGA R WA L that is the very goal of neoliberal policies and ideologies—making it so that the “term itself becomes a symptom of its own conditions” (p. 7). The contradictions that animate the particular context of CSD3 bring this specificity into sharp relief. While I examine these contradictions in greater detail elsewhere (Aggarwal 2018; Aggarwal, Mayorga, & Nevel, 2012), here, it is important to note that the minority power bloc of almost entirely White, middle- and upper-middle-income parents had pushed back against the privatization of education via charter schools, while also working to protect the segregated structures, qualified by choice-based policies, within the public schools. At the same time, the women at the Head Start center had, after a number of years of experience with charter schools, grown their collective analysis and had determined that they would reject the marketing flyers that they received regularly from charter corporations and explicitly seek out access to public schools for their children. The aftermath of the financial crisis of 2007/2008 brought a migration of an increasing number of middle- and upper-middle-income families to public schools. Yet given CSD3’s significant public housing stock, poor people remained, despite waves of gentrification that had moved through the area. In this context then, neighbors who otherwise rarely encountered one another made competing claims to the shared resource of public schools.4 My ethnographic research examines this conjuncture, where precarity was not mediated by privatization, but rather confirmed within the public and articulated through the policy and ideology of choice.5 I trouble assumed binaries between public and private, consumer and citizen and the market and the state. In doing so, I ask how this troubling might impact how we “see” neoliberalism; how we imagine our political horizons as they relate to rights, citizenship, publics infrastructures and the unfinished project of the long Civil Rights movement and how we more clearly identify the terrain of struggle and what we fight for. Gaining this clarity is more important than ever, as exemplified by the passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, which includes the provision of an “education savings account,” or what we might consider a tax shelter for the wealthy. Essentially, the provision provides an option for individuals to put aside a pre-tax allocation of up to $10,000, from the moment that a fetus is in utero, which can be used toward private school tuition. Combined with other stipulations in the act, including the imposition of a limitation of the state and local income, sales and property taxes (SALT deduction), the education savings account demonstrates well the agility of neoliberalism as capitalism. Forged in dialectical relationship with growing social movements that have been working to reclaim public education, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 significantly shifts fights that target school closures, charter schools or voucher program and promises instead the slow erosion of the public through mechanisms that are rendered largely invisible. South African poet Keorapetse Kgositsile wrote that “[w]hen the clouds clear, we shall S C HOOL C HOIC E | 93 know the colour of the sky” (as cited in Kelley, 2002, p. 11). Part of the work, then, in knowing the color of the sky, lies in rendering visible the structures of dispossession. C H O I C E : A G E N E A LO G I C A L A P P R O AC H It is important that choice also has, at different historical moments, represented a progressive demand that signified desegregation and educational justice. Indeed, as Michael Fabricant and Michelle Fine, James Forman Jr., Jack Doughtery, Russell Rickford as well as others have shown, more than a mechanism of oppression, the concept of choice has been a contested terrain through which decidedly different historical blocs have fought out their particular visions of freedom (Dougherty, 2004; Fabricant & Fine, 2012; Forman, 2005; Rickford, 2016). My project here, however, is to provide a critical genealogy of choice that can help in the project of illuminating how structures of dispossession work. A genealogical approach is crucial when it comes to questions of education, choice rights and race. Asking us to think critically about the pedagogical investment in Brown v. Board of Education, Gloria Ladson-Billings (2004) asserts that the reification of Brown within the United States has been critical to the production of a national narrative of racial inclusion and progress. Understood as such, Brown is indicative of the founding stories that Nikhil Pal Singh (2005) notes, American exceptionalism relies upon stories that centralize the overcoming of persecution through democratic tolerance and universalism achieved by racial and ethnic inclusion. Undergirded by stories like Brown, which depict overcoming and racial transcendence, education is one of the major arteries that have, in the second half of the twentieth century, consistently pumped new life into narrative. Indeed, as critical race theorist Derrick Bell (2004) reminds us, “Brown … served to reinforce the fiction that, by the decision’s rejection of racial barriers posed by segregation, the path of progress would be clear. Everyone can and should make it through their individual ability and effort” (p. 7). In popular renderings then, public education becomes reified as the node through which the civil rights movement articulated its vision and demands for justice, even as the radical critique offered by Black freedom struggles is simultaneously obfuscated (Alonso, Anderson, Su, & Theoharis, 2009). The burden of freedom then rests upon the individual family: the capacities of care, the types of choices made by parents and the ability of parents and students to dream big and aim high, to make the fullest potential out of the equal rights afforded to everyone. And so it happens, that at present, even as students at schools like ACP and Edon continue to be separated based on race and income, they read the official narrative of the civil rights movement as told through U.S. history books—one 94 | U JJU AGGA R WA L which explains that theirs is not a structured violence, but simply the residue of histories that have already been made and rights that have already been won. To dislodge this narrative, in what follows, building upon the work of critical race theorists including Derrick Bell (2004), Cheryl Harris (1993) and Gloria Ladson-Billings (2004) as well as historians including Mathew Lassiter and Joseph Crespino (2009) and Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard (2003) who have challenged what they term the de facto myth, I trace a critical genealogy of choice that begins with Brown II (1955) to illuminate the co-constitutive relationship between liberal freedom, rights, capitalism and the continued production of a racialized hierarchical citizenship.6 As Lisa Lowe (2015) explains “[b]y genealogy I mean that my analysis does not accept given categories and concepts as fixed or constant, but rather, takes as its work the inquiry into how those categories became established as given and with what effects. Genealogical method questions the apparent closure of our understanding of historical progress and attempts to contribute to what Michel Foucault has discussed as a historical ontology of ourselves, or a history of the present” (p. 3). Genealogy then helps us move away from oversimplified crude historical comparison of, for example, what rights exist or not; and instead, understand as Wendy Brown (1995) reminds us, what rights do—or how their structuring within the liberal capitalist state works to depoliticize and obscure economic and political power (p. 125). Friedman’s Third Alternative and a Genealogy of Choice Post-Brown As is well known, in 1954 the U.S. Supreme Court determined that separate but equal schools could never be equal. Yet the question still remained as to how and when desegregation would be carried out. As such, the Court’s decision signaled the possibility of two paths: one that could have required the state to redistribute resources; another that allowed for freedom to be reconciled otherwise. This second path, as I chart below, allowed for a redistribution of rights that were decidedly not tied to resources but rather guided by market logics. Central among these logics is the principle of choice. In 1955, in Brown v. Board of Education II (1955), when the Supreme Court failed to provide any clear guidance about how desegregation should take place, states and municipalities were granted the right to develop their own implementation plans at their own pace and with all deliberate speed. As has been widely critiqued, “deliberate” was subjective and determined at the discretion of those who already had political and economic power. The same year as Brown II, Milton Friedman (1955) put forth a vision for the restructuring of public education.Central to his plan of how schools should be organized was his argument that choice, rights and freedom are inextricably linked. The timing of Friedman’s prescription for public education was not S C HOOL C HOIC E | 95 by chance. Rather, Friedman framed his plan as a response to Brown, which, he argued, presented the problem of reconciling desegregation with a liberal version of freedom understood as individual liberties. If state-sanctioned segregation was morally wrong, was not, he queried, state-enforced desegregation equally problematic, as it impeded an individual’s right to choose the most appropriate means of educating their child?7 Friedman suggested that this conundrum could be fixed through the principle of choice, or rights structured as flexible. This fix, he argued, could preserve the democratic process by ensuring that parents who were unhappy with a particular school would have the freedom to withdraw their child and reinvest in a range of options—private, public, religious or even segregated—that better suited their needs. To be sure, Friedman’s rationale was simple: if schools were forced to compete for parents-as-consumers, satisfaction would be guaranteed, not only through the quality of education provided, but also through the types of schools that a family could select. Universal rights structured as flexible, individual private choices would provide what Friedman called a “third alternative” to state-enforced desegregation or segregation. As we will see, Friedman’s framework of choice as a third alternative has animated a range of policy reforms in the post-Brown era that have relied on the coupling of the freedom to choose and the right to exclude. Harris (1993) reminds us that the right to exclude is critical to the workings of what she terms, [W]hiteness as property: the ways that parallel yet distinct histories of U.S. slavery and genocide are continually inscribed into “racially contingent forms of property and rights,” that are consistently animated by the right to exclude (p. 1714). Indeed, as she notes, the right to exclude is the common nucleus for both Whiteness and private property as legal categories. Significant to how [W]hiteness as property works, Harris explains, is its persistence over time, its ability to maintain this nucleus as characteristic and function, even as definitions of race and property changed. That is, while Brown overturned Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which defined Whiteness as defendable property through the disassociation—or exclusion—of Blackness, in failing to redistribute resources, Brown ratified a new iteration of [W]hiteness as property. This new version was grounded not in the right to disassociate per se, but in the right to protect institutionalized and historically accumulated assets tied to status and privilege, thus sanctioning a status quo of “substantive disadvantage … as an accepted and acceptable baseline” grounded in—yet masking—racial domination and exclusion (Harris, 1993, p. 1753). Understood as such, [W]hiteness as property helps us locate how the structuring of a racialized hierarchical citizenship has worked through, rather than against, liberal rights and conceptions of freedom that simultaneously fortify and obscure the character of how domination and oppression work (Brown, 1995, p. 6; see also Vaught, 2011; Buras, 2011). 96 | U JJU AGGA R WA L Read through Friedman and Harris, Brown II can be understood as a moment of realignment that Gilmore references above, one that emerged in dialectical relationship to Black freedom struggles. Thus, while Brown signaled a different structure of citizenship than Jim Crow, as the genealogy of choice policies that I provide below demonstrates, the same ends were achieved through the joining of rights, choice and exclusion. What becomes clear, then, is that it is not so much about the question of the market vs. the state, or even the state as administrator that secures privatization. Rather, the realignment that took shape among the state, the market and rights in the post–civil rights period, animated by choice, entrenched key principles of neoliberalism (the cultivation of a consumer-oriented citizenship and the organization of publicly owned assets or goods according to market-based logics) within the realm of the public. Choice, Raced-Rights and the State in the Post-Brown Era In the years following Brown II, several states (including Arkansas, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia) developed what came to be known as Freedom of Choice plans. The term “segregation academies” (Champagne, 1973; Ladson-Billings, 2004; Walder & Cleveland, 1971) has aptly been used to describe the development of these plans that ensured the continued race-based segregation of students through a variety of means and mechanisms that ranged from local student assignment plans to the development of publicly funded all-White schools to the development of voucher systems. Yet diverse as their tactics were, the unifying element of Freedom of Choice plans was that they were enlivened by Friedman’s vision of choice as a third alternative supported by the state and were grounded in the right to exclude. State support included monetary funds, in-kind donations and legal and policy support (see Alexander & Alexander, 2004; Gordon, 1994; Turner, 2004). As Helen Hershkoff and Adam S. Cohen (1992) observe, in the case of Choctaw County, Alabama, where private school enrollment rose from 25,000 to 535,000 within just six years (1966–1972), “many governmental entities throughout the South provided buildings, donated educational supplies …. The movement’s rhetorical commitment was to ‘individual freedom in choosing public or private schooling’” (Hershkoff & Cohen, 1992, p. 3). In the well-known case of Prince Edward County, Virginia, a series of state laws cut off funds to the local school board, thus forcing all public schools to close for five years between 1959 and 1964. The schools that developed in Prince Edward County in the wake of these closings were voucher supported and all White. Here, as elsewhere, the consequences of segregation academies extended beyond that of education. Indeed, as Black families were forced to determine if and how their children would go to school, many children went without schooling, S C HOOL C HOIC E | 97 many siblings were separated from one another, some children were sent to live with relatives in nearby counties or far away, and some children attended separate schools that their families and others tried to construct out of necessity. As Kara Miles Turner (2004) documents, the impact on Black children of this era—who have come to be termed the “lost generation”— ranged in scale and scope and included intergenerational social, emotional and physical health. It took nearly 10 years for the Supreme Court to determine that these voucher-driven segregation academies were unconstitutional. Yet even after the Court’s findings in Griffin v. County School Board (1964), which declared, “there has been entirely too much deliberation and not enough speed in enforcing the constitutional rights which we held in Brown v. Board of Education,” various state and municipal governments continued to use or reconstitute choice-based plans to preserve segregated education through separate schools (quoted in Turner, 2004, p. 1689). As Michael W. Fuquay documents, the growth of segregation academies, or of the “private school movement” as he terms it, was a tactical shift in the longer strategy to block integration. In tracking the growth of segregation academies in Mississippi from 1964 to 1971, Fuquay (2002) observes that they were built using public funds, thus illustrating that “the private nature of Mississippi’s desegregation academies was largely a semantic subterfuge, designed to evade the requirements of law without sacrificing the benefits of public support” (p. 160). As we will see, those dedicated to maintaining enclosure understood the line between private and public to be a murky one, and navigated what is often considered a divide, seamlessly to advance their common purpose (see also, Scott & Quinn, 2014). In the case of New Kent, Virginia, for example, the county devised a plan that included two public schools: one White and one Black. The infrastructure of the all-White schools was thus maintained by using tactics that included various forms of persuasion, including the proactive school-based counseling-out of Black students from choosing White schools (Gordon, 1994). Like Friedman’s defense of individual liberties, the school board of New Kent claimed it could not be held culpable for the fact that individual choices resulted in separate schools. The local school board defended the plan and contended that it had fulfilled its obligation mandated by Brown II by adopting a plan in which every student, regardless of race, could “freely choose the school he or she would attend” (Alexander & Alexander, 2004, p. 1139). When the case of Green v. County School Board of New Kent County was brought before the Supreme Court in 1968, the Court determined that the so-called neutrality of choice that guided Freedom of Choice plans was no longer satisfactory, and that segregated schools must be destroyed, “root and branch.” In the end, while the Court did not prohibit Freedom of Choice plans, it did mandate that other methods of desegregation—which were both speedier and more effective—should be first considered and devised. Those who had been organizing latched on to the openings that Green presented, demonstrated by a 98 | U JJU AGGA R WA L rapid increase in the percentage Black students attending desegregated schools in the South. Green was followed by another significant desegregation win three years later, with Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education (1971). Building on Green as well as the broader momentum of Black freedom struggles, Swann further chipped away the freedom to exclude that had ensured the continued production of [W]hiteness as property. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg district of North Carolina had essentially been operating Freedom of Choice plans until 1968 when, in response to challenges in court brought by the NAACP, the school board developed a geography-based plan, which presented a limited approach to desegregation. Another plan, dubbed the “Finger plan,” giving credit to its architect, John Finger, called for a metropolitan-wide two-way busing plan as a method to achieve desegregation. The school board failed to implement the Finger Plan and the case eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court. In a surprising opinion, Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, noted that busing could be a “remedial technique” to achieve desegregation. Demonstrating however Woods’ (2017) emphasis on the need to understand the dialectic struggle between power blocs, four months after Swann, in response to growing pressure from Nixon (who supported Freedom of Choice plans and strongly opposed integration, had introduced a moratorium on busing), increased press attention and growing White resistance to desegregation, Chief Justice Burger tried to backpedal on his Swann opinion. In the Winston-Salem (Winston-Salem County Board v. Scott, 1971) stay application, Burger issued a more conservative read on Swann, arguing “every school need not reflect the racial composition of the system as a whole. And he promised personally to block any court requiring daily bus travel approaching three hours, if closer school facilities were available” (Orfield, 2015; Wilkinson, 1979, p. 149). Burger then mailed his opinion to federal judges throughout the country (Orfield, 2015).8 Further, as Derrick Bell Jr. (2004) cautions, the actual impact of Green and Swann must be assessed carefully and beyond the Court, as the appearance of dual separate school systems was altered but not eliminated and new measures—such as dual systems within schools—were created. If the post-Brown realignment in the South characterized the development of new tactics to preserve the structures of Jim Crow, the North was also characterized by its own continuity of racialized exclusion. Throughout northern cities, Black and Latino communities had been working to dismantle what they understood to be state-engineered—decidedly not de facto—segregation.9 In New York City, for example, the movement for desegregated schools had been steadily mounting and in 1958, nine Black mothers were charged with illegally keeping their children home from school (Back, 2003; de Forest, 2008; Jeffries & Jones, 2012). The group of women, who later became known as the Harlem Nine, refused to send their children to public schools that they believed would harm them. Ironically perhaps, S C HOOL C HOIC E | 99 the mothers’ campaign was called Freedom of Choice for Junior High Schools and resulted in the first court decision that recognized the structured character of de facto segregation (Back, 2003). The court found the mothers not guilty; moreover, Judge Justine Polier, in her opinion, condemned the New York City Board of Education, noting that four years after Brown, “the Board of Education of the City of New York has done substantially nothing to rectify a situation it should never have allowed to develop, for which it is legally responsible, and with which it has had ample time to come to grips,” and “the Board of Education of the City of New York can no more disclaim responsibility for what has occurred in this matter than the State of South Carolina could avoid responsibility for a ‘Jim Crow’ State Democratic Party which the State did everything possible to render ‘private’ in character and operation” (Matter of Skipwith, 1958). The struggle waged by the women of the Harlem Nine became a precursor for the movement for community control of schools, a movement that less than 10 years later was able to galvanize working-class parents of Color across New York City to keep their children home from school and, at the same time, create and implement freedom schools that modeled what education could be. Likewise, Black mothers in Boston, propelled by similar conditions, engaged in a related fight. Groundwork laid by Ruth Balson and Ellen Jackson as well as the Black Student Union was critical to the 1974 U.S. District Court ruling that the structures of segregation in Boston’s public schools needed to be undone (Theoharis, 2003; Delmont, 2016). The decision, which called for a mandatory desegregation plan, was met with massive resistance and violence as White communities defended their right to exclude. The intense battles of these years are still remembered and referenced in contemporary discussions about desegregation; and the outcomes of these joined struggles—in New York City and Boston—waged in the post-Brown North are critical to understanding the trajectory of national education reform policies in the years that followed. The same year as Judge W. Arthur Garrity issued an order requiring that Boston’s public schools desegregate, the Midwest city of Detroit also caught the nation’s attention in what would come to be one of the most significant court cases after Brown. Building on the victories from Green, Swann and Keyes v. School District No. 1 (1973), the NAACP sued Michigan Governor William Milliken for the development and implementation policies that maintained and further entrenched school and housing segregation, asserting the need to desegregate schools across district and county lines by consolidating the districts into one and desegregating schools therein. The case, however, would bring to a halt to the momentum gained in desegregation wins in previous years. In 1974, the Supreme Court determined that municipal governments could not be required to desegregate across district lines unless segregation was explicitly outlined as an intentional and affirmative policy. As Laura Pulido (2000) reminds us, needing to demonstrate intentionality 100 | U JJU AGGA R WA L is a key strategy to the maintenance and reproduction of the systems of racism and White privilege. And so it happened that Milliken v. Bradley (1974) established that plans such as those developed in Detroit to address inequities among school districts—were found to be wholly impermissible unless the explicit intent to segregate could be demonstrated. Indeed, as Harris observes, the Court’s decision in Milliken interprets the state and the market to be neutral and innocent. In doing so, the Court then ratified the right to protect historically accumulated assets tied to institutionalized status and privilege—thereby ensuring the continued protection and production of [W]hiteness as property—predicated upon the right to exclude, articulated as the freedom, or right, to choose (Harris, 1993). Subsequent to Milliken v. Bradley (1974), in the wake of violence that erupted from the Boston desegregation plan and in response to increased White flight from urban areas, the creation of the Federal Magnet Program provided yet another iteration of choice-based policies. Magnet schools were first developed in the 1960s and 1970s but were widely implemented throughout the 1980s and 1990s (Beal & Hendry, 2012). The goals of magnet schools/programs are twofold: (1) to magnetize or make attractive—through the development of curriculum, resources and learning themes—schools that might otherwise not be chosen; and (2) thereby encourage students and their families to choose a school that lies outside of their neighborhood (West, 1994). Both goals are supposed to result in desegregation outcomes, or more specifically, the reduction of racial isolation.10 As such, magnet schools rely on a market-driven framework of choice, one that places the onus for desegregation on families (and the choices they make) rather than on school districts or municipal governments. More specifically, magnet schools have consistently been targeted for implementation in urban areas where municipal governments have identified the need to make public schools more attractive to White parents and as a way to circumvent mandatory student assignment plans (Carl, 1994). As has been widely documented, magnet schools and programs have been limited in their stated goals of reducing racial isolation, and some magnet schools and programs have actually exacerbated segregation (Beal & Hendry, 2012; Carl, 1994; West, 1994). In 1990 another experiment in school choice—the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program—which revisited the mechanism of voucher programs, gained national attention. The program had strong state-based support from Governor Tommy Thompson (who also became widely known in the 1990s for his welfare-to-work, otherwise known as workfare program); federal support (from the George H. W. Bush administration); and private backing (from the Bradley and Heritage Foundations, two conservative policy organizations that were, at the time, entrenched in lobbying for voucher programs nationally). Further, as Jack Dougherty (2004) as well as Thomas Pedroni (2007) document, the voucher program was also undergirded by an unlikely alliance between these primarily White S C HOOL C HOIC E | 101 and conservative forces and some sectors of the Black community who called for the creation of a separate Black school district (a call that grew out of an assessment that integrated education had not and would not advance the needs and well-being of Black families). When it began, the voucher program in Milwaukee provided low-income students with a $2,446 voucher that was redeemable as full tuition at a state-approved private school. Five years later, by 1995, Republicans had gained control of the Wisconsin state legislature and raised the voucher amount to $4,600 while also expanding the range of schools included in the program (which would come to include religious schools). As the voucher program continued to expand (by 2003 it served over 11,000 children), the majority of participants in the program were almost exclusively Black and Latino, thus raising critiques that the voucher program worked to increase segregation (Alexander & Alexander, 2004). Moreover, as Walter C. Farrell Jr. and Jackolyn E. Mathews (2006) note, in addition to increasing segregation, voucher participants were often subjected to inferior schools with fewer resources and poorer facilities and made “no consistently significant improvement in academic achievement” (p. 527). In 2002, proponents of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) appropriated what had been a demand for greater accountability made by low-income communities of Color. Like those who had advocated for the voucher movement in Milwaukee years before, NCLB advocates made particular reference to the ways that public education has historically abandoned low-income communities of Color. In particular, the Bush administration promised that NCLB—with provisions that allowed for local governments to penalize schools, teachers, parents and students for poor academic outcomes—would close the achievement gap for low-income students and students of Color by increasing accountability and by increasing opportunity and choice. A common sound bite of the Bush administration was that NCLB would bring an end to the soft bigotry of low expectations (Bush, 2000) by requiring that the data used to determine student achievement be disaggregated. Indeed, part of the Bush administration’s brilliance was in marketing NCLB as a policy that would finally account for the ways that race did matter.11 Vouchers were initially written into NCLB but were later removed as the legislation worked its way through various committees. The concept of choice, however, remained in the form of a transfer program: students at schools that failed to demonstrate Adequate Yearly Progress (through the measure of mandatory high-stakes tests) for two consecutive years were empowered to choose to transfer to a better performing public school in their district.12 Yet as Monty Neill (2003) and Roslyn Arlin Mickelson and Stephanie Southworth (2005) note, given the infrastructure of many school systems, the transfer option simply did not work. In most cases the seats were not available to transfer to; and so, as the long history prior to NCLB demonstrates, the right to choose 102 | U JJU AGGA R WA L did not work for poor families. Further, the so-called accountability provisions of NCLB were not tied to requirements for the state to re-invest in “failing” public schools. Rather, the organized abandonment (Gilmore, 2008) that had characterized and produced such schools became only further entrenched. The right to choose under NCLB, then, was merely a hollowed-out statutory right for most. Those with political and economic power already benefited from the right to choose; those to whom Bush claimed this right was extended experienced little change in accessing a more equitable education for their child. In New York City, for example, findings indicate that the combination of a lack of infrastructure and confusing bureaucracy made the transfer provision ineffective at best, while in many cases it actually exacerbated problems. According to a 2008 New York Daily News article, of the 181,000 students eligible to transfer to better schools, less than 2% did (Melago, 2008). And so, while NCLB did not bring greater choice (or resources) to communities who, since Brown, have continued to be historically underserved by public education, the legislation did solidify a new freedom: one for markets of private enterprise within the public. That is, NCLB extended the structures through which state monies were funneled to private contractors in order to further entrench the principle of market competition proposed by Friedman (1955). Less than a decade later, in 2009, the principle of market competition was further consolidated with President Obama’s Race to the Top Fund (otherwise known as the “education stimulus”). Part of the Obama administration’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, Race to the Top promised $4.35 billion in federal funding for education (Aggarwal & Mayorga, 2016). However, there was a catch: funds were not evenly distributed among the states or school districts. Instead, Race to the Top required that states compete against one another. In order to be eligible to compete for funds, states were required to meet a number of guidelines that included amending policies that limited the number of charter schools that could exist at a given time. Moreover, states were required to remove policy provisions that prohibited teachers’ salaries from being determined by student performance on high-stakes tests. As such, Race to the Top can be understood as akin to the structural adjustment programs associated with the global south, which require states to restructure public goods and services as conditions in order to receive much-needed loans. And like structural adjustment programs carried out elsewhere, the policies changes required by Race to the Top have resulted in intensified processes of disinvestment, state abandonment and inequality. As we have seen, while Brown I indicated the end of state-enforced segregation, how universal rights came to be structured as individual private choices ensured that the same ends, built into the realm of the public, would be achieved through different means: through choice. And despite the fact that over 60 years S C HOOL C HOIC E | 103 of reforms have failed to undo separate and unequal education, the logic of choice as the panacea to inequality and perquisite of freedom persists. On one hand, as one CSD3 elected official who I interviewed put it, you can’t have freedom without choice, it’s as “American as apple pie.” Yet joined to this particular qualifier of liberal freedom is what could be argued to be just as American: the right to exclude, the defining logic of [W]hiteness as property. Friedman understood this twinned character of choice as it operates within capitalism well and noted as well the need to police the system, in order to preserve “conditions favorable to competition” (Friedman, 1951). In 2017, Betsy DeVos was confirmed by the U.S. Senate as the 11th Secretary of Education of the United States. The confirmation of DeVos, a staunch advocate of choice, privatization and states’ rights, has ushered in a different moment: one in which the illusion of choice—like the idea of post-racialism—has been largely turned on its head. Given President Trump’s overt support of White supremacy, as well as the growth and development of movements for racial justice movements that have propelled a growing popular critique of segregated schools, there is an increasing recognition of the relationship among choice, segregation and inequality. Our current conjuncture presents what we might understand as yet another moment of realignment. And critical to how this realignment plays out is our capacity to move beyond narrow assessments. As Greenberg and Schneider (1994) explain, “[t]he answers you get depend on the questions you ask. Sometimes we become so absorbed responding to a problem that we forget to ask what problem we are trying to solve” (p. 179). In other words, we need to know the color of the sky. When it comes to growing critiques of choice, the focus tend to be on impact rather than the design of choice. As such, the subjunctive is often used to explain the shortcomings of choice, meaning that it is reasoned that choice could, should or would work if more parents had greater knowledge, time or connections. Another line of reasoning draws attention to the ways that school selection processes are informed by social capital or individual bias. The take away from these analyses leads us to accounts that emphasize an uneven access to information, a lack of savvy-ness or know-how among poor and working class parents, a deficit of empowerment (or entitlement depending on who you ask), a difference in aspirations as well as understandings of what makes a good school, or for others still, the need or desire to stay close to home. Throughout the course of my fieldwork, the district officials, policy experts and, often, middle and upper middle class parents that I interviewed affirmed this tacit belief in the democratic potential of choice. For example, Judy, a White woman who has worked for CSD3 for over two decades, in reflecting on segregation in the district, put it quite succinctly: 104 | U JJU AGGA R WA L You just have to do your homework, and there’s a certain population who will do their homework, and others who won’t …. The higher educated a family is and the more communicative they are, then they’re going to understand what their choices are …. The folks who take advantage of the choice are folks that have higher communication skills, are more gregarious, are out on the playground, are not reluctant to approach someone and talk or overhear a conversation and get into the conversation, whether that is socio-economic or not, I don’t know, but I do think that it’s a little bit of personality involved. As Judy lays out, the problem is one of culture, not of structure or design. The predicament of choice, however, extends well beyond individual or implicit bias or attitudes. Tasha, Nicole, Edith and the other mothers from the Head Start center that I accompanied throughout my research held a diversity of personal dispositions (from what might be characterized as being outspoken to milder mannered), were well informed, studied the schools, knew their rights, advocated for one another and were more than willing to travel. Yet this made little impact on the types of schools their children would attend. Edna, who has worked at the Head Start center for over 30 years explained the conundrum of choice that she had long witnessed, “our parents have false choices.” If, as Wendy Brown (2015) notes, neoliberalism reframes questions of equality as the “right to compete in a world where there are always winners and losers” (p. 38), then rather than reforming choice—or making it so that more people can compete, or that the grounds of competition are a bit more “fair”—it is urgent to instead center how choice, like capitalism, is always already tied to the process of race-making. As Malcolm X (as cited in Mason, 2004) put it quite clearly, “you can’t have capitalism without racism,” (p. 24) the point then, is not to make racism—or capitalism—more fair, but rather, to uproot it. CO N C LU S I O N This chapter began with a vignette from a Head Start center where a group of Black and Latina mothers of limited economic means were trying to navigate access for their soon-to-be five-year-old children within one of the most diverse, yet segregated and unequal, district in the nation’s largest school system. The women are from different places but, by virtue of the positions of race and class that they occupy in the United States, find themselves in the same predicament, one that Tasha cautions is far from new. Rather, the constraints that they confront are indicative of a realignment, as Gilmore reminds us, in the social structure. As we have seen, the post-Brown structuring of universal rights as individual private choices secured this realignment, which, predicated on the right to exclude, elided the redistribution of resources and ensured the continuity of a hierarchical citizenship, organized through race. Our examination has demonstrated that as a S C HOOL C HOIC E | 105 result of this elision, the organization of equal rights in the post-Brown period preserves, protects and consistently produces [W]hiteness as property while obscuring the organization of political and economic power required to do so. Furthermore, by embedding the market in the realm of the public, the post-Brown realignment ensured the cultivation of a consumer-based citizenship and an infrastructure of the public that not only is characterized by, but also produces the social separateness that Jodi Melamed (2015) has noted, is crucial to the functioning of racial capitalism. To return to Nicole’s description: the schools are racism and discrimination. Karl Marx (1978) writes that private property is, in essence, the right to self-interest and as such, “leads every man to see in other men, not the realization, but rather the limitation of his own liberty” (p. 42). Drawing on this insight from Marx and from Gilmore’s (2012) theorization of partition, Jodi Melamed (2015) advises that we might understand racial capitalism as systemic violence on collective life through the “production of social separateness—the disjoining or deactivating of relations between human beings (and humans and nature)—needed for capitalist expropriation to work.” (p. 78; Aggarwal, 2018). As we have traced, the structuring of universal rights as individual private choices in the post-Brown period ensured the market’s entrenchment in the realm of the public, requiring the cultivation of a consumer-oriented citizenship predicated on exclusion, resulting in a public that is always already characterized by the production of social separateness resulting in, as Marx warned, each of us coming to see in our fellow citizen only the limits to our own freedom. Yet, as Bonnie Honig (2017) reminds us, while public things such as education have historically worked as sites of racialized dispossession, they also present a terrain of struggle over what types of social relations, rights and forms of belonging will be made through these “holding environments,” (p. 24) as she terms them. Where do we look to as we imagine and fight for another public? We might begin by looking to the provisional and immanent architectures forged within and from organized abandonment (Gilmore, 2008). Indeed, every day Tasha, Nicole and Edith and the others who have joined them work to secure what is not guaranteed and often not received: a decent public education for their children. Informing their labors is a particular knowing that is inculcated as a result of inhabiting the cracks of a liberalism’s contradictory universalism, one that invokes a clear awareness of the historical continuity, of a future that is not secured, filled with hope and caution and circumscribed love and the daily work of care.13 This situated knowledge is confirmed by the findings of a study from the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation: that premature death is significantly determined by access to education, which is stratified by race and class (Tavernise, 2012). In such a formulation, unequal and segregated education animates the continued production of a 106 | U JJU AGGA R WA L differentially valued life—or what Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2007) defines as racism, “the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death” (p. 247). While the women at the Head Start do not share a common or formal politics per se, as excluded political subjects they fight from the margins for their children. And here, context makes a difference. Almost every teacher at the Head Start center is a former parent of the program, so many of the women at the center have raised their children together. As co-workers and neighbors, they are also part of one another’s lives. They have been co-madres, confidants, friends and aunties to each other’s children. They take up collections for one another when family members pass away and have supported one another in fighting off evictions and the Administration of Children’s Services, or the prospect of the state taking their children. They also gather to celebrate their children’s graduations, weddings and journeys into parenthood. Indeed, like the extended kin systems of exchange and care that Carol Stack (1975) documents, the community at the Head Start center operates much like an extended family: there are differences that arise among its members (some of these differences are short lasting while others are more entrenched), and some members get along with each other more than others do; not many leave, and there is a sense of shared responsibility for and toward one another. And it is from this place—qualified by income, geography and exclusion— where children are understood to represent more than one family’s future, and more than one or two parents’ responsibility, that the consumer citizenship and market logics that neoliberalism relies upon, fails. Here, motherhood becomes a political foundation for collective action rather than a descriptive category of individual women’s experiences, requiring us to extend, rather than contract, our political horizon (Collins, 2000; Gilmore, 2007). And it is in this place, where, the structure of relations and recognition stretches both temporally and spatially and yet is grounded in the quotidian, where we might find an immanent architecture of rights and belonging for a different kind of public: one that gestures the contemporary echoes of the Black radical tradition and presents the possibility of reaching beyond the repetition of confined citizenship, where in each other we might be able to recognize the possibilities, rather than limits, to freedom. NOTES 1. I have provided pseudonyms for all schools, people and references (such as street names). 2. I have used Latino (instead of Latinx) in this piece in an effort to have greater correspondence to the terms used by the community in which I conducted research, where community members I encountered and engaged refer to themselves as Black, Hispanic, Spanish, or Latino. S C HOOL C HOIC E | 107 3. Harvey (2003) describes accumulation by dispossession as the process by which “assets held by the state or in common were released into the market where over accumulating capital could invest in them, upgrade them, and speculate in them. New terrains for profitable activity were opened up… once in motion, however, this movement created incredible pressures to find more and more arenas, either at home or abroad, where privatization might be achieved” (Harvey, 2003, p. 158). 4. Further, in CSD3, despite a growing presence of charter schools, the majority of schools were traditional public schools (this also reflects broader trends: for example, in 2014, charter schools represented only 6% of schools nationally; 4% of schools in New York State and in New York City 1%). 5. As I explore in other work, choice in the public yielded the same experiences as what is often characterized as a problem of privatization: a competitive and opaque landscape of admissions; uneven access and a limited ability to assert rights or entitlement to services; an increasingly hegemonic understanding of the public as a marketplace; and intensified branding and marketing of schools (Aggarwal, 2018). 6. In this genealogy, I do not attempt to provide a history of desegregation cases prior to or after Brown II. Rather, I focus on illuminating a particular history of how choice was mobilized by federal, state and municipal formal and informal policies in the period after 1955. 7. Hannah Arendt, in her 1959 essay, Reflections on Little Rock, made a similar argument as Friedman about the relationship between the right to choose, individual liberty, freedom and the right of free association—and likewise, the freedom from forced association. (Arendt, 1959) 8. The New York Times observed that the length of Burger’s opinion was “unusual in the denial of stays…[and] underscored his misgivings over busing orders that were being handed down by lower court judges who read the Supreme Court’s rulings as requiring racial balance in the schools” (Graham, 1971). As Orfield (2015) traces, the next two years brought further victories that pushed forward desegregation, namely Wright v. City of Emporia (1972) and Keyes v. School District No. 1 (1973). Wright v. City of Emporia (1972) blocked a Virginia school district from evading the elimination of a freedom of choice plan; while Keyes, building on Swann, further established links among intention, school and housing segregation—this time in a northern city. 9. These northern movements illustrate the contradictory history of choice in education. Further, as Theoharis (2003) and Delmont (2016), among others, have pointed out, efforts to desegregate in northern cities were significantly hindered by the racial imbalance clause of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. 10. As I note elsewhere (Aggarwal, 2016), the term “racial isolation” in education policy can be traced backed to the Coleman et al Report of 1966, which like the Moynihan Report, was undergirded by a theory of culture of poverty. . . . 11. Further, as Craig Willse’s warns, we must be careful about claims made by social scientists and policy experts regarding what disaggregating data accounts for and does. As he examines, the mere act of disaggregating data has been positioned as accounting for race, yet does very little to account for the continued conditions that continue to produce racism and as Gilmore puts it, “group differentiated vulnerability to premature death” (Gilmore, 2007; Willse, 2015). 12. In 2012, at least thirty-three states were granted NCLB waivers, which many cite as an indication of the legislation’s failure. 13. Indeed, as Patricia Hill Collins (2000) reminds us, this epistemology is critical to understanding how power works and how it might be challenged. 108 | U JJU AGGA R WA L REFERENCES Aggarwal, U., Mayorga, E., & Nevel, D. (2012). Slow violence and neoliberal education reform: Reflections on a school closure. Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology, 18(2), 156. Aggarwal, U., & Mayorga, E. (2016). From forgotten to fought over: Neoliberal restructuring, public schools, and urban space. S&F Online, 13(2). Aggarwal, U. (2016). The ideological architecture of whiteness as property in educational policy. Educational Policy, 30(1), 128–152. Aggarwal, U. (2018). After rights. In L. Fernandes (Ed.), Feminists rethink the neoliberal state. Inequality, exclusion, and change. New York: New York University Press. Alexander, K., & Alexander, K. (2004). Vouchers and the privatization of American education: Justifying racial segregation from Brown to Zelman. University of Illinois Law Review, 5, 1131?. Alonso, G., Anderson, N. S., Su, C., & Theoharis, J. (2009). Our schools suck: Students talk back to a segregated nation on the failures of urban education. New York: New York University Press. Arendt, H. (1959). Reflections on little rock. Dissent, 6(1), 45–56. Apple, M. W. (2001). Comparing neo-liberal projects and inequality in education. Comparative Education, 37(4), 409–423. Back, A. (2003). Exposing the “whole segregation myth”: The Harlem Nine and New York City’s school desegregation battles.” In J. Theoharis & K. Woodard (Eds.), Freedom north: Black freedom struggles outside the South, 1940–1980. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Bartlett, L., Frederick, M., Gulbrandsen, T., & Murillo, E. (2002). The marketization of education: Public schools for private ends. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 33(1), 5–29. Beal, H. K. O., & Hendry, P. M. (2012). The ironies of school choice: Empowering parents and reconceptualizing public education. American Journal of Education, 118(4), 521–550. Bell, D. (2004). Silent covenants: Brown v. Board of Education and the unfulfilled hopes for racial reform. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483, 74 S. Ct. 686, 98 L. Ed. 873 (1954). Brown v. Board of Education, 349 U.S. 294, 75 S. Ct. 753, 99 L. Ed. 1083 (1955). Brown, W. (1995). States of injury: Power and freedom in late modernity. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Brown, W. (2015). Undoing the demos: Neoliberalism’s stealth revolution. Cambridge: MIT Press. Buras, K. (2011). Race, charter schools, and conscious capitalism: On the spatial politics of whiteness as property (and the unconscionable assault on Black New Orleans). Harvard Educational Review, 81(2), 296–331. Bush, G. W. (2000). George W. Bush’s speech to the NAACP. Washington Post, July 10. www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/onpolitics/elections/bushtext071000.htm. Accessed July 7, 2016. Carl, J. (1994). Parental choice as national policy in England and the United States. Comparative Education Review, 38(3), 294–322. Champagne, A. (1973). The segregation academy and the law. The Journal of Negro Education, 42(1), 58–66. Coleman, J. S., Campbell, E. Q., Hobson, C. J., McPartland, J., Mood, A. M., Weinfeld, F. D., & York, R. (1966). Equality of educational opportunity (pp. 1066–5684). Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. Collins, P. H. (2000). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge. S C HOOL C HOIC E | 109 deForest, J. (2008). The 1958 Harlem school boycott: Parental activism and the struggle for educational equity in New York City. The Urban Review, 40(1), 21–41. Delmont, M. F. (2016). Why busing failed: Race, media, and the national resistance to school desegregation. Berkeley: University of California Press. Dougherty, J. (2004). More than one struggle: The evolution of Black school reform in Milwaukee. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Fabricant, M., & Fine, M. (2012). Charter schools and the corporate makeover of public education: What’s at stake? New York: Teachers College Press. Farrell, W. C., Jr. & Mathews, J. (2006). The Milwaukee school voucher initiative: Impact on black students. The Journal of Negro Education, 75(3), 519–531. Fernandes, L. (Ed.). (2018). Feminists rethink the neoliberal state. Inequality, exclusion, and change. New York: New York University Press. Forman, J., Jr. (2005). The secret history of school choice: How progressives got there first. Georgetown Law Journal, 93, 1287–2095. Friedman, M. (1951). Neo-liberalism and its prospects. Farmland, February, 89–93. Friedman, M. (1955). The role of government in education. In R. A. Solo (Ed.), Economics and the public interest. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Fuquay, M. W. (2002). Civil rights and the private school movement in Mississippi, 1964–1971. History of Education Quarterly, 42(2), 159–180. Gardner, D. P. (1983). A nation at risk: The imperative for educational reform. Washington DC: US Department of Education. Gilmore, R. W. (2007). Golden gulag: Prisons, surplus, crisis, and opposition in globalizing California. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gilmore, R. W. (2008). Forgotten places and the seeds of grassroots planning. In C. R. Hale (Ed.), Engaging contradictions: Theory, politics, and methods of activist scholarship (pp. 31–61). Berkeley: University of California Press. Gilmore, R. W. (2012, September). Partition. Keynote presented at the Decolonize the city! Decoloniale perspektiven auf die neoliberal stadt, Berlin, Germany. Gordon, W. M. (1994). The implementation of desegregation plans since Brown. Journal of Negro Education, 63(3), 310–322. Graham, F. P. (1971). Burge cautions lower tribunals on busing orders. The New York Times. Green v. County School Board of New Kent County, 391 U.S. 430, 88 S. Ct. 1689, 20 L. Ed. 2d 716 (1968). Greenberg, M., & Schneider, D. (1994). Violence in American cities: Young black males in the answer, but what was the question? Social Science & Medicine, 39(2), 179–187. Griffin v. County School Board (1964). Harris, C. I. (1993). Whiteness as property. Harvard Law Review, 106, 1707–1791. Harvey, D. (2003). The new imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hershkoff, H., & Cohen, A. S. (1992). School choice and the lessons of Choctaw County. Yale Law & Policy Review, 10, 1–29. Honig, B. (2017). Public things: Democracy in disrepair. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jeffries, H. K., & Jones, P. D. (2012). Desegregating New York: The case of the “Harlem Nine. OAH Magazine of History, 26(1), 51–53. Kelley, R. D. (2002). Freedom dreams: The black radical imagination. Boston: Beacon Press. Keyes v. School District no. 1, Denver, Colorado. 413 U.S. 189 (1973). Klein, N. (2007). Missing reference. 110 | U JJU AGGA R WA L Kucsera, J., & Orfield, G. (2014). New York State’s extreme school segregation: Inequality, inaction, and a damaged future. Los Angeles: UCLA, The Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles. Ladson-Billings, G. (2004). Landing on the wrong note: The price we paid for Brown. Educational Researcher, 33(7), 3–13. Lassiter, M. D., & Crespino, J. (2009). The myth of southern exceptionalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lipman, P., & Hursh, D. (2007). Renaissance 2010: The reassertion of ruling-class power through neoliberal policies in Chicago. Policy Futures in Education, 5(2), 160–178. Lowe, L. (2015). The intimacies of four continents. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Marx, K. (1978). On the Jewish question. In R.C. Tucker (Ed.), The Marx-Engels reader. New York: Norton. Mason, P. L. (2004). NEA presidential address: Identity, markets, and persistent racial inequality. The Review of Black Political Economy, 32(1), 13–36. Matter of Skipwith, 14 Misc. 2d 325, 180 N.Y.S.2d 852, 180 N.Y.2d 852 (Dom. Rel. Ct. 1958). Melago, C. (2008). Left in dark over No Child Left Behind. New York Daily News. Retrieved from http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/education/left-dark-child-left-behind-article-1.306014 Melamed, J. (2015). Racial Capitalism. Critical Ethnic Studies, 1, 76–85. Mickelson, R. A., & Southworth, S. (2005). When opting out is not a choice: Implications for NCLB’s transfer option from Charlotte, North Carolina. Equity & Excellence in Education, 38(3), 249–263. Milliken v. Bradley, 418 U.S. 717, 94 S. Ct. 3112, 41 L. Ed. 2d 1069 (1974). Neill, M. (2003). Making lemonade from NCLB lemons. Rethinking Schools, Fall, 9–11. Orfield, M. (2015). Milliken, Meredith, and metropolitan segregation. UCLA Law Review, 62, 363. Peck, J., Theodore, N., & Brenner, N. (2009). Neoliberal urbanism: Models, moments, mutations. SAIS Review of International Affairs, 29(1), 49–66. Pedroni, T. (2007). Market movements: African American involvement in school voucher reform. New York: Routledge. Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). Pulido, L. (2000). Rethinking environmental racism: White privilege and urban development in Southern California. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 90(1), 12–40. Rickford, R. (2016). We are an African people: Independent education, black power, and the radical imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Saltman, K. 2007. (Ed). (2007). Schooling and the Politics of Disaster. New York: Routledge. Saltman, K. (2007). Schooling in disaster capitalism: How the political right is using disaster to privatize public schooling. Teacher Education Quarterly. Spring 2007, 131–156. Scott, J., & Quinn, R. (2014). The politics of education in the post-Brown era: Race, markets, and the struggle for equitable schooling. Educational Administration Quarterly, 50(5), 749–763. Singh, N. P. (2005). Black is a country: Race and the unfinished struggle for democracy. Harvard: Harvard University Press. Stack, C. B. (1975). All our kin. New York: Basic Books. Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, 402 U.S. 1 (U.S. Supreme Court, 1971). Tavernise, S. (2012). Longevity up in U.S., but education creates disparity, study says. The New York Times. S C HOOL C HOIC E | 111 Theoharis, J. (2003). “I’d rather go to school in the South”: How Boston’s school desegregation complicates the civil rights paradigm. In J. Theoharis & K. Woodard (Eds.), Freedom North: Black freedom struggles outside the South, 1940–1980. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Theoharis, J., & Woodard, K. (2003). Freedom North: Black freedom struggles outside the South, 1940– 1980. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Turner, K. M. (2004). Both victors and victims: Prince Edward County, Virginia, the NAACP, and “Brown.” Virginia Law Review, 90(6), 1667–1691. Vaught, S. E. (2011). Racism, public schooling, and the entrenchment of white supremacy: A critical race ethnography. Albany: SUNY Press. Walder, J. C., & Cleveland, A. D. (1971). The South’s new segregation academies. Phi Delta Kappan, 53(4), 234–239. West, K. C. (1994). A desegregation tool that backfired: Magnet schools and classroom segregation. Yale Law Journal, 103, 2567–2592. Wilkinson, J. H. (1979). From Brown to Bakke. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Willse, C. (2015). The value of homelessness: Managing surplus life in the United States. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Williamson, J. A. (2006). Chapter 2. A tale of two movements: The power and consequences of misremembering Brown. Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, 105(2), 36–57. Winston-Salem County Board v. Scott (1971). Woods, C. (2017). Development drowned and reborn: The blues and bourbon restorations in post-Katrina New Orleans. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Wright v. City of Emporia, 407 US 451 (1972).