Pedroni, Thomas C. (2007). Market movements: African American involvement in school voucher reform. Reviewed by Janelle Scott, University of California at Berkeley

Pedroni, Thomas C. (2007). Market movements: African American involvement in school voucher reform. NY: Routledge Pp. 172     $33     ISBN 978-0-415-95609-3 Reviewed by Janelle Scott University of California at Berkeley August 27, 2008 Introduction The beginning of the new school year is likely to bring with it a plethora of newspaper editorials calling for the expansion of school choice, especially school vouchers. Central to school voucher advocates’ efforts are attempts to demonstrate that school choice reforms hold moral currency based on the support they draw from those most dispossessed by current educational policies. For example, The Friedman Foundation for Education Choice has conducted state polls to gauge the support of likely voters for choice since 2005, most recently in Oklahoma (DiPerna, 2008), and Terry Moe relied on telephone survey data to argue that African American support for choice was on the rise (Moe, 2001). Advocates often point to the educational needs of poor, urban African American and Latino families when calling for the needed expansion of school choice policies, but more importantly to show that market-based reforms are socially just (Arons, 1989; Viteritti, 2000). This social justice claim has also been articulated through recently formed ethnocentric choice advocacy organizations such as the Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO) and Hispanic Council for Reform and Educational Options (HCREO). While there is obvious clamoring for better schooling options within these communities, the claims of widespread African American and Latino support for school vouchers as the only viable option to struggling public schools is somewhat simplified. On the other hand, traditional public school adherents, including Democratic policy makers and teachers unions, discount the level of dissatisfaction—and in some cases—desperation among poor and working class African Americans in relation to their public school options in cities across the United States, and their support for immediate educational options regardless of from what political ideology those options originate. For example, The People for the American Way issued a report on BAEO in which the author wondered if the organization’s members represented the voices of the community, or if, given their conservative foundation funding, they were being “held captive” by the political right (People for the American Way, 2001). Generally coming from liberal-progressive ideologies, these public school supporters often overlook the research that explores the strategic decision-making African American and Latinos make in relation to their support of market-based school choice (Pleasants, 2000; Wilson-Cooper, 2005). A question that animates market critics and fans alike is whether African American support or participation in reforms like vouchers, charter schools, or privately managed schools signals a broader ideological support for neoliberal strategies, or whether it is simply an indication of displeasure with local schooling, an attempt to secure immediate options for children impacted by under-resourced and underperforming schools, but not indicative of an ideological shift away from traditional, progressive civil rights issues and toward a more conservative social agenda. Pedroni argues that the latter perspective reflects the experience of African American parents and their engagement in school choice reforms. Thomas Pedroni’s Market movements: African American involvement in school voucher reform greatly assists in distilling the complexities of school choice reform within African American communities, and contributes greatly to the literature on the politics of school choice reform. Pedroni’s book provides solid theoretical framing and through empirical study―foregrounds the voices of parents and community members. In a policy environment where researchers disagree about the meaning of relatively flat aggregate student achievement data in many school choice reforms, this volume helps to reframe the policy discourse to considerations beyond standardized test performance, pointing to the issues that parents, students, teachers, and school leaders identify as central to their educational struggles and triumphs. Pedroni suggests that the book’s findings “…will help defenders of a progressive vision of public education envision strategies for reincorporating the legitimate educational concerns of voucher families in to more effective educational reform in the public sector” (p. 14). Focus, framework, and methodology Pedroni’s focus is Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the site of the nation’s longest running public school voucher program, better known as the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP). His methods involve ethnographic work in and around five schools participating in the MPCP. The book’s conceptual framework centers upon two themes: subaltern agency and identity formation, which Pedroni says take place "in the process of advocating for and utilizing vouchers as Black educational activists, low-income families, and their more conservative allies suture their interests together within tensely constructed and maintained alliances" (p. 6), and that these alliances are more fleeting than commonly understood. “Significantly, this leaves the door open for rearticulating marginalized families’ educational concerns to ultimately more effective, meaningful, and democratic education reform” (p. 17). The book’s framework and findings unfold over the course of six chapters. Pedroni situates parental participation in the MPCP against an historical backdrop in which predominantly African American schools were persistently under funded, and in which black students participating in desegregation plans found themselves resegregated through tracking in predominantly white schools, even though these schools benefited from fiscal incentives to educate these students. Black leaders and community-based organizations had long advocated greater responsiveness from Milwaukee and Wisconsin public officials, and had often been frustrated in their efforts to seek quality schools. Racial and economic injustice as a matter of public policy, then, provides the context for the origins of the MPCP program. Out of this broader context comes Pedroni’s conceptual frame. He argues that the educational left has underestimated the degree and causes of African American support for vouchers, and therefore, ignored significant frustrations in this constituency that if addressed, could help educators, public school advocates, and parents to form a powerful alliance. Instead, he argues, these groups are factionalized. The existence of such divisions allows for other ideological approaches to schooling to become more appealing. Drawing from Apple & Oliver’s (2003) notion of a “hegemonic alliance,” Pedroni discusses the members of this group, which includes neoliberals, neoconservatives, authoritarian populists, and a professional and managerial group of the new middle class. While having some small, intra-group strategic tensions, this alliance has successfully framed vouchers to particular constituencies. Competition, privatization, managerialism, and smaller government are prevailing perspectives supporting school vouchers. Under school voucher plans, parents—mostly women, who are the most active parental choosers—are given the freedom to choose on behalf of their children and bear the ultimate responsibility for those choices. Yet Pedroni’s framework departs from Apple & Oliver’s when imagining where African American and Latino participants fit within this broader frame. He is dissatisfied with renderings, for example, that place state legislator Polly Williams, an African American voucher advocate, and her constituents as either equal players or unknowing collaborators with the broader school voucher alliance. Instead, Pedroni argues that African American voucher supporters are neither “ideologically unformed” (p. 31), nor do they hold the power that politically elite voucher advocates possess. Yet Williams’s and other African Americans’ support was essential, argues Pedroni, to give the voucher program social legitimacy. This places this group in a unique position: they have been disempowered by state policies, and are essential players in dismantling such structures, yet at similar power disadvantages when engaging with more elite choice advocates, factors that cause them to become, according to Pedroni, subaltern actors choosing tactically, “…sometimes in ways that creatively turn the strategic deployments of the powerful back against the powerful, and other times in ways that are ultimately self-defeating for subaltern groups, as power groups accomplish their objectives precisely because of tactical ‘poaching’ by subaltern groups” (p. 38). In terms of identity formation, then, Pedroni argues that African American voucher supporters incorporate aspects of neoliberal and neoconservative elements, but that this is combined with progressive perspectives as well. Their voucher support should be understood as tactical, not a whole scale adoption of conservative ideology, or a whole scale rejection of traditional liberal/progressive social views. While Pedroni’s extensive explication of this theoretical frame might be off-putting to those uninterested in social theory, it will be appealing to those frustrated with the often atheoretical body of school choice research. An area for Pedroni and others interested in this theoretical terrain to explore more deeply is the intersectionality of social identity: how race, gender, socioeconomic status, religious belief, and sexual orientations interact with participation in school choice reforms. As Pedroni acknowledges much later in the book, the role of gender in this study in particular needs closer examination since the majority of the parents he interviews are African American mothers. Findings Chapters 3-6 present the ethnographic data that anchor the book. These data show that African American participation in the MPCP does not fit as neatly into a neoliberal/neconservative alliance as advocates would like to argue because African American parents are looking for choice to help accomplish different social and educational goals. For example, one important finding that emerges is that when African Americans discuss what they value about their children’s experiences in voucher schools, choice and competition are not the essential commodities. Nor is there a unified critique of teachers unions or education bureaucracy (though these entities do come up) that often characterizes policy maker and advocates’ support of choice. Rather, they point to qualitative differences between Milwaukee’s urban public schools and the private schools they are experiencing, pointing to such issues as smaller class sizes, proximity of the school location to where the family resides, and greater individual attention teachers can provide when not overwhelmed by large classes or other social issues. Choice then, for these parents, is understood to be a mechanism for facilitating access to better schooling conditions for all children, regardless of their backgrounds. Where conservative visions of choice identify parents as consumers, parents define themselves as members of a community. Still, Pedroni cautions white progressives to be mindful of the ways that they react to African American voucher supporters, treating them as naïve for allying with conservatives, and failing to recognize that their collaboration in voucher reform is tactical, as has been African American participation in the Democratic Party. This tactical approach has a long history of African Americans needing to discern the best political routes for them to maximize their social standing, and tensions with progressives and conservatives are hallmarks of this ideological negotiation. Even BAEO, which was founded originally in Milwaukee in 2000 by African American choice supporters with substantial support from conservative foundations, has great diversity within the organization, and is not unified in its approach to school choice. Intra-racial tensions about optimal strategies are present, as well as inter-organizational tensions between BAEO itself and its conservative allies. Even original voucher supporters, such as State Representative Polly Williams, are opponents of voucher expansion beyond low-income families, and even anti-voucher expansionists differ over which aspects of the program they would constrain, and which they would grow. It is within these tensions, what Pedroni calls sutures, that possibilities for activists to form alliances with African Americans exist, whether it be to garner their support for vouchers or for more traditionally progressive educational strategies. Families participating in the MPCP are also diverse. They share in the subaltern practices of tactical choice making and identity building, concepts introduced earlier in the book, but here provided with examples, such as the parent who participates in choice out of a critique of existing conditions in public schools, but understands that she has not had a say in the creation of such conditions. At the same time, she adopts the identity conservative advocates have ascribed to her- as a taxpayer and consumer exercising her buying power. Pedroni allows the parents’ voices to come through without triangulating the claims parents make about the schools with which they interact- his methods do not include evaluating the accuracy of parents’ experiences. Instead he remains interested in ideological and identity formation. The five schools in the study include an Islamic school, a Catholic school, an academic and vocational high school, a K-4 nonsectarian school, and a K-4 African-centered school. Pedroni interviewed at least three parents at each school, when possible, sampling for a parent who had experience with the school, one who was new to the school, and another who had left the school. While there are interesting differences in perspectives among the parents, one unifying critique of public schools is their overcrowding and large class sizes. Many parents see vouchers as a way for the state to redistribute resources, but rather than calling for more competition and closure of traditional public schools, they argue for their strengthening. An example of this perspective comes from a voucher parent with a daughter in a Catholic high school, “Ms. Dapedako endorses vouchers as a state form of redistributive justice countering these inequalities, and not as a market form delivering efficiency through market discipline. Because of this, she also opposes the universalization of vouchers” (p. 94). The parents are also strategic about their use of vouchers; some have children who attend public schools while they send others to MCPC schools, others plan to send their children to a Milwaukee public school after they matriculate from their current MCPC school, and several parents had previously enrolled their children in private schools before enrolling them in MCPC ones. Thus, the parents critique public and private educational forms as sometimes being academically unsound especially for African American children. As we learn in the appendix on methods, Pedroni faced some limitations regarding his parental interactions as the schools’ leadership assisted him with contacting parents, and at some schools, these leaders refused to give him the names of parents who had left the schools. The absence of these parents’ voices somewhat limits the rich complexity generated by the other respondents. The book’s sixth and final chapter returns its focus to African Americans’ participation in the voucher alliance. Here Pedroni reiterates that the alliance between conservative voucher supporters and African Americans is not as cohesive as commonly represented, and that there is a space in the slack for alternative visions of educational reform to be articulated that might be more tightly aligned to African American parents and community leaders’ needs. For the parents in Pedroni’s study, access to school vouchers only partially fulfilled their hopes. Small class sizes, individualized teacher attention for students, responsive discipline policies, supportive administrators, supported teachers, academic focus, a family environment “As a result of closer and therefore more transparent relationships, teachers with smaller class sizes are less empowered to allege student pathology as a cover for their own inadequacies” (p. 122). At the same time, parents in the study invoked neoliberal and neoconservative values: identifying themselves as tax payers and educational consumers, privileging the importance of accountability and competition as mechanisms for improving the Milwaukee public schools, the need for values education, and proper home environments; critiquing other African American families’ parenting and engagement in their children’s schooling. Still, Pedroni argues that the families’ perspectives, despite being realized within a school voucher program, were more aligned with progressive school reform agendas than with the neoliberal and neoconservative ideologies because they called for more resources, more culturally responsive and individualized teaching, smaller schools and class sizes and better fit between families and schooling environments. “That is, the way that families inhabit the discourses and opportunities of the voucher program seems to coincide more closely, ideologically speaking, with welfarist readings of a state’s responsibility to its citizens, as well as to visions of cultural and educational self-determination on the part of marginalized urban communities of color, that it does to models of atomized individuals rationally consuming educational products and thereby bringing efficiency to an educational free market” (p. 132). At the same time, parents joined in the neoliberal and neoconservative critique of teachers unions, and for administrators to have greater flexibility in hiring and firing poorly performing teachers. School choice becomes aligned with community control movements because it removes public schools―institutions many parents see as run by elite white teachers unions―from the oversight of African American children, and instead provides parents with access to African American run and staffed independent private schools. Conclusion Pedroni’s call for the invocation of complexity in the school choice debate is likely to go unheeded by staunch advocates located on the debate’s polar sides. Yet his book is a timely look at how and why African Americans engage in choice policies and any advocate, regardless of political perspective, who claims to represent the views of this highly diverse community, should be required to read it. Parents with experience in other private and public schools reported that their students were racially stigmatized, and recognize that private schools are no panacea for African American children, but that given the deplorable conditions in many urban schools, they are an immediate and viable option. Pedroni’s recollection of his experiences teaching in a pre-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans public school highlights the many challenges students, parents and teachers face under state policy conditions that are inherently undemocratic, unequal, and morally indefensible. Pedroni calls for a rearticulation of progressive and democratic educational reforms that can honor these parents' longstanding concerns with the problems of public education, while also resisting the expansion of market forms as their ultimate and only solution. He concludes that schools of education, educational bureaucracies, teachers unions, traditional civil rights organizations, if inclined, could become levers for this shift in thinking and with parents, foster a new social movement for equitable education policy, despite their relative resource limitations. References Apple, M. W. and Oliver, A. (2003). Becoming Right: Education and the formation of conservative movements. In: Apple, M.W. et al., The state and the politics of knowledge (pp. 25-50). New York: RoutledgeFalmer. Arons, S. (1989). Educational choice as a civil rights strategy. In N. E. Devins (Ed.), Public values, private schools (pp. 63-87). London: The Falmer Press. DiPerna, P. (2008). Oklahoma's opinion on K-12 education and school choice. Indianapolis: Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice. Moe, T. M. (2001). Schools, vouchers, and the American public. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press. People for the American Way. (2001). Community voice or captive of the right? A closer look at the Black Alliance for Educational Options. Washington, DC: People for the American Way Foundation. Pleasants, H. M. (2000). Defining and seeking a "good education": A qualitative study of Black parents who select charter schools for their children. Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation, Michigan State University, East Lansing. Viteritti, J. P. (2000). Choosing equality: School choice, the Constitution, and civil society. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press. Wilson-Cooper, C. (2005). School choice and the standpoint of African American mothers: Considering the power of positionality. Journal of Negro Education, 74(2), 174-189. About the Reviewer Janelle Scott is an Assistant Professor at the University of California at Berkeley in the Graduate School of Education and the Department of African American Studies. She is a graduate of UC Berkeley, with a degree in Political Science, and of UCLA, where she earned a Ph.D. in Education Policy. Her research centers on three related policy strands: the racial politics of public education, the politics of school choice, and the role of private sector actors in shaping public education. Her current research examines the relationship between philanthropy and school choice policy in urban communities. She is a 2008-2009 National Academy of Education-Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow, and the editor of School choice and diversity: What the evidence says (2005 Teachers College Press).