What do universal rights to public goods like education mean when codified as individual, private choices? Is the “problem” of school choice actually not about better choices for all but, rather, about the competition and exclusion that choice engenders—guaranteeing a system of winners and losers? Unsettling Choice: Race, Rights, and the Partitioning of Public Education (U Minnesota Press, 2024) addresses such questions through a compelling ethnography that illuminates how one path of neoliberal restructuring in the United States emerged in tandem with, and in response to, the Civil Rights movement.
Drawing on ethnographic research in one New York City school district, Unsettling Choice traces the contestations that surfaced when, in the wake of the 2007–2009 Great Recession, public schools navigated austerity by expanding choice-based programs. Ujju Aggarwal argues that this strategy, positioned as “saving public schools,” mobilized mechanisms rooted in market logics to recruit families with economic capital on their side, thereby solidifying a public sphere that increasingly resembled the private—where contingency was anticipated and rights for some were marked by intensified precarity for poor and working-class Black and Latinx families. As Unsettling Choice shows, these struggles over public schools—one of the last remaining universal public goods in the United States—were entrapped within neoliberal regimes that exceeded privatization and ensured exclusion even as they were couched in language of equity, diversity, care, and rights. And yet this richly detailed and engaging book also tracks an architecture of expansive rights, care, and belonging built among poor and working-class parents at a Head Start center, whose critique of choice helps us understand how we might struggle for—and reimagine—justice, and a public that remains to be won.
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Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. With the price of just about everything going up during inflation, we thought we'd bring our prices down. So to help us, we brought in a reverse auctioneer, which is apparently a thing. Mint Mobile unlimited, premium wireless! Get 30-30, get 30, get 30, get 20-20, get 20-20, get 20-20, get 15-15, 15-15, just 15 bucks a month, so... Give it a try at mintmobile.com/switch. $45 up front for three months plus taxes and fees, promoting for new customers for limited time, unlimited more than 40 gigabytes per month, so go to mintmobile.com. Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello everybody and welcome back to New Books and Education, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. I'm Laura Kelly, a host on the channel. Today we'll be talking to Ujua Garwal, the author of the new book Unsettling Choice. Ujua, welcome to the show. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself? Sure, thanks so much for having me. So, I am trained, I guess this book grows out of kind of a variety of positions that I'm trained as a community organizer, a popular educator, but also as an anthropologist. And I currently am an assistant professor in the bachelor's program for adult and transfer students at the New School, where I teach classes in liberal arts, global studies, and anthropology. Fantastic, thank you. So, this is a book, and I realized I forgot to read this subtitle, so we're talking about unsettling choice, race, rights, and the partitioning of public education. So, this book is about your experience as an ethnographer, accompanying mothers at a Head Start program through navigating their choices for their children's schools in New York City's public schools. When people who follow education policy hear school choice, they might first think of vouchers and charters, but your book is about choices or lack of choices available to parents navigating the public school system. For readers who aren't familiar with New York City's process of assigning children to schools, can you give us a logistical background on the landscape that these families were navigating? Sure, thanks so much for this question. So it's really true. When we think about school choice, as you mentioned, or how it's most often discussed, it is vouchers or charters or other mechanisms of privatization that come to mind. So it might seem contradictory to some to think about school choice beyond these mechanisms as they manifest in the public, but this was in fact what we found and confronted. And when I say we, again, this kind of this book emerges from a long history of work that first grew out of my work as an organizer in the district that I later came to study, where charter schools were growing in some areas, but not others. And at the same time, choice policies were also growing and expanding and non charter based public schools. So in this context, school choice in the district included charters and private schools, but also magnet programs, dual language programs, gifted and talented programs, district-wide choice programs and more, right. So this is for elementary school education again. So if you think about choice is the expansion of options that a family has as to where they might send their child to public school or to school. It's also important to remember that with choice families choose to some extent, but schools also choose who they admit. And this was true, even sometimes for, for example, for catchment schools or area based schools. So what this meant practically was then attending a district school fair to learn more about the options available obtain information, getting a coveted spot on a school tour. Attending a school tour, which was a prerequisite for an application applying to the school, sometimes attending additional meetings or submitting additional application materials, and sometimes navigating waitlists. So again, it's families were presented with a range of options, but schools were also presented with an expanding range of what we might understand to be consumer citizens. And what this ended up meaning for many was an increased precarity along with increasing segregation and inequality in one of the most diverse yet segregated and unequal and choice based school districts in the nation's largest school system. Okay, that sounds super complicated, which I think was part of the central findings. So I mentioned a moment ago, the subtitle race rights and the partitioning of public education. Can you tell listeners how you're using the word partition. Sure, I'm happy to. And I'll begin by giving you a quick working definition and trying to then break that down some. So by partition public, which is a framework I use and develop. I mean the embeddedness of a market based infrastructure within the space of the public that requires competition and cultivates a myopia of consumer citizenship. It ensures conditional inclusion anticipates and is predicated on exclusion and inequality. So again, that, right, this, the choice based system of that, again, is connected to a market based infrastructure, ensures conditional inclusion. That anticipates and is predicated on exclusion and inequality, thereby producing kind of the continuation, right, of racialized and hierarchical group differentiation. So what do I mean by all that and considering the context I was sharing earlier about how choice works. I grew more and more curious about what the seeming contradictions of again the ways that choice expands beyond the realm of the private might help us understand more generally about what kinds of social relations are produced and naturalized and what of public is made and constructed every day. So, on one hand, then I use partition as a way to move away from the way that choice is often discussed and considered right. So, for example, this is often referred to as the predicaments or impediments, the individuals or sometimes even groups of people face to making better choices to choosing better. For example, if choice is supposed to be open to all why don't some people just simply choose a good school or choose diversity, choose integration or progressive pedagogy and the list goes on. So, moving away from thinking about choice is managerialism guilt or meritocracy I turn to partition to consider the work that choice does, following the social and political processes that it engenders and the political subjectivities and cultural logic cultivates to normalize naturalize and reproduce inequality and exclusion within the public and again, a lot of this kind of framing around cultural logic and thinking about political subjectivities for me emerges from my training as an anthropologist coming to this project. So, in thinking about this I'm trying to understand how a public is produced where rights are organized by, again, a market based infrastructure qualified by choices that are grounded in the right to exclude right. And just as a quick side note, Cheryl Harris, the critical race study scholar teaches us that that the right to exclude as a consistent nucleus of whiteness and private property, even as their definitions have changed over time. And so I look at how this confluence produces again a cultural logic grounded in an antagonistic myopia, whereas marks put it we are compelled to see in one another not just the possibility, not really the possibilities of freedom, but rather the limits to our own freedom right, that thereby shrinks rather expands the relationalities or possibilities of solidarity within the public, right, where it's assumed there will always be some winners and some losers where segregation is also then understood to be a reified and inevitable reality that can only better be managed, rather than again an active and ongoing separation rooted in a set of political and social conditions that we are that we actively maintain, mobilize and reproduce every day. We're tracing this positioning of choice as a partitioning logic and structure in public education. I hope to make clear that it's not just about reforming the public we have but we really have to work to reimagine and transform it all together. But that leads beautifully into what I was going to ask you next, which is about all that you've just been talking about how the mothers in the study, their experience of trying to access a public good was characterized by you right at consumerism competition in the city, and you described a competitive and opaque landscape of admissions, uneven access and a limited ability to assert rights or entitlement to services. Could you tell us a story from your data that will illustrate for listeners exactly what this looked like in the mom's experiences. Absolutely, and thanks again for asking this so again these characteristics of a competitive and opaque landscape, uneven access, a limited ability to assert rights. These sound like aspects of the private and are often, and were often in my research what I encountered as a rightful critiques brought against many charter schools. The key question again I ask is what does it mean that these characteristics increasingly qualified the public sphere. One very basic example of how this played out was gaining access to a school tour, right. Which many of the women at the Head Start Center were had a, you know, would call were told were full, would then kind of attend the ones that they eventually did found that they had open spots they were told often that they weren't allowed to bring a partner or younger children they were then they would then show up at these tours and see that many of those who were migrating to the public schools so white but not only white families who appeared to be middle class or otherwise had kind of greater economic capital would bring a partner would would bring younger children who are not yet school age. So they were on one hand these discrepancies officials and other policy experts I spoke to often said that well, you know, it's just a problem of knowledge of being savvy or not of being able to demand to be demanding enough that maybe people just didn't simply didn't understand how to navigate the system. So, just as a side note it's important to remember that these are public schools and that these qualities should not be prerequisites for accessing education right and despite the flaws of such arguments it was not in fact true. It was not knowledge, it wasn't a lack of being savvy enough or knowledgeable enough in the case of my own research, the women at the Head Start Center were coming together weekly, studied the schools when on school tours together, their assessments and experiences of what a school was like on the inside so it wasn't again a lack of knowledge. But what was what was evident right was that the opacity was working on a lot of levels right it was working on the level of gaining access to a school it also was working on the level of how choice was used and mobilized by district and school officials to create programs in schools, how these programs were created, who they were created for how access was granted. And ironically or not many of these initiatives were in the shape of dual language programs magnet programs or other programs that were supposed to be framed or were framed as diversity measures, even though they work to exclude many of the poor and working class in the area. Now how these characteristics played out also look like flyers in schools right mentioning or the mention during a school tour of expected financial contributions. So we expect parents to be involved in the school to contribute financially to the school, the average contribution is X amount of dollars right, and that would sometimes be 500 that would sometimes be marked as 1000 sometimes 2000 right, depending on the school or the context. And again, they were, I think part of what was striking to me, or, and, and yet often normalized was that these kind of mentions of financial contributions were not only discussed in the frame of parental contribution, a parental involvement, but also often cloaked in the lack language of care. Right. So care claims to care became a way to, on one hand, narrate and legitimize exclusion that choice guarantees as the result simply of a group of caring parents coming together. And yeah, of course the women at the Head Start Center, or to their own analysis right they read these forms and references to kind of particular ways of being involved or caring as forms of gatekeeping and making. And they also understood choice to be a setup and to be false. So part of what I want to emphasize here again is that there was a critique forged by the women at the Head Start Center of the opacity of these processes and of choice. It wasn't always heard or recognized, but it was, it was there and it was very active. It's that time of the year. Your vacation is coming up. You can already hear the beach waves, feel the warm breeze, relax and think about work. You really, really wanted all to work out while you're away. Monday.com gives you and the team that peace of mind. When all work is on one platform and everyone's in sync, things just flow, wherever you are, tap the banner to go to Monday.com. As I'm looking at my next question, I'm realizing it might have made sense to ask it first, but here we are. So what's the relationship between your community organizing and your research. Tell us how you came to this study and how you negotiated shifting roles from organizer to researcher. Yeah, thank you. I really appreciate this question. I guess what I want to begin with in, because it's, it's many stories and long stories to tell. So what I want to begin with is while this question and the tensions that it points to were really central to my work and specific contexts are also not unique to me. So what do we mean by that means that there's a long lineage of activists engaged ethnographers that I'm in dialogue with and see myself work building upon the work of, or in it, hopefully, hopefully working in a tradition of. And in that tradition is also important, then, as you just ran your question for me to know that the key questions that my work examines grew out of my work for many, many years of organizing as part of an organization that I work to build with others called the Center for Immigrant Families. So these were active kind of contradictions that we confronted in the course of our organizing. And later that I kind of took the time to reflect on some of these, some of the questions that I encountered in the work and thought specifically about what they might teach us more broadly about neoliberal restructuring in the United States and more. So for me and negotiating what it meant to move into a role of researcher had to do with a lot of unexpected lessons. So, for example, one of these had to do with how does one think about ethnographic distance, right. I thought, as I entered graduate school and was making this quote unquote transition, that a lack of distance was a good thing that detached being a detached observer claims of objectivity represented in fact the worst traditions of anthropology historically and in the present. And I remember one of my mentors and graduate school leaf mollings who herself was one of the luminaries of engaged at anthropology tell me have to have more distance. And it took me a while but I realized how necessary that was it wasn't as it was necessary on one hand for access. But really it was essential to crafting the intersubjective space that is necessary for ethnographic work. So, getting this distance required a shift for me from a position of knowing and often telling that I did or explaining that I did as an organizer to listening and developing a curiosity and perspective and seeing and observing and listening, right. From working to transform the structures that produce a set of given conditions to trying to understand how these conditions are produced lived experienced and survived, and maybe not successfully contested all the time but how they're maintained right. And, and so in thinking about that distance and thinking about shifting that positionality it really for me was, was very much about how I entered a space, right. And what I, what I did there what I hope to see there what I was open to seeing right how I was observing. At the same time it wasn't like I was a researcher one day and ethnographer or it wasn't like I was a researcher one day and an organizer the next or vice versa. Nor was it that I, yeah, that these roles were kind of interchangeable or separate. I remember this really vividly coming up as attention when I was first quote unquote entering the field. That is when I was first beginning my research in the same place that I had been working and living in organizing for a long time. Joao Costa Vargas Vargas is framing or flip of the ethnographic method of participant observation to what he terms and explains as observant participation was really important to me. For Vargas this kind of flip to observant participation dispels claims of objectivity and neutrality that are of course aligned with the maintenance and violence of dominant power. And yet reminds us that our first line of accountability in research or organizing or any work we might do is to the collective efforts or movements for social transformation that we are aligned with, right. And so it's from that place that we act as anything in the world. And it's from that place that observation doesn't become something separate from ourselves or from the work that we're committed to or, or a set of values It becomes an appendage so that it's not again about kind of becoming somebody different but really shifts how you enter a space and how we see our roles or how we understand even the question of the quote unquote field right In my case, this impacted how I approach questions of methods as well. And a framework that I term uneven methods. So for me it was really important to think about how I was doing research, or rather, maybe if political power in a partition landscape wasn't just uneven, but it was actively being disputed, then where, how did that dispute on evenness impact my methodology, not just to take stock or account or describe unevenness or conditions, but what it meant to actively engage them. I'm glad you brought us to methods. I did want to ask about that. Several times you acknowledge that you were telling partial stories, not all that you knew from your participants. You also write about refusal in ethnographic research where you or your participants determine that some part of their experience is not available for consumption as research. How did you and your participants navigate these ethical decisions about what part of their experiences were available for ethnographic study. Thank you. And it follows nicely on this question of, yeah, thinking about how we enter who we are in the space of research or organizing. But again, I think just as a side note for me, an important piece of that is that it refers to, I think, you know, the question of intellectualism more broadly that expands beyond kind of academia. It can't be found in many spaces. And often the best best practices occur in other spaces beyond the academia, but not only a lot of a lot of good stuff that people are doing is within academic institutions as well. So, but going back to this question of partial stories, I guess I'll begin by thinking by sharing a little bit about how I'm thinking about the framework. Why, and so maybe I'll begin with that question with the with the why because I think the context helps or informs the framing. So as I mentioned earlier, I found that choice was narrated and understood and naturalized and often through a register of care that somehow supposedly Karen right led one to make the right choices which in turn, resulted in higher academic goals. And again, this narrative didn't go, it never went uncontested the women at the Head Start Center will, or well aware of how care claims to care worked in this context and how it positioned them, right, and within these discourses. And here just quickly it's important to mark that these tendencies were far from something new right but rather they entered into a long history, deeply rooted in a culture of poverty theory. Which social policies claim the correspondence between income, race, academic achievement levels, and individual responsibility, parenting practices values and family structures. So in this mix women as mothers are often positioned as primary protagonists right to understanding causing or curing inequality. And also the target of reform measures that focus on the sensibilities behaviors and practices of parental care which have grown significantly since the 1980s and coincide, not accidentally with expanded efforts to dismantle the welfare state right. So as we see expansion of policy social policies that emphasize and draw on culture of poverty theory to locate the parenting practices and family structures and values of individual families as a problem, right. So in thinking about the work that in this context, in the context of my own research that claims to care and discourses of care we're doing. It was important for me on one hand not just to fall to avoid the trap of having the stories of the women at the Head Start Center be just as good as right. I didn't, I wanted to make sure that their stories were not inadvertently understood to be measured against a hegemonic norm, kind of like the notion of disparity often does right, how disparity is always rooted against or measured against a hegemonic norm that is not undone. So when tracking kind of the claims labor and infrastructures of care in this in this context of choice, I use the framework and approach of partial stories to think about not incomplete but partial stories right. As a framework that grows out of the legacies and practices and praxis rather of women of color and third world feminism, right. And it's through these partial stories then that I worked on settle what we expect to learn from ethnographic knowledge, and on whose terms a thick description, often again measured position against this unnamed invisible hegemonic norm and structures of power remain undisturbed is carried out right. So here in thinking about partial stories and developing this framework, I build on the work of Patricia Hill Collins, who teaches us that partial perspectives bring a critical and specific lens to how power works. They're doing so they provide a different way of thinking and alternative to the evasion of power inherent in relativist approaches, while also resisting the impulse to move such perspectives into totalizing narratives right so it's not saying that these partial stories, on one hand it's saying that the partial stories are not the same, they're not totalizing, it is holding their difference. So through their use I try and engage an idea of kind of practice and idea of opacity to provoke the reader really to consider what we don't know right. So in a way I'm trying to facilitate a dialogue with the reader to provoke questions about what we might not know what can't be measured about also the temporal stretch. And then in the intersecting systems and structures of violence and contingency that continue to shape how relations are constructed every day, as well as kind of again the temporal stretch, the kind of an epist and deep kind of knowledge of how precarity works, and then the structures of care that are imagined and carried out alongside that knowledge, and in context. So as we wind down here, is there anything else that you wanted to be able to say about this topic or the book. Sure. I think that, I mean, I think I, one of the things that I always want to emphasize is that, while I land on the public that we might not have. I also want to emphasize the public we need and I think that we can find some of the kernels of what that public might be beyond the reformist traps we keep encountering. And so in my work, I think about this specifically through what kinds of relation, such a public might engender beyond that of partition. I think there's a lot to learn from places like but not exclusive to the Head Start Center, where bounded geographically and stretching kind of again across time. But rooted in place women have built not a chosen community of self proclaimed that claims to be radical in any way, but actually practices and produces a radical infrastructure of care. Right. That is forged through material conditions and intergenerational together and as to what we might consider a conviviality. It's these infrastructures built over time that might appear ordinary at one glance and yet are quite extraordinary right there rooted in logics of mutuality of collectivity of expansive understandings of belonging and non disposability. Where it's not just that the logic of partition doesn't make sense. It's also understood and assessed to create the opposite of security or safety for anyone family. Right. So while my book is about partition choice and about the limits of the public we have it's also about where we can look to find a collective, a collective practice. A cultural logic political subjectivities practices of relationality that can really be the groundwork from which we can radically reimagine a public that we need and can fight for. Thank you for leaving us with that and then our final question is what are you working on now. Right. What am I working on now. Well, so my next research project is tentatively called education against enclosure. And it really builds on this last note of the public we need right. An exam is how practical local struggles embedded within education can be significant to understanding how enclosure works, how it's understood and how it's contested right so Damien so join her reminds us the enclosure signifies more than a physical barrier. More than encompassing of a wall, but rather is about the elimination of resources that are critical to the longevity and well being of a community over time. Right. And thinking about kind of how and how education is a site through which communities over time have understood recognized enclosure. I also look at then kind of the the worlds that they imagine fight for and build so. So for my own particular study, I'm beginning with a few historical case studies, often surgeon organizing that took shape. In the late 1960s and early 1970s in New York City that include hospital housing and school occupations as well as a formation of street academies and food programs. And part of what I'm interested in learning is how the actors involved work through education on one hand to reconfigure place based relations of power. And yet also tracing how kind of what they work on expands well beyond this basis or sector of education alone and really informs a much more expansive understanding of community of place of infrastructure of what we might call a right to the city. I think you will have a lot to analyze and look at with that project maybe we'll have the opportunity to have you back to talk about that. Thank you so much for coming on the show today we really appreciate it. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate the conversation in the time. So thank you for the invitation. [Music] You
