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Unraveling the Geographies of the U.S. Public Education System
Topics: Education
, Ethnicity and Race
, Geographic Theory
Keywords: Education, Schooling, Neoliberalism, Scale, Capitalism, Race, Segregation Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract Day: Sunday Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 05:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 06:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) Room: Virtual 78
Authors:
Olivia Ildefonso, CUNY Graduate Center
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Abstract
In the United States, the national Opt Out movement against high-stakes testing overwhelmingly emerged from majority white, middle- to upper-class suburban school districts. To make sense of why the movement began in these geographies, I suggest that we must denaturalize the geographies themselves. Drennon (2006) argues that most scholarship and activism that focuses on today’s educational disparities take for granted the structure of the public education system. Building on Drennon’s work, I argue that without an understanding of how the U.S. public education system came to be—how it was formed in bits and pieces over three centuries, by whom, and how a particular mode of education was consolidated into a national system—we will not be able to meaningfully assess the Opt Out movement or any other modern-day educational reform movement. Through taking take a long view of history to make sense of the current conjuncture, my research connects the nation’s largest anti-testing protest to social contestations that took place centuries earlier.
Unraveling the Geographies of the U.S. Public Education System