[00:00:15] Jon M: I’m Jon Moscow.
[00:00:17] Amy H-L: And I’m Amy Halpern-Laff. Our guest today is Dr. Ujju Aggarwal. Dr. Aggarwal is assistant professor of anthropology and experiential learning at The New School and author of Unsettling Choice: Race, Rights, and the Partitioning of Public Education. We last interviewed Dr. Aggarwal in 2019 on School Choice: Whiteness as Property and the Right to Exclude. Welcome back, Ujju.
[00:00:44] Ujju A: Thank you so much, Jon and Amy. It is an honor to be back here to join you again, and thank you just for inviting me and for the work you do.
[00:00:56] Jon M: Much of your book is based on your work with mothers at a Head Start Center in Community School District Three in Manhattan. Could you talk about this work?
[00:01:05] Ujju A: Sure. Thank you for that question. So, as you noted, this book, and my research more broadly, grows out of my long-term work that started in Community District Three as part of an organization called Center for Immigrant Families, where I worked for nearly a decade. It was a popular education center, neighborhood-based community organizing center of poor and working-class adult immigrant women of color and community members that really worked to build, at its core, community power through a lens of self-determination. So through our popular education workshops we came to, we didn’t start out with an issue, but we came to eventually, focus on the intersection of public education and gentrification. The district that we were organizing in was one of the most diverse and yet segregated and unequal school districts in the nation’s largest school system of New York City.
And as we came to focus more on public education, one of our, kind of, primary visions was fighting for schools that reflected, respected, and served the communities that they were part of. Something very basic, but also something that we were clear was about something that didn’t really exist yet, a vision that really drove our organizing about … and rooted in the type of social transformation that we were really fighting for. And so part of what we were was really driving that kind of more concrete level, was a struggle over schools, which were understood to be everyday institutions, a struggle over community and place in the context of, again, intensifying gentrification, and a struggle over what the future of the public, more broadly, in the place of Manhattan Valley, which was a neighborhood in Community School District Three that we were rooted in, would be, and over whose futures would be centered or valued or prioritized in that place.
The time was the early two thousands and moving into kind of the oughts. And in terms of some of the conditions that we were facing, it was on one hand the establishment of mayoral control, and secondly, the connected kind of rapid and expanding sweeps of school closures that were hitting many schools, primarily those serving poor communities of color, those that were predominantly Black and Brown, alongside the rapid expansion of charter schools. And this made many understand at the time that the problem of equity or the problem to fight in public education was one of privatization. And that was true in many ways, but also it didn’t really fit necessarily the concrete experiences of the members in Center for Immigrant Families or capture necessarily their experiences.
And this is where maybe my training, both as a community organizer trained in popular education, and so rooted in people’s stories and experiences, and as an ethnographer, later came to be important because people’s experiences are not just about kind of moving into organizing campaigns, but really about the shaping of them, right, the analysis that needs to shape the organizing that we build.
And so, for example, one of the things that we were encountering was that while the kind of common frame was that of privatization was a problem, what people were encountering. In terms of conditions, material conditions of an opaque landscape of admissions, kind of differential access, rights looking different in context, was also playing out in the public realm. And the common denominator there was choice. So one of the things that I then came to trace in my research that kind of picked up years later in the context of the Great Recession was this contradiction around how do we map this question of what is the quote unquote “problem.” Is it segmented to privatization or is it broader in terms of how choice dictates maybe more broadly privatized version of the public that we might consider?
So these conditions that we were mapping, encountering, organizing around at the Center for Immigrant Families became more intensified in the context of the Great Recession, and part of why this became more intensified was the austerity measures that were being pushed forward right at the time. So again moving from period of massive school closures to intensified budget cuts and even more grave threats of more and more schools being closed due to and facing, again, kind of austerity, budget cuts, and closure.
So one of the pivots that was made during this period was to expand choice policies as a way to mitigate austerity. So what this looked like then was thinking about how to expand choice policies in the district and think about how the expansion of choice policies could ameliorate budget cuts by appealing to a very specific parent consumer base. So my research follows what happened when these moves occurred, what these policy measures resulted in terms of segregation, inequality, but also more generally, an expanded marketplace of education, and what it did to people’s sensibilities of how we understand and fight for and imagine a public more broadly.
[00:07:13] Jon M: Could you elaborate a little bit on how they envisioned that choice would ameliorate austerity? What’s the connection there?
[00:07:22] Ujju A: Sure. So part of what I encountered in my field research and kind of what I documented was that school administrators understood that there were a few things hitting them or endangering them at the time that needed to be, again, mitigated. One of those was the fear of being marked as under-enrolled, right. We know during the Bloomberg administration at the time, for example, the way that schools were determined to be under-enrolled was pretty dubious, including, for example, counting the square footage of janitor closets. We also know there was like the fear of being under-enrolled and wanting to increase enrollments.
There was also the desire to avert budget cuts through really appealing to and marketing schools towards middle class and upper middle class parents who were, at the time, also reconsidering, many of whom at the time were reconsidering, their decision to enroll or enrollment in private schools, and either making, considering opt, quote, unquote “opting” into the public or making a switch from private to public.
And so there was a kind of concerted marketing to, for example, private preschools that served particular income brackets, who hadn’t really subscribed to the public schools, asking those parents what they wanted, what would entice them to come to a public school. And it was in that moment many, the mechanism of choice that allowed school administrators to respond to those parent desires to build particular programs for them, that would allow them to move into the school.
[00:09:15] Amy H-L: What were the issues that the mothers you met with faced in choosing schools for their children?
[00:09:23] Ujju A: Yeah. Thank you for that question, Amy. Again, so my work kind of was rooted in the experience of building the Center for Immigrant Families and then later working together with the Bloomingdale Family Head Start program in the neighborhood, building out a program called the Parent Leadership Project, where we came together and where a lot of my research was also then, my individual research, was also partnered with, and many of the women at the Head Start Center were faced, you know, challenges to choice. So part of what I debunk in my research is this idea that the problem with choice is about people not knowing their rights or not understanding the system.
And part of what what we did through the Parent Leadership Project was come together weekly. People took time out of their schedules, or work schedules or life schedules, come together weekly, learn about rights, learn about the schools, learn about the admissions process, go visit the schools together, go learn about the schools together, share their information, share what they experienced, and so people were hyper-informed, right. They could write a manual on school choice in the district and on the different schools, and yet what they encountered often was that they were told that, “oh, you don’t understand how the system works.” “Oh, you don’t understand your rights.” “Oh, you don’t understand.” “That must not actually be your experience because that’s not how it’s supposed to work.”
So that was one thing that people faced. Another thing that people encountered often was differential treatment. Accessing school tours, which were a requirement for the application process at the time, right. So you had to attend a school tour in order to apply to a school. Access was sometimes differential, and that meant things like not including interpretation on school tours, language interpretation, being told that they couldn’t bring younger children on school tours, and then seeing that this was again, not the case for everybody, right.
That there were other people bringing younger children, not school age, on the tour with them. Other things that people encountered were maybe less overt .So often on school tours. I mean, in some schools making this kind of switch in terms of who they were marketing, who they were prioritizing, people would often see signs in the school and it would be verbally communicated that an expected parent contribution would be X amount of dollars. And this is again, to a public school. And sometimes that would range in the thousands of dollars. Not always, but sometimes. It was often also indicated that, and this was one of the areas that my research then followed more was there was often a way that administrators and, and or those leading the tour would emphasize the importance of care, saying that we really want parents who care. We really want parents who care about the school. And so in thinking about how care was mobilized by the school in that context, the analysis that the women at the Head Start Center came to was that care was just another mechanism through which race and class were being articulated.
So, obviously, the women at the Head Start Center cared for their kids. They cared about finding a good school, they cared about many of them wanted to volunteer in the school. Many of them wanted to contribute to the school. But the way that care was being mobilized in this context was a very particular version of care. It was based on a particular type of volunteerism, a type of contribution, a type of time, a type of income bracket that was imagined as well. So those were some of the challenges that people navigated. I think one last one was there was just differential information that people were given. So in our group at the Head Start Center, we had people who spoke English, people who were not dominant English speakers, and people were given just really different information about inquiring about access to the same school and within the same week, for example. “Oh, we’re full.” “Oh, we have room.” So what became clear in terms of what people were experiencing was that there was, even though choice promised more equity and more access, it actually denied that to many.
[00:13:54] Amy H-L: Ujju, could you give us some specific examples of mothers’ experiences when visiting the schools?
[00:14:03] Ujju A: Sure. So I can provide some examples. One that comes to mind again, focuses on this idea of care and monetary donations. So, you know, one of the things that we did was go in teams always to visit the schools. This was a kind of strategy that we adopted from the Center for Immigrant Families to understand that a school might treat people differently together, knowing the kind of the context that people were entering of unequal admissions, a discriminatory treatment, and that you’re more likely to respond differently if you’re together, also, right, that we could more easily defend either ourselves or each other if we were not just going as individuals and maybe questioning what was happening to us. So one of the things that we would then do is share these assessments from the teams in our meetings of what people found and experienced. And one of the things that I remember, one of the members , it’s pseudonymity that’s used in the book, emphasized was, as she put it, she had gone on school tours to private schools, public schools. She was just assessing all her options.
And she was like, “You know, in some ways, I was treated better at the private school than I was at the public.” She assessed her experience of being looked at in particular ways, assessed in particular ways, but then also again, the idea of care. So she really emphasized this and then the group really picked up on it, sharing their own experiences as well. But she kept talking about how the school would emphasize this idea of care. And she understood it to be a particular kind of measurement in her words, she said, “You know, I don’t care how much you think I care. I care.” And so how are you going to measure that? Right. And for her, this was then tied to the kind of joined recruitment or advisement that she received of how much parents were expected to donate, right. And reaching into, in a couple schools at the time, at least those that she shared and documented in the thousands of dollars.
And then this prompted more story sharing of other experiences in schools that we encountered. One being, for example, that people felt that those who came with a husband or a partner were treated a little bit differently in the Q and A session. They were treated differently. Their questions were taken more seriously.
So there was that kind of assessment in terms of people’s experiences on school tours. There was also what I mentioned earlier, being kind of shushed, because if the school didn’t provide language interpretation on school tours, we provided it for each other. And so parents were often shushed because they were talking, quote unquote “out of turn” on the school tour for providing language interpretation to each other when the school was failing to provide that themselves.
I’ll give two more quick examples. One is that we had a member who was an immigrant, Black immigrant from Europe and had a European accent when they spoke English. And they, just by virtue of their accent and what was assessed from their accent, were given all the information that they asked for when they called a school for admissions information. At the same time, a long-term member who had raised her children in the neighborhood, who was an immigrant from the Dominican Republic, was denied the same information, right. So we decided to go together and present ourselves to the school. But it was these kinds of very, sometimes more overt, like the last example and sometimes less overt, like the previous examples, that really moved from, but resulted in the same, right a lack of access, a lack of information, yeah. Just very differential treatment.
The last example I’ll share that, maybe I can talk about more fully later, was very confusing information often, when it came to the question of access around dual language programs in the district, which have a very long history in the district, and were started as an alternative to bilingual education that understood language and culture through a deficit lens to really providing an alternative that was much more about, again, language and cultural maintenance, but also understanding diversity, quote unquote, “as a strength to build from.”
And so another trajectory that I follow in my research is what happened to these programs. How did choice move in and redirect the aims and ends of these programs? And so in terms of parents’ experiences in schools, those were also a experience of both exclusion, confusion, and differential access.
[00:19:17] Jon M: In your book, you talk about the post-Brown realignment following the Supreme Court decision in Brown versus the Board of Education. What was this, and what are the key issues associated with it?
[00:19:30] Ujju A: Yeah, thanks for that question, Jon. You know what I term the post-Brown realignment is really trying to address how a lot of literature, and organizing sometimes, in education can take a few different approaches to how we see the relationship between continuity of racialized exclusion and inequity in education. And one approach is kind of seeing a flat line between Jim Crow and our contemporary period, that nothing has changed, nothing will change. Racialized exclusion in the United States is forever and always. Another approach centers neoliberalism, and particularly with an emphasis on privatization. Through line there is emphasizing the idea that we have democracy, but it’s being chipped away through privatization, that democracy is real in the United States, that it has been real, but it’s being chipped away through privatization. And finally, a third through line that I trace is what some term an urban managerialist approach saying that we have to just be pragmatic. Inequity is there, it always will be there, but we just have to manage it better, and we have to kind of tweak it. We have to modify it and make it as manageable as possible.
And so through the post-Brown realignment, one of the things I try to consider is how can thinking through choice, and this particular moment of Brown versus Board of Education, open up a way for us to map contradictions differently and also open up a way for us to think about how we understand, imagine, and fight for the public. So one of the things I trace through this framework of the post-Brown realignment is how in the absence of a redistributive state, there’s Brown 1, 1954. Brown 2, 1955 is the moment when the Supreme Court says states and municipalities, with all deliberate speed, can have, though, discretion as to how desegregation is implemented. And that caveat opens up a kind of space where I trace this idea of what happened, what could have happened in that moment, and then what happened.
And here in 1955, we have Milton Friedman, who is often credited as one of, kind of, the fathers of neoliberalism, who presents what he terms a third alternative to state-enforced segregation and state-enforced desegregation. The problem, he says, with state-mandated desegregation is that impedes on individual liberty. So he’s trying to figure out how to preserve this idea of individual liberty with both the problems of state-enforced segregation and state-mandated desegregation. What he comes up with, again through this third alternative, is the structuring of flexible, what he terms flexible rights that really center choice. And for him, this idea of choice provides a bunch of options, provides a bunch of options that can include integrated schools, can include segregated schools, can include private options, but really it establishes a market in education.
And so one of the things I follow then is what happens in this moment when universal rights come to be structured as individual private choices? How does a market come to be established in that time within and embedded within the structure of rights and the public realm, not just strenuous to it, but embedded within the public, and what are the consequences there? How does that then impact both the material and structural realities and our political subjectivities? How we come to imagine ourselves as political subjects in the public, right, with rights, and what it does to how we understand the public realm as well? Maybe I’ll leave it there, see if there’s any follow up questions.
[00:24:06] Jon M: Yeah. It sounds as though what you’re talking about right now is the suite, of people being viewed as consumers, of parents being envisioned as consumers rather than as citizens, using citizens in the broadest sense of the term. Is that right?
[00:24:23] Ujju A: Yes, exactly. And so that’s in this kind of framework of post-Brown realignment, I’m trying to think through, right, we are often told that two significant elements of neoliberal restructuring are the use of market-based logics to organize public goods and services and secondly, the cultivation of a consumer citizenship.
And if we kind of follow from 1955, this is essentially what is established. So there’s a marketplace established both as within public education, it’s a way that rights come to be structured, but also as you’re saying and noting the cultivation of this consumer citizenship, how we understand ourselves and how we’re able to assert our rights comes to the fore and really structures this idea of moving from citizenship and how, for example, Black freedom struggles we’re envisioning and fighting for public education as a way, as a modality of citizenship and belonging to a consumer citizen.
[00:25:29] Amy H-L: So you talk about how choice includes the power of schools to exclude. Is there a way that school choice can exist without exclusion?
[00:25:44] Ujju A: That is a good question. I mean, I think in some ways it makes us think about if capitalism can exist without exclusion, right. To me, I mean, if we understand choice as a mechanism through which a marketplace is established, through which we move from being citizens to consumers, I think it is hard to imagine a system of choice without exclusion. One of the theorists that I lean heavily on in my work, and I got to talk to you all about last time I was on the show, is the critical legal studies, critical race scholar Cheryl Harris. And part of what she traces in her theory of whiteness as property that is really, again, that I kind of pair with Friedman, to think together with them, is, what she kind of shows, is that the common nucleus of both whiteness as a structure and form of power that is made and remade in the United States and of private property, even as the legal definitions of both have changed over time, is the right to exclude, that the right to exclude has been consistently, historically, the common nucleus of both whiteness and of private property over time, historically, again, even as those categories have changed. And so if we think about Harris informing how we envision the possibility and limitations of choice, I think it helps us also understand not only what is being produced and reproduced through the exclusionary mechanisms and guarantees of choice, but also its limitations within a capitalist system. I think within a socialist system, that’s maybe a different question, but within the capitalist society in which we live, I think that choice has very limited possibilities in terms of equity. Could it, again, I think it might be about that third category of the managerialist approach, could we mitigate inequality or do we expand our imaginary around maybe a different kind of possibility altogether?
[00:28:01] Jon M: So Kamar Samuels, the new chancellor of the New York City Department of Education, was the superintendent in District Three. Do you have a sense of how he’ll approach integration of schools citywide?
[00:28:15] Ujju A: Chancellor Samuels, I think, is part of an administration that is really exciting in this moment, that promises a lot of possibility, and I think the question is what that possibility will look like in terms of implementation. So I don’t have specific comments about Chancellor Samuels. What I am hopeful about is this new administration and what it might mean in terms of how we, not just reimagine but re-experience and rebuild a public. And significant to that, I think, is how we center ideas of governance and, for example, radical municipalism.
[00:29:03] Jon M: Can you talk briefly about what radical municipalism means?
[00:29:09] Ujju A: Well, I should say I’m not an expert on radical municipalism, but my understanding of it is that it grows out of work that, for example, people have done in cooperation, Jackson has done in Jackson, Mississippi, that the LA Tenants Union is building. Also looking to other models of, for example, experiments that have been tried out in Barcelona and other places and thinking really about, kind of, this idea of both co-governance and dual power and how we can achieve popular democratic governance and make sure that that version of co-governance, the balance is very much rooted in popular governance and that that outside piece of deep organizing and rooted organizing has a lot of leverage.
And so what are the mechanisms then through which it grows? That leverage is, for example, through mechanisms like popular assemblies, participatory budgeting, other structures that I think have informed Mayor Mamdani’s campaign and platforms, right. So it’s not just about implementing the reforms, but thinking about what those reforms, how those reforms live, what they mean, and how they’re governed. Because any policy needs tweaks in terms of implementation, and so who’s making those tweaks? Is it just those who are sitting in a particular seat of power, or is it the actual communities who are impacted by them?
And I think that is one… in many ways for me, then, this represents the counter to what choice does. So if choice atomizes us, I mean, so I look at choice historically. I look at it practically through policy, but I also look at it anthropologically. And one of the things that I try and trace is how choice creates a particular set of political subjectivities, a way of moving through the world in each of us that ends up being about individual mobility or individual survival, right. And, at best, it creates a myopic, kind of, a narrow way of understanding the world that is potentially joined with others, but it really creates a public in which we are disconnected from each other rather than a public in which we are connected by each other, which again, radical municipalism presents an opportunity of and where our political imaginary can continue to grow, where we can continue to be transformed. And it was this potential that I also witnessed at the Head Start Center in the organizing amongst the women. So it wasn’t just that choice had killed all of that potential. But also thinking about in the tradition, for example, of SNCC, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, where do we see that potential? Where do we see the infrastructures already existing of the organizing in the world that we need?
[00:32:21] Amy H-L: Thank you. Ujju Aggarwal, author of Unsettling Choice: Race, Rights, and the Partitioning of Public Education.
[00:32:30] Ujju A: Well, thank you both so much, truly, for the work you do, for having me join you in conversation, and for what your show consistently, I think, provides in terms of alternatives, hope, example, practice, and theory coming together.
[00:32:47] Jon M: Thank you for your comments. And thank you, listeners. If you found this podcast worthwhile, please share it with friends and colleagues. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and give us a rating or a review. This helps others to find the show. Check out our website for more episodes and videos and to subscribe to our emails.
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