Unsettling Choice: Race, Rights, and the Partitioning of Public Education

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 about the competition and exclusion that choice engenders? Unsettling Choice 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.

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 mobilized mechanisms rooted in market logics to recruit families with economic capital on their side, solidifying a public sphere that increasingly resembled the private.

As Unsettling Choice shows, these struggles over public schools were entrapped within neoliberal regimes that exceeded privatization and ensured exclusion even as they were couched in language of equity, diversity, care, and rights. This book 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 justice, and a public that remains to be won.

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