School Choice, Exclusion, and Race Taming in Milwaukee: A Meta-ethnography

Abstract

This article presents a meta-ethnography (Urrieta Jr and Noblit (eds), Cultural constructions of identity: meta ethnography and theory, Oxford University Press. 2018. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190676087.001.0001) of school choice across education sectors in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA. A site of intense contention and experimentation around school choice, Milwaukee constitutes a unique case that can offer insights into similar education reforms increasingly being implemented on a global scale. In synthesizing six book-length qualitative research studies, I engage key differences among the texts and then offer a lines-of-argument synthesis (Noblit and Hare, Meta-ethnography: synthesizing qualitative studies. Sage Publications, 1988. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781412985000) that reinterprets the studies as stories about whiteness’ right to exclude across school sectors (Aggarwal, in: Fernandes (ed), Feminists rethink the neoliberal state: inequality, exclusion, and change, New York University Press, 2018. https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479800155.003.0003; Harris, Harv Law Rev 106(8):1707–1791, 1993. https://doi.org/10.2307/1341787). Lastly, I engage various layers of interpretation in the studies (via the interconnected avenues of theory, researcher positionality, and methodology) to describe race taming discourses that attempt to make race, racism, and white supremacy manageable and containable through insufficient education interventions. I suggest that both exclusion and race taming can offer cautionary lessons about the tenuousness and possibilities of interest convergence during a time of apparently renewed cross-racial support for public education in the contemporary Milwaukee education scene.