Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
For decades now, school choice has been growing in urban areas around the world, but we ve not yet deeply analyzed the ways that such programs interact with the complicated politics of race and ethnicity in contemporary multicultural cities. This book offers a close look at such questions through the case of the twenty-year struggle within Toronto s black community to introduce black-focused curricula and schools, which culminated in the opening of the publicly funded Africentric Alternative School in Toronto in 2009. The authors offer a detailed analysis of the policy process and practices involved in the battle for and creation of the school, and they draw lessons from it for the politics of education in other cities."
Synopsis
The empirical focus of this book is on the twenty year struggle by parents and members of the Black community in Toronto to introduce an Africentric Alternative School (AAS) with Black-focused curricula. It brings together a seemingly disparate series of events that emerged from equity and multicultural narratives about the establishment of the school - violence, anti-racism and race-based statistics, policy entrepreneurs, and the re-birth of alternative schools in Toronto - to illustrate how these events ostensibly functioned through neoliberal choice mechanisms and practices. Gulson and Webb show how school choice can represent and manifest the hopes and fears, contestations and settlements of contemporary racial biopolitics of education in multicultural cities.