ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to explore why it is difficult to make the symbolic and material forms of liberal antiracism into objects of critical analysis and to consider liberal school reform as a sociocultural "practice of power". It proposes that liberal reformers infuse the politics of inclusion with authority as they make sense of their work in terms of its moral superiority. The chapter argues that it is difficult to define liberal school reform in terms of its political authority. It examines how conceptions of power in critical education research obscure changing relations between activism and the nonprofit sector. The living tradition of liberal school reform is hard to detect in critical scholarship on education politics. Another interpretive framework that stymies theorization of liberal school reform as an exercise of political power grows from the self-representations of the Center for Educational Equity (CEE).
