ABSTRACT
While in lockdown during the COVID pandemic, I tracked a group of affluent parents in Ann Arbor, Michigan (U.S.), incensed by public educators’ choice to shift learning to virtual classrooms. They seemed to regard public education as a “service” like any other, subsidised by their tax dollars and therefore answerable to them. Rejecting the democratic ideals of public education and disparaging the expertise of teachers, unions, and school board representatives, they tacitly embraced the corporate paradigm that regards public schools as purveyors of goods and services, beholden to customers. I studied this group of consumer-minded parents, who had titled themselves Ann Arbor Reasonable Return (A2R2), from October 2020 through May 2021 by attending Board of Education (BOE) meetings where the onslaught of their divisive letters, read aloud, demoralised teachers. I reviewed recordings of these presentations and combed through scores of Facebook posts, enriching my analysis with insights gleaned from scholarship in education and sociology. My engagement with this uprising of the upper-crust was more than scholarly: I hired a Donald J. Trump impersonator to read excerpts of these scornful criticisms, recorded his diatribe, and inserted this video into a BOE meeting to create the artwork Nice White Moderates (https://rebekahmodrak.com/work/nice-white-moderates-videos/), and to hold a mirror up to the reactionary mindset employed by this ostensibly “liberal” cohort of white upper middle-class parents. Then, I introduced this work into Ann Arbor-based Facebook groups to elicit a broader and, I hoped, more honest conversation about the toll such tactics and self-interested assumptions take on our community.
