ABSTRACT
Charter schools have been a popular approach to education policy and reform. Supported historically by a unified—yet presently fracturing—coalition of policy-makers on both the political left and right, charter schools have solidified their presence on educational landscapes. Despite mixed results on standard measures of educational achievement, charter school growth remains constant. As part of what Apple terms conservative modernization, charter schools are undergirded by powerful interest groups and represent an ideological and political movement. This chapter aims to trace how white supremacy is operative in the charter school movement by focusing on what the author terms actually existing racism (AER). Actually existing racism is a play on Brenner and Theodore’s notion of “actually existing neoliberalism,” which charts the differing permutations of neoliberalism across varying spaces. AER relies on critical race theory to illuminate the spatially differing, yet ideologically connecting, forms of racism that persist. As such, this chapter redirects policy analysis that centers political economy while evading a larger articulation of the racial antagonisms upon which neoliberalism is founded. Comparing the choice movements in Arizona and Louisiana, this chapter illustrates how a critical race policy analysis uncovers the “threadbare lie” of race neutrality in reform implementation by deploying the critical race constructs of critique of liberalism and whiteness as property.
