Dear colleagues and friends,
You are cordially invited to join the upcoming webinar/seminar on the Marketization and Privatization in Education seminar series. The next session, with Dr. Kristen Buras (bio below), is on Charter Schools, Race, and Urban Space Where the Market Meets Grassroots Resistance (abstract below).
This seminar will take place at 1pm (PDT)/ 3pm (CDT) on April 7th (Tue), 2015. There are two possible methods of joining the seminar.
(1) If you are attending in person in Urbana-Champaign, please come to #22 in College of Education, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
(2) If you are joining the webinar, please go to http://bluejeans.com/ and click “Join meeting” as a participant and enter Meeting ID: 305154344 Please join us 10 minutes prior to the meeting time so that we can ensure everyone’s audio and video work properly.
For webinar participants, please (1) mute your microphone, (2) turn off your video feed, and (3) do not share screen. If you would like to ask questions or need technical assistance, please use the 'CHAT' typing function.
**To give us a better idea of how many attendees/participants we may have, please RSVP by filling out the form:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1EIbEi3bA5HuAkVhMLdVAZQ5qOn7EWSP9RjKM3-ZfY8g/viewform?c=0&w=1&usp=mail_form_link
For questions or other assistance, please send a message to Ee-Seul Yoon (eeseul@gmail.com) or Dwayne Cover (dcover@alumni.ubc.ca).
Hope you can join us.
Regards,
Ee-Seul Yoon and Christopher Lubienski​ at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Dwayne Cover at the University of British Columbia
Abstract
Charter schools have been promoted as an equitable and innovative solution to the problems plaguing urban schools. Advocates claim that charter schools benefit working-class students of color by offering them access to a “portfolio” of school choices. In Charter Schools, Race, and Urban Space, Kristen Buras presents a very different account. Her case study of New Orleans—where veteran teachers were fired en masse and the nation’s first all-charter school district was developed—shows that such reform is less about the needs of racially oppressed communities and more about the production of an urban space economy in which white entrepreneurs capitalize on black children and neighborhoods. In this revealing book, Buras draws on critical theories of race, political economy, and space, as well as a decade of research on the ground to expose the criminal dispossession of black teachers and students who have contributed to New Orleans’ culture and history. Mapping federal, state, and local policy networks, she shows the city’s landscape has been reshaped by a strategic venture to privatize public education. She likewise chronicles grassroots efforts to defend historic schools and neighborhoods against this assault, revealing a commitment to equity and place and articulating a vision of change that is sure to inspire heated debate among communities nationwide.
Bio
Kristen Buras was a Wisconsin-Spencer Fellow and received her doctorate from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Policy Studies at Georgia State University in Atlanta. She is the author of Charter Schools, Race, and Urban Space: Where the Market Meets Grassroots Resistance, which chronicles the past decade of education reform in New Orleans. Additionally, she is coauthor of Pedagogy, Policy, and the Privatized City: Stories of Dispossession and Defiance from New Orleans, which was recognized for its outstanding contribution by the Curriculum Studies Division of the American Educational Research Association (AERA). Read more at http://education.gsu.edu/profile/kristen-buras/
* If you are interested in buying her book, please email me: eeseul@gmail.com.
