Market Movements (African American Involvement in School Voucher Reform)

Winner of the 2009 Critics Choice Book Award of the American Educational Studies Association (AESA)

Through careful ethnographic research, Market Movements represents community leaders, school officials, and most importantly, African American working class families who have used vouchers as a means of removing their children from public schools they deemed unacceptable. The book works to discern the overlaps and tensions between the educational visions of African American voucher families and those of powerful conservative educational forces in U.S. society which purport to be allied with them. To the extent that there are points of divergence with the educational right, and points of convergence with educational progressives, this book provides a hopeful message and a practical vision. It seeks to accomplish some of the critical empirical and conceptual groundwork that is necessary in order to renew the increasingly fractious relations between those social actors—teachers, communities of color, critical researchers, and labor unions—most likely to defend and expand previous social democratic victories.