The partitioning of public education

Public schools are one of the last remaining universal public goods in the United States—and are also some of our most unequal institutions. In Unsettling Choice, Ujju Aggarwal explores how the expansion of choice-based programs led to greater inequality and segregation in a gentrifying New York City neighborhood during the years following the Great Recession, mobilizing mechanisms rooted in market logics to recruit families with economic capital on their side while solidifying a public sphere that increasingly resembled the private. Here, Aggarwal is joined in conversation with Sabina Vaught.

Ujju Aggarwal is assistant professor of anthropology and experiential learning at The New School. She is author of Unsettling Choice: Race, Rights, and the Partitioning of Public Education and coeditor of What’s Race Got to Do with It? How Current School Reform Policy Maintains Racial and Economic Inequality.

Sabina Vaught is professor at the University of Pittsburgh and director of the Kinloch Commons for Critical Pedagogy and Leadership. Vaught is coauthor of The School-Prison Trust and author of Compulsory: Education and the Dispossession of Youth in a Prison School.  

Episode references:

Ruth Wilson Gilmore

Christina Heatherton

Cindy Katz

Selma James

João Costa Vargas

Morgan Talty / Fire Exit

Praise for the book:

“A must-read to understand the racialized violence inherent within one of the most fundamental aspects of education in the United States: the logic of choice.”
—Damien Sojoyner

“Read this book, and be moved and transformed.”
—Sabina Vaught

Unsettling Choice: Race, Rights, and the Partitioning of Public Education by Ujju Aggarwal is available from University of Minnesota Press.