Education systems in all societies are designed to serve as the primary institutions that reproduce dominant social and economic orders, customs and beliefs systems. In U.S. public education, this makes schooling a function of capitalism, white supremacy and their intrinsic restraints on democracy and social equality. Current efforts to reform primary and secondary public education are based within the violence of white supremacy aligned with the broader brutality of neoliberalism. Elite, Eurocentric education policymakers continue to espouse a language of equity while simultaneously maintaining private elite schools for their own children, spaces that look nothing like the ones they are designing for the masses. This results in a hyper intensification of the sorting of students based on their “value” as defined by a neoliberal worldview steeped in white supremacy. In this system, those identified to have the least amount of value are ultimately deemed disposable.
This article is composed of several components that seem on the surface distinct but are actually quite connected, and will illustrate the relationship between education reform policies and the lives of children and communities of color in the United States. Essential to this project are selected audio interviews with some of the most powerful U.S. critical education scholars and activists of our time. Alongside our own narrative, we share their voices and stories, collected by Education Radio[1] from July 2011 through June 2012. The two authors of this article were producers for Education Radio, which documented testimony and analysis of the impact of U.S. education reform policies on schools and communities. We have selected pieces of that audio from the Education Radio collection as a way to weave together a narrative of a public education system that is structured—both historically and contemporarily—within the violence of white supremacy. Our hope is that the voices we share will both enhance the story we are telling as well as connect readers more deeply to the issues we discuss.