School Choice, Charter Schools, and Minneapolis: Exploring the Privatization and Marketization of Schooling in Our City

The class will be a majority reading and discussion group with the potential to get involved in some education activism, through our class or through other projects that are already in the works in the area. I will have interesting and relevant readings prepared. However, the class will be a project of all involved and all will have a say in what we read, discuss, and do together.

We will work together to understand how the impact of school privatization via charter or contract schools, and other trends and policies that seek to transform public education to align with neoliberal and free market ideologies. We will discuss how this transformation benefits/negatively impacts different groups of people in the cities, the possibilities for radical change in the way we think about educating young people, and the relevance of the public school system in its current form to our daily lives and desires. There are many ways we can explore these issues including but not limited to:

- privatization and the increasing role of philanthropy in public education

- the commercialization of schooling and students and parents as consumers

- the increasing hierarchization of public schooling (i.e. magnet schools) and unequal distribution of resources

This is an ambitious class with many fruitful directions to take - directions that we can decide on as a group based on our collective interests.