Master's Tools and the Master's House: A Historical Analysis Exploring the Myth of Educating for Democracy in the United States

TL;DR: Zinn as discussed by the authors examines more than one hundred sites that promote incorrect interpretations of American history and raises questions about what Americans choose to commemorate during the American civil war and the early 20th century.

Abstract: The book, the result of six years of activism and research into school and urban reform in Chicago, begins with a brief overview of neoliberalism. Following this, the first chapter presents Lipman’s central argument: neoliberal urban and education policies, supported and informed by White supremacist ideologies, displace African American and Latino/a working class communities as part of a project to attract urban investment. The second chapter expands upon this claim, linking post-Fordist global capitalism and White supremacy to school reform and urban policies in Chicago. The third chapter presents an analysis of the Chicago Public School Board’s Renaissance 2010 policy document and exposition of how policy actors use it together with federal education policies to further the marketization and disinvestment of public education in Chicago. In the fourth chapter, Lipman critiques mixed income housing and schooling policies and the discourses that underpin both while building further support for her claim that urban reform and school reform are part of the same neoliberal urban initiative. She finds that while framed in egalitarian rhetoric, mixed-income urban development and education policies are implicitly supported by racist discourses that disavow the structural problems facing African American and Latino/a working class communities. Moreover, the recodification of poverty as a cultural problem devalues these communities as spaces of intellectual and cultural production

TL;DR: The authors argued that deeply embedded within racialized policy discourses is not merely a concern about disproportionality or inequality, but also a concern with the bodies of Black people, the signification of their Blackness, and the threat posed by the Black to the educational well-being of other students.

TL;DR: Dahl as mentioned in this paper argues that the legitimacy of the American Constitution derives solely from its utility as an instrument of democratic governance, and argues that due to the context in which it was conceived, the constitution came to incorporate significant antidemocratic elements.

TL;DR: Wilson as mentioned in this paper applies an exciting new analytic framework to three politically fraught social problems: the persistence of the inner-city ghetto, the plight of low-skilled black males, and the fragmentation of the African American family.