Annotated Bibliography On Equality

American Educational Research Journal http://aerj.aera.net Reconstructing Equality on New Political Ground: The Politics of Representation in the Charter School Debate at the University of California, San Diego
Lisa Rosen and Hugh Mehan Am Educ Res J 2003; 40; 655 DOI: 10.3102/00028312040003655 The online version of this article can be found at: http://aer.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/40/3/655

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On the basis of a case study of the controversy surrounding the building of a charter school at the University of California, San Diego, in response to the elimination of affirmative action in University of California admissions, the authors describe the meaningmaking process by which that campus established new procedures for promoting educational equality and constructed new meanings to justify those policies and to resolve conflicts about their legitimacy. The charter school was created after a contentious public debate, in which the concept for the school and tacit definitions of equality, of social responsibility, and of the university itself became objects of contestation. The analysis reveals (a) the constitutive social processes by which particular meanings of equality and social responsibility are constructed and institutionalized, and (b) the role of higher education policy in reconstituting meanings of equality in the wake of affirmative action’s political retreat. KEYWORDS: affirmative action, educational equity, politics of representation.
These include (a) a national political context that is characterized, on the one hand, by the rejuvenation of conservative ideas by the New Right and, on the other hand, by an education reform movement that has arisen partly in response to criticism of public education by New Right groups; (b) a state context defined by a series of political decisions that eroded both the credibility and the legality of affirmative action in California; and (c) a local context that is characterized by a historical disconnect between the elite UCSD campus and the broader San Diego community, particularly its poor neighborhoods and racial and ethnic minority communities. The National Context: The Rejuvenation of the Right The UCSD charter school debate occurred in the aftermath of the “conservative revolution” in the U.S. Congress, when the national political conversation was focused on reevaluating many of the liberal social programs instituted in the 1960s, particularly welfare and affirmative action. President Bill Clinton declared, “The era of Big Government is over,” and politicians from California governor Pete Wilson to House speaker Newt Gingrich trumpeted “personal responsibility” rather than state intervention as the solution to problems of social inequality. The following statement by Connerly is representative of this position:
It is not any government