Sociology Department Colloquium: Mary Pattillo

Date
Thu February 18th 2016, 12:30 - 1:45pm
Location
Mendenhall
Sociology Department Colloquium: Mary Pattillo

Please join us for a colloquium being given by Mary Pattillo, Harold Washington Professor of Sociology and African American Studies at Northwestern University.

School Choice?

School choice is promoted as one strategy to improve educational outcomes for African Americans. Key themes in Black school choice politics are empowerment, control, and agency. Using qualitative interviews with poor and working-class Black parents in Chicago, Pattillo will speak on the question: How well do the themes of empowerment, agency, and control characterize the experiences of low-income African American parents tasked with putting their children in schools? Also, what kind of political positions emerge from parents’ everyday experiences given the ubiquitous language of school choice? In the end, parents’ stories convey limited and weak empowerment, limited individual agency, and no control. Their perspectives conjure policy frameworks and political ideologies that require a discussion of entitlements and provision, rather than choice.