Terri S. Wilson

School Marketing as a Sorting Mechanism: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Charter School Websites

An emerging body of research has explored “supply side” questions of school choice, or how schools and systems shape enrollment through locational decisions, recruitment, and marketing. This study focuses on how school websites market and communicate the distinct missions of charter schools to prospective families. Through a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of 55 elementary charter school websites in one demographically diverse metropolitan area, we explore how school websites operate as discursive texts that signal the potential “fit” between particular schools and particular families. Guided by a critical discourse analysis framework, we emphasize how websites (a) employ implicit discourses of race, culture, and diversity; (b) draw on different meanings of academic achievement, and (c) emphasize different ideologies of individualized learning. We argue that websites act as one mechanism that contributes to the segmentation and differentiation of an emerging local marketplace of school options.

Contesting the Public School Reconsidering Charter Schools as Counterpublics

Although technically open to all, charter schools often emphasize distinctive missions that appeal to particular groups of students and families. These missions, especially ones focusing on ethnic, linguistic, and cultural differences, also contribute to segregation between schools. Such schools raise normative questions about the aims of education. Are they a troubling retreat from an integrated public school system? Or are they new public spaces relevant to the needs of certain communities? Through a case study of one potentially counterpublic school, I describe how this school embodied aspects of public-ness. I argue that a counterpublic framework—in emphasizing shared decision making, expanded discursive space, and a publicist orientation—offers resources for considering under what circumstances distinctive schools might serve public goals.

Charter Schools, Free Schools, and School Choice

This chapter focuses on the philosophical questions and tensions involved in the phenomenon of charter schools (United States), free schools (United Kingdom), and similar schools that give students and parents greater choice within public school systems. After a brief review of these reforms and their shared rationales, I focus on the philosophical questions about the purposes, aims, and values raised by autonomous schools of choice. This chapter reviews these philosophical questions along two broad dimensions: (1) rights, pluralism, and autonomy and (2) democracy, justice, and equity. I conclude by sketching out implications of these philosophical questions for choice policy and practice and some recommendations for employing philosophical frameworks in the analysis of these policies.