The Money Chase: The Role of Racial Innuendo and Marketized Discourse in Courting Private Dollars

Background/Context: The business and philanthropic sectors have been a persistent force in shaping U.S. schools. Recently, they have used their resources to advance policies that embody newer principles of industry--reforms that suggest that competition, choice, and deregulation can spur improvement and effectiveness. This has most notably included deep investments in the proliferation of charter schools, surfacing questions as to the sector's reliance on private dollars as well as the equitable and democratic impact of advancing this manifestation of neoliberal reform. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: While scholars have elucidated the role of business and philanthropic funding in promoting charter schools, less is known about how the well-substantiated connections between charters and the private sector have been facilitated or how discourse--the ideas, representations, and argumentation conveyed in acts of communication--is mobilized to create a rationale for support. To date, research has typically examined the discourse and messaging intended for families navigating choice settings. Yet, how these depictions are crafted for donors, who typically inhabit positions of economic and social power and are critical actors in charter growth, remain comparatively less understood. Research Design: This study fills this empirical gap and investigates the tactics used to solicit donor investment by charter management organizations (CMOs). It uses a conceptual framework that synthesizes tenets from the research on neoliberal policy networks and the sociology of race to enable a multifaceted analysis of the discursive tactics used to secure donor support while attending to the often-nuanced ways in which race may be invoked in those efforts. Methodologically, this study follows an embedded case study design to investigate the tactics deployed by a population of CMOs in Northern California and relies on observational and documentary data to examine how CMOs design and execute donor outreach and the resonant messages they aim to elevate. Conclusions/Recommendations: I find that CMOs elevated business-friendly themes related to workforce preparation, impact, and return on investment in their outreach and at times commodified their constituents by offering their labor as exchangeable resources to elevate donor profiles. Simultaneously, CMOs advanced color-evasive discourse, relying on deficit-laden racial narratives to create a reinforcing and complementary rationale for intervention. These findings suggest that CMOs relied on market and racialized logics as the persuasive fodder for donor investment, leaving the economic and racial status quo--and the democratic and equity implications it perpetuates--unchallenged.