Charter schools as sites of neoliberal cultural reproduction: Prestige, performance, and inequity in the International Baccalaureate era

Abstract

Set in a racially and economically marginalized South Bronx middle school during the late charter school era, and informed by a retrospective autoethnography, this study engages curriculum inquiry to examine how the International Baccalaureate (IB) program operates within the racialized governance of neoliberal education reforms, where symbolic prestige coexists with—and often obscures—racial capitalism and neoliberal racism (Lipman, 2011). Drawing on currere as a narrative and temporal mode of inquiry, this study uses narrative vignettes constructed from field notes, written reflections, institutional documents, and embodied memory to illuminate how the IB’s cosmopolitan rhetoric, embodied in the school’s “RISE” core values (Responsibility, Integrity, Scholarship, Excellence) circulates across the manifest and latent curriculum. While the prescribed curriculum and accountability structures promise rigor and global citizenship, the latent curriculum enforces neoliberal disciplinary norms and conceals structural inequities, including segregated facilities, underinvestment, and the erasure of students’ lived experiences. Framed through theories of cultural capital and social reproduction (Bourdieu, 1973, 1986), in dialogue with intersectional and decolonial frameworks (Fregoso Bailón, 2025; Kumashiro, 2012; Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995), the study advances narrative as a method of ideological critique and argues for decolonial approaches to teacher preparation and policy grounded in culturally sustaining pedagogy, critical reflexivity, and material redistribution.

Keywords

References

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