"The Voice of Choice" - Transpacific Educational Exchanges in the Neo-Liberal Era

This talk explores the visits of two African American proponents of parental school choice.

Wednesday 18 October 2023

Presenter: Professor Hilary Moss

This talk explores the visits of two African American proponents of parental school choice from Milwaukee, Wisconsin to Aotearoa New Zealand in the 1990s. The first, Polly Williams, arrived in Auckland in 1993 as a visiting fellow at the Auckland Institution of Technology at the invitation of neo-liberal businessman, Roger Kerr, and his associates at the Business Roundtable. The second, Howard Fuller, came to Aotearoa New Zealand in 1999 at the invitation of the Māori Education Commission, the Independent Schools Council, and the Ministry of Education. By examining the conversations, contributions, and critiques of parental school choice advanced by Black and Indigenous activists and educators, this talk revises the dominant account of the ascendancy of school choice in Aotearoa New Zealand, which has traditionally spotlighted neo-liberal disciples of American free market economists, particularly Milton Friedman and James Buchanan. Moreover, this talk argues, foregrounding less well-known episodes and historical actors involved in other transpacific educational exchanges also repositions Aotearoa New Zealand as a critical locus in other global educational reform movements, including those for equal educational opportunity; language rights; and cultural preservation.

Hilary Moss is Professor of History, Black Studies, and Education Studies at Amherst College; and a Resident Scholar at the Stout; and a Visiting Scholar in the School of History, Philosophy, Political Science, and International Relations. She is also the President of the History of Education Society (HES), an international society devoted to promoting the teaching of history across institutions. Her talk will draw from her current project, There Goes the Neighbourhood School: A Transnational and Comparative History of Zoning and Choice in late 20^th Century Aotearoa New Zealand and the United States, which will be the first to situate its late twentieth-century embrace of school choice within a transnational frame. She is also the author of Schooling Citizens: The African American Struggle for Education in Antebellum America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), which received the 2010 Outstanding Book Award from the History of Education Society.