Farver, S.  (2016, March 23). Review of What’s race got to do with it? How current school reform policy 

maintains racial and economic inequality by Picower, B., & Mayorga, E. (Eds.). Education Review, 23. 
http://dx.doi.org/10.14507/er.v23.1918 

March 23, 2016 ISSN 1094-5296 

 

 
Picower, B. & Mayorga, E. (Eds.). (2015). What’s race got to do with it? How current 

school reform policy maintains racial and economic inequality. New York, NY: 
Peter Lang.  

 
Pp. vii+ 208                                                                                             ISBN: 978-1-4331-2883-7 
                

Reviewed by Scott D. Farver 
Michigan State University 
United States  

 
Outside of courses that focus 

specifically on matters of race and equity in 
education, I often feel isolated in my doctoral 
studies when I discuss these issues. In an era 
that is often described as ‘postracial,’ there are 
many who discount race as a determining 
factor in educational and economic policy, 
pointing to the election of President Barack 
Obama as an example of how we as a nation 
have “moved past race” (Alemán, Salazar, 
Rorrer, & Parker, 2011, p. 479). Reading Bree 
Picower and Edwin Mayorga’s new edited 
volume What’s race got to do with it? How current 
school reform policy maintains racial and economic 
inequality (2015), I felt like I was “home,” 
surrounded by others who not only do not buy 
into this myth, but actively resist and fight 
against it. Picower and Mayorga gathered eight 
scholar-activists from around the country for 
this book to answer the question posed in the 
title—what does race have to do with things 

http://dx.doi.org/10.14507/er.v23.1918


Education Review /Reseñas Educativas 
 

 

2 

like racial and economic inequality? In a 
nutshell, everything.  

 This book is the result of over a 
decade of work Picower and Mayorga 
accomplished as leaders of a grassroots activist 
group called the New York Collective of 
Radical Educators (NYCoRE). Building on 
monthly meetings (also titled What’s race got to 
do with it?) that allowed educators to engage in 
readings and discussions about racism’s role in 
school closings around the city, this book 
continues that work in “bringing together 
leading scholar activists’ voices on how race 
and neoliberalism work in sync to maintain 
inequality across the country” (p. 2).  

 As a result of these discussions, 
NYCoRE members visualized the mixture of 
neoliberalism and race as a “Hydra,” in 
reference to the many-headed monster of 
Greek mythology. That Hydra was difficult to 
defeat, as every time one head was removed, 
two heads would grow in its place. NYCoRE 
connected the Greek Hydra to the market-
based reforms they were experiencing in New 
York and viewed reforms such as mayoral 
control of schools and high-stakes testing as 
heads to a modern-day Hydra of educational 
reform. The group found that when their 
focus was centered on just one head (or 
reform), they lost sight of the central body (or 
Hydra) driving such reform. They also found 
that, as Hercules did when he needed his 
nephew to defeat the Hydra, NYCoRE needed 
allies to address the central body driving the 
many-heads of reform that they viewed as 
species of neoliberalism and to address the 
issue at its core. As NYCoRE members 
continued their work, they realized the ideals 
of neoliberalism driving such market-based 
reforms were intricately tied to race.  

Though only one author explicitly uses 
Critical Race Theory (CRT) as a grounding 
framework in this collection, (David Stovall), 
this collection seems to center on a key tenet 
of CRT, that racism is an “ordinary, not 

aberrational” part of our society (Delgado & 
Stefancic, 2012, p. 7), which makes it appear 
“normal and natural to people in this culture” 
(Ladson-Billings, 1998, p. 11). Since race and 
racism are acknowledged by CRT to interact 
through and within other forms of 
subordination, this book highlights how 
neoliberal policies in particular interact with 
racism to continue educational inequities. This 
book, then, continues the efforts of the 
NYCoRE in order to gain wider support from 
others to help defeat this modern-day beast. 

 Picower and Mayorga have linked the 
chapters in this text around two central 
grounding theories and ideas, both of which I 
explore in turn in this review: neoliberalism 
and White supremacy. While grounding their 
work in a variety of frameworks, the authors 
in this book all link their ideas to these two 
theories by exploring individual reforms taking 
place in education throughout the country. 
The authors show how forces of neoliberalism 
and racism collude within those reforms, while 
also giving examples of how some are 
currently resisting such reforms, which I also 
describe. The authors build upon the Hydra 
metaphor to show a connectedness that would 
not be possible reading these chapters in 
isolation.  

Neoliberalism 

 The editors set the stage for the rest of 
the text and ground their work in Kumashiro’s 
(2008) definition of neoliberalism—a capitalist 
ideology that sees markets and competition as 
the best way to bring about social change. In 
such a system, public services become private, 
which, because of the belief in the power of 
market forces, should ensure the “best” and 
most “efficient” products for the 
consumers—while at the same time cutting 
public services, wages, and standing staunchly 
in the face of unions. Such neoliberal policies 
use ideas such as meritocracy and 
accountability to further their agenda of 
privatizing public goods and services, leading 



Review of What’s race got to do with it? by S. Farver   

 

 

3 

to further inequities in education, which this 
book exposes and fights against.   

 Picower and Mayorga (2015) explain 
how such neoliberal ideals “use market-based 
rhetoric to take power from the majority of 
people and concentrate it in the hands of few 
while masking the process that allowed this to 
happen” (p. 5). As such, individual choice is a 
key component of neoliberalism—which 
praises those who succeed in such a system, 
and punishes those who do not. Pauline 
Lipman (2015) challenges this fallacy in her 
examination of school closings in Chicago, 
where 50 neighborhood schools serving 
primarily African American and Latino/a low 
income students were shuttered, turned over 
to private operators, or converted to charter 
schools. For Lipman, the school closings in 
Chicago are the epitome of neoliberal failings 
that assault students, families, and 
communities of Color and are an extension of 
racist state abandonment of urban areas. 
Lipman describes how these decisions to 
move towards a neoliberal privatization model 
of public education are justified as colorblind 
and that the school selected for closure just 
happen to disproportionally affect African 
Americans—an excuse she challenges 
throughout her chapter.  

 Aggarwal (2015) also examines how 
neoliberal reforms such as school choice do 
not just have racialized outcomes, but rather are 
organized through race and directly tied to ideas 
of individual rights in a capitalist state (p. 105). 
While Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 
required school desegregation, Brown v. Board of 
Education II in 1955 was supposed to answer 
‘how’ and ‘when’ that desegregation was 
supposed to happen. Aggarwal (2015) 
documents how school choice was an answer 
to this question of ‘how’ and ‘when,’ which 
resulted in the onus being placed on families 
instead of institutions. Aggarwal argues how 
the re-segregation of schools we see today is a 
result of such neoliberal reforms based on 
choice, which then blame families, students 

and communities for not making the ‘proper’ 
choices.  

 Neoliberalism and race are central to 
David Stovall’s (2015) chapter on mayoral 
control of schools as well. Using CRT, Stovall 
argues how neoliberalism linked with 
Whiteness is central to examples of mayors 
taking control over public schools in large 
cities across the country. Using Leonardo’s 
(2009) definition of Whiteness as an ideology 
that permeates Western thought and action, 
which leads to domination, Stovall’s chapter 
describes how this control stems from a belief 
from White power structures that community 
members cannot be trusted to make decisions 
about education. This mayoral control over 
education limits the ways in which residents 
can improve their education. It then paves the 
way for neoliberal policies such as charter 
schools, union busting, and merit-based 
teacher pay to sweep into schools with little or 
no resistance from a rubber-stamping board 
intent on keeping such a mayor happy. For 
Stovall (2015), schools under mayoral control 
“become the conduit for an illusion of 
progress for all, with the reality of progress for 
some” (p. 54).  

 Jones (2015) focuses his discussion on 
neoliberal reforms around issues of 
privatization of schools and the displacement 
of Black teachers by White ones. Jones 
examines how the neoliberal “business model” 
for education drives many new reforms—one 
where “innovation” lies with management, as 
workers themselves in this model could never 
be trusted to innovate, especially in a collective 
(i.e. unionized) sense (p. 85). Though public 
sector unions historically have helped lift 
African Americans out of poverty, in a 
business model of education where profit is 
the bottom line, unions become problematic, 
which results in workers being exploited and 
dehumanized. For Jones, this is directly linked 
to both themes of the book—neoliberal 
reforms and racism—as he writes, “there is no 



Education Review /Reseñas Educativas 
 

 

4 

way to challenge racism without challenging 
economic exploitation and vice versa” (p. 93).  

Whiteness and White Supremacy 

 Nevertheless, Picower and Mayorga 
(2015) want to be clear that the problems with 
current educational reforms do not lie solely 
with neoliberal policies, but are deeply 
entrenched in issues of race—specifically 
Whiteness. The editors find it critical to name 
this system and the process of domination as 
White supremacy—defined by them as “the way 
in which our society was founded and remains 
organized so that White people are at the top 
of the hierarchy of power” (p. 6). The White 
supremacy they discuss is not the hood-
wearing-KKK-members-type of supremacy, 
but a systematic one that positions Whiteness 
as being powerful and dominating all reaches 
of society. This idea of White domination over 
people of Color is directly tied to ideas of the 
Whiteness being seen as a property. This is 
based on Harris’(1993) idea that there are 
certain “privileges and benefits that 
accompany the status of being White [that] 
have become a valuable asset that whites 
sought to protect” (p. 6). With this in mind, 
there is a strong theme throughout the text 
that shows ties between neoliberal policies and 
the systematic protection of these privileges 
and benefits of Whiteness.  

 Wayne Au (2015) grounds his 
discussion on high-stakes testing around issues 
of Whiteness and White supremacy. Au 
describes how every current major reform is 
centered on ideas of student performance, 
which is measured by high-stakes standardized 
tests. Au describes how these modern 
standardized tests are rooted in the racist IQ 
testing and Eugenics movement of the early 
20th century. The idea of standardization in 
testing assumes objectivity in the tests, which 
implies that those individuals with the most 
merit who work the hardest do the best. When 
non-Whites perform poorly on tests, 
neoliberal logic would suggest such scores are 

the result of individual failings, not of 
institutional ones. Au challenges this and 
asserts that modern high-stakes standardized 
testing offers “a pathway to success for 
affluence and Whiteness at the cost of the 
failure of low-income students of Color” (p. 
33). Au argues these tests are not neutral but 
are central to supporting success of affluent 
White students.  

 White Supremacy is central to 
Terrenda White’s (2015) argument about 
reasons for rapid expansion of certain kinds of 
charter schools (“No Excuses” charters) in 
urban areas, especially those that focus on 
behavior management and “rigid adherence to 
dominant cultural norms and expectations” (p. 
125). White describes how neoliberal views of 
choice in schooling minimizes any focus on 
needed structural reforms to schooling while 
attributing trends such as discrimination in 
schools to choices made by families in a fair 
and open market. Despite the best intentions 
of actors within such schools, White finds that 
educator practices in these schools were in 
response to desires and interests of senior 
agents of the charter organization, who tend to 
be White. Using frameworks of abstract 
liberalism and cultural racism, White describes 
how Whiteness is constructed as an invisible 
norm, against which students of Color in these 
schools are routinely judged. This often results 
in a view of cultural deviance from teachers in 
such schools as well as a failure to value the 
community in which these schools operate.  

 Barbara Madeloni (2015) sees edTPA, 
a new teacher candidate assessment tool, as an 
instrument of White supremacy that requires 
obedience and acquiescence. For Madeloni, 
the core of Whiteness is “to deny voices of 
outrage and defiance, to call for politeness and 
moderation, to deny voices that name power, 
especially the power of Whiteness” (p. 177), 
and edTPA reproduces this. According to 
Madeloni, edTPA and its reliance on 
standardization based on Whiteness is limiting 
for teacher educators who wish to engage in 



Review of What’s race got to do with it? by S. Farver   

 

 

5 

social justice. It is clear that for Madeloni, 
edTPA reproduces the Whiteness already 
prevalent within our education system through 
many instances of standardization, which 
“requires there is a norm” (p. 168). For 
Madeloni, this is unacceptable, as this “norm” 
reproduces Whiteness. The use of tools such 
as edTPA is counter to any view of education 
that is non-static and non-linear, and denies 
voice, imagination, and embodied knowledge 
from student teachers.  

 In her chapter on philanthrocapitalism, 
Amy Brown (2015) writes about collusion of 
big corporate money with “good White 
saviors” (p. 155) in schools across the country. 
Brown examines how philanthropists in 
education are able to perpetuate hegemonic 
norms by controlling how their large 
donations must be sent. In her study, Brown 
finds a clear relation between such 
philanthropic capitalism, White supremacy, 
and economic inequality that depends on a 
certain racialized narrative (that students of 
Color are in need of saving) that, like other 
neoliberal reforms discuss throughout the text, 
seem to be neutral. Brown points out that 
even though donors can be framed as 
benevolent as they give to large non-profits 
aimed at helping students of Color, they also 
enjoy perks such as political influence and 
even tax deductions for their donations.  

With a background of studying issues 
of race and Whiteness through a CRT lens, I 
was expecting to read about White supremacy 
and how it continues to create inequality in the 
United States in relation to neoliberalism. The 
“normalcy” of Whiteness in the United States 
makes discussions that center on systemic 
White supremacy as defined by CRT scholars, 
difficult for some without this background. 
White readers of this text who may not have 
this background might have difficulty getting 
past ideas of structural racism and White 
supremacy as defined here because of a 
historical connection of White supremacy to 
overt racist actions. A typical reaction might 

be, “But I’m not a White supremacist!” Those 
without a background in CRT may shut down 
or resist these ideas, as their understanding of 
racism may be personal, not systemic, 
accountability. I do not see this as a critique of 
any of the authors in this volume by any 
means—rather a nod to how needed such 
discourse is, especially for future teachers.  

Resistance 

 Though the state of education in the 
United States might seem dire from the 
discussion above, I was most impressed with 
how each author gives examples of how 
students, families, and teachers are resisting 
these individual reform efforts in their own 
communities. Instead of being burdened by 
these neoliberal reforms wrapped in colorblind 
ideology, these communities are actively 
resisting such reforms and resistance is woven 
throughout the book. Jones, for example, 
discusses how unions in Chicago linked with 
families and made it impossible for the mayor 
to pit parents against teachers, which allowed 
for a successful strike to improve schools 
there. Lipman describes how organized 
resistance to school closings across the United 
States has demonstrated that parents are both 
a resource and a source of vision in education. 
David Stovall (2015) describes successful 
attempts to implement positive change in 
Chicago and Jackson, Mississippi with the 
advice that “the only thing that has a chance 
again the Hydra is the ability of residents to 
organize, plan, and implement strategies that 
support inclusive, democratic structures for 
decision making” (p. 55). Wayne Au presents a 
number of groups who are tired of high-stakes 
standardized testing and describes how the 
tremendously the resistance has grown. 
Among the many groups described by Au is 
the Badass Teachers Association, which has 
over 38,000 supporters, as well as other 
national groups nationwide that oppose such 
tests.  



Education Review /Reseñas Educativas 
 

 

6 

 Another unique asset this book 
provides is its inclusion of four articles of 
resistance in its appendix. Picower and 
Mayorga include in this collection a speech at a 
rally against school closures in Chicago by 
nine-year-old Asean Johnson, where he 
demands of the major of Chicago, Rahm 
Emanuel that, “EDUCATION IS OUR 
RIGHT, THAT IS WHY WE HAVE TO 
FIGHT!” (p. 185). There is also a 10-point 
platform of demands by a group of young 
activists in New York City called the 
A.C.T.I.O.N. project who see it as their 
mission to fight for a quality education, of 
which they feel they are being deprived. Also 
included is the mission and platform for a 
coalition of grassroots organizations called the 
Network of Teacher Activist Groups (TAG) 
and a statement from Stand Up Opt Out to 
the Chancellor of New York City schools as to 
why they decided not to administer 
standardized tests in 2014. These additions are 
crucial for readers to see, as they provide 
concrete examples of how others have resisted 
these neoliberal reforms in their own 
communities.  

 Because this book ties present 
neoliberal reforms directly to race and racism, 
I would highly recommend this book to be 
read by all teacher educators in doctoral 
seminars. There are perhaps many future 
teacher educators who are not as familiar with 
these ideas who would benefit from a 
thorough understanding of how race and class 
combine to maintain inequalities in education. 
I also believe this text present unique 
opportunities for readers to see real-world 
examples of how such policies are being 

resisted by communities throughout the 
country. While I believe this text might be too 
theoretical for undergraduate pre-service 
teachers early in their studies (i.e. first and 
second year students in teacher preparation 
programs), I would also recommend using this 
text with students immediately before or even 
during their student teaching placement. This 
book would help give those student teachers 
language and strategies to name and confront 
the policies they are seeing enacted in their 
student teaching placements. 

 This collection of author-activists 
present not only a thorough examination of 
the problems associated with neoliberal policy 
initiatives found in education today, but clearly 
show how they are grounded in certain ideas 
about race and Whiteness that cannot be 
untangled. Reading this text, I have a clearer 
understanding of the racist underpinnings of 
the seemingly race-neutral neoliberal education 
initiatives being forced upon many 
communities in our country. However, the 
takeaway from this volume should not be 
despair at the size and scope of the many-
headed Hydra of educational reform facing us 
today, but rather hope that through the 
collective resistance these authors highlight 
and engage in, the Hydra can be defeated. 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
References  
 
Alemán, E., Salazar, T., Rorrer, A., & Parker, L. (2011). Introduction to postracialism in U.S. public 

school and higher education settings: The politics of education in the age of Obama. Peabody 
Journal of Education, 86(5), 479-487.  

 



Review of What’s race got to do with it? by S. Farver   

 

 

7 

Delgado, R., & Stefancic, J. (2012). Critical race theory: An introduction (2nd ed.). New York: New York 
University Press. 

 
Harris, C. I. (1993). Whiteness as property. Harvard Law Review, 106(8), 1710-1712.  
 
Kumashiro, K. K. (2008). The seduction of common sense: How the right has framed the debate on America's 

schools. New York: Teachers College Press. 
 
Ladson-Billings, G. (1998). Just what is critical race theory and what's it doing in a nice field like 

education? International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 11(1), 7-24.  
 
Leonardo, Z. (2009). Race, whiteness, and education. New York: Routledge. 
 
 
 
About the Reviewer 
 
Scott D. Farver 
Michigan State University 
Scott D. Farver is a doctoral student in Curriculum, Instruction, and Teacher Education in the 
College of Education at Michigan State University. Scott was a high school German teacher before 
joining the US Peace Corps with his wife, Erin. While serving as a volunteer in the Philippines (2006-
08), he co-taught English and helped organize teacher trainings with his local counterparts. Scott also 
taught fourth and fifth grade near the Navajo Nation. His current research focuses on issues of race 
and critical multiculturalism for pre-service teachers. 
 
  



Education Review /Reseñas Educativas 
 

 

8 

 

Education Review/Reseñas Educativas/Resenhas Educativas is supported by the edXchange initiative’s 
Scholarly Communications Group at the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, Arizona State 

University. Copyright is retained by the first or sole author, who grants right of first publication to 
the Education Review. Readers are free to copy, display, and distribute this article, as long as the 
work is attributed to the author(s) and Education Review, it is distributed for non-commercial 
purposes only, and no alteration or transformation is made in the work. More details of this 
Creative Commons license are available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/. 
All other uses must be approved by the author(s) or Education Review. Education Review is 
published by the Scholarly Communications Group of the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, 
Arizona State University. 
 
Connect with Education Review on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/pages/Education-
Review/178358222192644) and on Twitter @EducReview 

 
 

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Education-Review/178358222192644
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Education-Review/178358222192644