Constructing an Educational “Quality” Crisis: (E)quality Politics and Racialization Beyond Target Beneficiaries

In this critical, political discourse analysis, we trace how two concepts, equity and quality, became discursively linked and contested in the administration of postsecondary education policy over time (1968–1994)—a developmental process we refer to as (e)quality politics. By engaging in a historical analysis, we investigate (a) the racialized political origins and discursive processes by which arguments over educational “quality” are advanced as part of an antiequity policy paradigm and (b) how this paradigm reinscribes racial inequity into administrative and organizational action over time. We illustrate how, once an (e)quality politics paradigm is established, racialized policy designs can persist, even in the absence of explicit references to racialized social constructions of target populations in later periods of policy development.