Slow Violence, Contested Community, and Neoliberal Education Reform: Low-Income Youth of Color in the Case of One School Closing

• In Event: Encountering Race: Discourses of Race and Racialization and the Education of Immigrant Youth in the United States and Europe

Abstract

I. Objectives
Brandeis was a large comprehensive high school located on New York City’s Upper West Side. In 2009, the New York City Department of Education (NYCDOE) decided that Brandeis was a failing school and slated it to be phased out, or closed. Far from an anomaly, Brandeis was among over 100 schools that have been closed since Mayor Michael Bloomberg assumed control of the city’s school system in 2002. In many ways, Brandeis, like other schools, was indicative of what Gilmore (2008) has described as forgotten or abandoned places of the racial state. To a large extent, the conditions that Fine (1991) documented over 20 years ago remained true: Brandeis continued both to be under-resourced and served a predominantly low-income and Black and Latino student body. It was not until the NYCDOE designated Brandeis for closure that the school, or more precisely, the building that once housed Brandeis, transformed from being a place that was once forgotten to one that became fought over. This paper examines this shift, how it was facilitated, and what made it appear normal. Specifically, this paper focuses on racial framings of immigrant youth, schools, and neighborhoods that were invoked in the midst of this fight. We suggest that this transformation of the place of Brandeis during what we term the postmortem period of its phase-out is indicative of the ways that contestations over public schools and urban space are increasingly interrelated and undergirded by a decades-long project of abandonment and renewal that extends well beyond the city’s 2009 decision.

II. Theoretical framework
This paper draws upon and contributes to two primary bodies of literature. First, we draw on education scholarship (i.e. Buras (2010), Gulson (2011), Lipman and Hursh (2007), etc.) that links restructuring in education, the role of market forces that permeate state-driven education reforms, and urban renewal. Second, we build upon American Studies scholars (i.e. Gilmore (2002, 2008), Melamed (2006, 2011)) whose work interrogates the relationships among political and economic restructuring, racial exclusion, and citizenship.

III. Methods
The authors’ methods include: historical methods, discourse analysis, and ethnographic methods.

IV. Data sources
Data sources include: newspaper articles, web postings, participant observation of community meetings and NYCDOE hearings, semi-structured and in-depth interviews.

V. Results and/or arguments
By focusing on the postmortem period of Brandeis, we argue that it is critical to extend the temporal, spatial, and political frameworks through which we understand and challenge neoliberal restructuring in education. Specifically, we work to situate neoliberalism in education as not only economic, but also racial.

VI. Significance
In dialogue with Weis and Fine’s (2012) call for “critical bifocality,” we assert that the contestations in this case are indicative of how struggles over public schools and urban space are increasingly interrelated and undergirded by decades-long projects of abandonment and renewal that extends well beyond the present day. As such, this paper provides an analysis that highlights the fatal coupling of structural racism and capitalism within current education policy and reform.

Authors

• Ujju Aggarwal

• Edwin Mayorga, The Graduate Center - CUNY