Austerity Education: Making Schooling Markets in Detroit

• In Event: 65.039 - Understanding Education Privatization and Marketization in Canada, Iceland, Switzerland, and the United States

Abstract

1. Objectives or purposes

In this paper I explore how markets in education are induced and shaped by the political-economic environment within which they develop. I do so by examining how schooling markets have been created in the City of Detroit. Detroit, which is being drastically reshaped through extreme austerity measures, is an excellent example of how a market’s emergence is structured by its social context. This is because the remaking of the public school system in Detroit is closely connected to other marketization and privatization projects as the city struggles to manage public services in the face of bankruptcy. The objective of this study is to explore how schooling markets in Detroit are related to broader political economic shifts in that city.

2. Perspective(s) or theoretical framework

Using the insights from institutional theories within the field of sociology of markets (Block, 2011; Fligstein and Dauter, 2007; Krippner, 2011) I examine how markets are social institutions that are closely connected to the broader dynamics of power and that are shaped through struggle. This literature provides a framework through which education scholars can understand the dynamics that cause markets to develop differently depending on the actors within them, on connections to power held outside of markets, and, most importantly, on how actors with uneven power struggle over the governance of markets (Fligstein 1996).

3. Methods techniques, or modes of inquiry

The paper presents the results of a case study that is based on an analysis of documents and semi-structured interviews.

4. Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials

Data sources include public policy and media reports, and qualitative research including interviews with figures attempting to shape the education market in Detroit such as politicians, charter school operators and teachers’ unions.

5. Results / scientific or scholarly significance of the study

This paper will advance an understanding of how markets are conceptualized by education scholars, unpacking the contingent nature of their emergence and relating this to how we can understand the functioning of schooling markets. The results of the case illustrate how the shift to a market system to deliver publically-funded education in Detroit is related to the city’s bankruptcy, to the approach taken by the City’s emergency manager, and to processes of capitalist accumulation. This is significant because it advances the view that it is important to understand markets in education as contingent institutions that are shaped by their environment, rather than as homogenous forces whose effects can be understood in isolation (as posited by public choice scholars).

Author

• Dan Cohen, University of British Columbia