Chicago's Education Landscape: The Politics of State Abandonment and Coercive Governance Meet a Counterhegemonic Movement

• In Event: 72.028 - The Landscape of Education Policy and Politics in Chicago: Neoliberalism, Race, Resistance, and Justice

Abstract

Objectives
The purpose of this paper is to map the political, economic, and social terrain of Chicago’s education agenda and its consequences for equity and justice, and to locate Chicago’s contested education politics in the conjuncture of coercive neoliberalism, protracted urban crisis, and racial exclusion and counterhegemonic possibilities.

Data and methods
The analysis is based on 15 years of ethnographic and archival research, including interviews, participant observation of public meetings, analysis of policy documents and reports, and public data on educational outcomes, budgets, school and city demographics and their spatial dimensions. The author combines thematic analysis (Emerson, Fretz & Shaw, 1995) of documentary and qualitative data with GIS-produced maps showing spatial relationships of school closings, charter school expansion, loss of enrollment, poverty, race, and public investment/disinvestment.

Theoretical framework, conclusions, significance
The author traces the consequences of 15 years of neoliberal experiments in an increasingly unequal, market-driven school district with sharp disparities in curriculum, resources, outcomes, and public investment that map onto class and race polarities that characterize the city itself. Neighborhood public schools in African American and some Latino areas have suffered repeated rounds of disinvestment and destabilization, extreme pressures of accountability, school closings, and privatization while public tax dollars have flowed to charter schools and selective public schools in affluent areas (Caref et al, 2012; Karp, 2014). Education is at the center of competing claims on the city by Chicago’s corporate and financial elite and by working class and low-income whites, African Americans, Latina/os, Asians, and a shrinking middle class (Lipman, 2011). The closing/phase out/turn around of over 150 schools in Black and Latino communities since 2001 and disproportionate public funding of charter school expansion and selective schools for the upper middle class while cutting budgets of neighborhood public schools has provoked a storm of opposition by teachers, parents, and students. These education policies and their contestations are situated in race and class politics of public austerity and disinvestment, privatization, gentrification, and displacement.
Drawing on critical scholarship in urban sociology, geography, political economy, educational policy and race, the author argues these neoliberal policies have helped remake the city for capital accumulation, elite consumption and racial containment/exclusion in the context of inter-urban global competition (Brenner & Theodore, 2002; Lipman, 2011). The 2008 economic crisis and ensuing municipal fiscal crisis were an opportunity for further neoliberalization through an “extreme economy” of “austerity urbanism” (Peck, 2012; Pew Charitable Trust, 2012). Driven by intertwined dynamics of capital and race (Melamed, 2011), the mayor-appointed School Board dictates neighborhood school budget cuts and mass closing of neighborhood schools, essentially abandoning low-income African American communities, clearing the way for charter school operators and “accumulation by dispossession” (Harvey, 2005). Drawing on Gramsci’s (1971) theory of the integral state (Davies, 2010), the author argues that the state’s education policy in Chicago constitutes governance by coercion (Lipman 2013), provoking an education social movement grounded in a social imaginary of racial justice, economic redistribution, and democracy. This paper contributes to understanding this dialectic, its counter-hegemonic possibilities and national implications

Author

• Pauline Lipman, University of Illinois at Chicago