From Common Schools to Marketization: A Review of the Literature on the Political Economy of Urban School Privatization

• In Event: 75.061 - Roundtable Session 34
  In Roundtable Session: 75.061-11 - Education Markets and Social Inequalities: A Global Perspective

Abstract

Overview & Paper Focus. Market reforms have been expanding in urban contexts. As globalization has expanded, income inequality has grown, as has the racialized, spatial isolation of the poor. These trends, layered on top of historical housing and banking discrimination and suburban flight, have left many central city districts struggling for resources, political capital, and support for an aging infrastructure. At the same time, these districts face increasing demands from policy makers for schools and teachers to demonstrate improved performance on standardized assessments or suffer high stakes sanctions like school closures or terminations. Vouchers, charter schools, online schools, and for-profit contracting for core educational services have taken root in many cities. Yet researchers, focused narrowly on effectiveness of these interventions, often overlook the broader contexts in which these policies are expanding.

Conceptual Orientation. This paper draws and expands upon the urban political economy framework originally developed in Rury and Mirel’s groundbreaking 1997 review of the literature on the political economy of urban education. They argued that educational researchers must engage in an analysis of the dynamics of power and wealth in urban contexts; examine the “spatial relationships that have shaped existing conceptions of city schools;” and understand the “historical forces that have brought the schools to their present state” (p.50). This paper updates their framework and literature review by investigating the radical shifts in urban school policy and global economic trends that have given way to rising inequality even as market reforms have been embraced by policy makers and implemented in key urban districts.

Methods and Findings. We conducted a review (2000-2014) of the political economy and schooling literature, identifying three primary areas of scholarship. The first area is scholarship focused on extreme racial segregation and enrollment losses in urban school districts. A second set of literature considers the ways in which school choice policies interact with shifting demographic and political trends in urban school districts. This work also considers the impact of urban renewal polices aimed at attracting wealthy, white residents back into the cities. A third body of scholarship examines the political economy of privatization and the ways in which disinvestment in the urban core ripened the ability for private sector actors to secure contracts over the provision of local school operations, district functions, and policy decisions for poor students. This final area, we argue, holds the greatest potential for connecting historic structural and racial inequalities into our understanding of the continued inequities under market reforms.

Conclusion and Significance. An urban political economy analysis of market reforms highlights the way in which these reforms can perpetuate and reify social, political, and economic inequality. Our analysis illustrates how such reforms have left urban districts with old buildings to maintain, a disproportionate concentration of students with high needs, and trying to "compete" in an educational market in which they are disadvantaged by historical and current policies.

Authors

• Janelle T. Scott, University of California - Berkeley

• Jennifer Jellison Holme, The University of Texas - Austin