Urban School Closings: White Supremacy, State Abandonment, and Accumulation by Dispossession

• In Event: The Hydra of Educational Reform: Racial Capitalism and Market-Based School Reforms

Abstract

Objectives
This paper situates school closings in neoliberal and racial logics that drive the restructuring of public education in the U.S. It examines impacts on African American urban communities in particular and the response of an emergent, organized resistance led by communities of color.

Theoretical framework
The paper situates school closings in wider political-economic processes of neoliberalism—the hegemony of market rule in every social sphere—and “accumulation by dispossession” (appropriation of the public and the commons for capital accumulation (Harvey, 2005). It specifically draws on theorizations of neoliberalism in the U.S. as a racialized project rooted in intertwined logics of capital and white supremacy (Lipman, 2015; Lipsitz, 2011; Melamed, 2011). It also builds on and extends critical urban theory (Brenner & Theodore, 2002) and analyses of historically racialized urban (Coates, 2014) and education policies (Ladson-Billings, 2006) that provide the grounding for disinvestment, gentrification and exclusion of Black communities (Lipman, 2011).

Methods and Data
The paper is based on 10 years of extensive ethnographic work and participation in grassroots education movements, including field notes from observations of public meetings; interviews with parents, students and teachers; and analysis of policy documents and media reports. It draws specifically on data collected in 2013-2014: in-depth interviews with Chicago parents and transcripts of public hearings related to mass school closings in 2013.

Results and conclusions:
The data show that closing schools does not improve education, and that it undermines parent participation and exclusion of their perspectives. More broadly, the paper argues that a policy of mass public school closings in African American urban areas is central to a strategy of state abandonment of those communities. Organized state abandonment facilitates the appropriation of Black public space for capital accumulation through investment in, and profiting from, education privatization (charter and privately-run turnaround schools). However, I argue that focusing solely on school closings misses a larger, shifting process of racialized neoliberal urban experimentation (Peck and Theodore, 2012). Thus, what is needed is a transformational education politics that incorporates opposition to school closings and other neoliberal strategies in a larger challenge to the underlying capitalist and racial logics that are remaking public education and cities. The paper concludes by describing an emergent grassroots movement and alternative agenda that centers the knowledge and experiences of parents, students, and communities of color in strategies of school transformation and democracy and targets both corporate privatization and racial oppression.

Significance
The paper contributes to research on effects of closing public schools on students, families, and communities. It opens a wider conversation on the relationship of education policy to forced dispossession of African American homes, land, and historical “home places” (Haymes, 1995) through dismantling public housing, foreclosure of homes and rental units, closing public clinics and hospitals, and privatization of public services. It couples this analysis with an alternative educational and urban agenda that is beginning to emerge from education social movements led by people of color and that is linked to other urban issues (Journey for Justice, 2014).

Author

• Pauline Lipman, University of Illinois at Chicago