Slaying the Hydra: Understanding and Critiquing Neoliberal Education Reform in This Era of Racial Capitalism

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

Abstract

Objective
The objective of this paper is to ground an analysis of neoliberal school reform in a racial-economic theoretical framework. Coupling critical theories of race and political economy, the central assertion of this paper is that while neoliberal reforms have been understood as primarily economic, they are also always already racialized. Using the mythological creature the “hydra” as a conceptual metaphor, this paper shows how current reforms are all connected to a broader “body” that is pushing public education toward privatization. In pushing toward privatization, the hydra is also animated by a cultural politics of race that materially and ideologically works alongside capitalism to maintain racial and economic inequality.

Theoretical Perspective
One of the dangers that scholarship that focuses on the logics of neoliberalism in education runs into is rendering educational crises as being solely economic in nature. By narrowing crises to economics the effects of other social forces, including racism, are ignored and the quality of analysis is bankrupted.
In response, this paper proposes a racial-economic framework where political economy and critical theories of race are woven together. Building off the notion of racial capitalism (Melamed, 2011; Robinson, 1983), the argument here is that racial inequality and economic oppression are always bounded to each other. As such, the analytical goal in “performing a race and class synthesis is to privilege neither framework and, instead, offer[s] an intersectional, integrated, or what [I] am calling a raceclass perspective” (Leonardo, 2012 p. 438). In other words, the analytic framework presented here is one that seeks not to privilege one analysis (class or race) over the other, but rather to understand them as interconnected and mutually constitutive.

Methods, Modes of Inquiry
This is a theoretical paper that draws on extant critical theories of race and political economy in order to advance a notion of racial capitalism and present a racial-economic analytic framework.

Results and conclusions
Working through literature on neoliberal education reform and critical theories of race, the central argument is that the intentional ignoring and erasure of structural racism within market-oriented educational policy undermines scholarly and activist capacities to generate a more thorough understanding and critique of the logic and practices of the neoliberal education policy. By working in both racial and economic terms it becomes clearer how racism and neoliberal forms of social ordering are interimbricated (Fraser, 2000) within educational and social policy.

Significance
Articulating a dual lens of racial and economic analysis, this paper lays the groundwork for future scholarship. We argue that this interimbrication warrants forms of scholar-activism that confront racism and capitalism at the same time. Another key strategy is coupling policy/institutional work to social movements. Social movements are a vital social form where groups of people “give voice to concerns about the rights, welfare, and well-being of themselves and others by engaging in different forms of collective action and public protest” (University of California, Santa Barbara, Sociology, n.d.). By articulating this racial-economic framework our intention is to make an important contribution to public research.

Authors

• Edwin Mayorga, Swarthmore College

• Bree Picower, Montclair State University