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

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

Over the last twenty years, critical education scholarship has turned to the concept of “neoliberal education” reform to describe how market-based reforms and policies reproduce social inequality. At the same time, other scholars center their work on the effects of structural racism in U.S. schools and society. These two essential forms of analysis have often been positioned parallel to each other, resulting in false and counterproductive divisions. This symposium braids these analyses and asks what role race plays within and across the multiple projects, or what we call the “many heads of the “neoliberal education reform hydra.” By articulating a racial-economic framework for analyzing education policy, this symposium seeks to contribute to the struggle to slay the hydra.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Critical Educators for Social Justice

Chair

• Edward Ryan Curammeng, University of California - Los Angeles

Papers

• Urban School Closings: White Supremacy, State Abandonment, and Accumulation by Dispossession - Pauline Lipman, University of Illinois at Chicago

• School Choice: The Freedom to Choose, the Right to Exclude - Ujju Aggarwal, Graduate Center of the City University of New York

• Union Busting: Black Teachers, Privatization, and the Future of Teacher Unions - Brian P Jones, City University of New York

• Slaying the Hydra: Understanding and Critiquing Neoliberal Education Reform in This Era of Racial Capitalism - Edwin Mayorga, Swarthmore College; Bree Picower, Montclair State University

Discussants

• Michelle Fine, City University of New York

• Wayne Au, University of Washington - Bothell

• Amy E. Brown, University of Pennsylvania

• David O. Stovall, University of Illinois at Chicago