"Zones" of (non)Being: Neoliberal Charter School Reform and Prerequisites for White Accumulation

• In Event: 34.036 - Ghetto Schooling 20 Years Later: New Directions in the Study of the Political Economy of Urban Education

Abstract

The twenty-year anniversary of Jean Anyon’s seminal 1997 text, Ghetto schooling: a political economy of urban educational reform, speaks to this year’s AERA theme, “Knowledge to Action: Achieving the Promise of Equal Educational Opportunity” by tracing how both notions of “promise” and “opportunity” are stymied by narrow reforms that are disconnected from “economic reprioritization, and a resuscitation of the cities themselves” (p. xvi). As such, these reforms in Anyon’s interpretation are always already overdetermined and eclipsed by the current political economy and social contexts of education. Anyon’s work continues to resonate as “savage inequalities” still reign supreme in our “ghetto schools” and communities.
Entirely dismissing Anyon’s premise that urban schools will thrive only when attention is paid to the political economic contexts in which they exist, current policy-makers and reformers propose and enact market-based/neoliberal reforms that promote privatization and “no excuses” ideologies, which suggest that inequality, poverty, and racism are not “excuses” for disparate educational outcomes. To a large extent, no excuses charter schools have become the preferential policy in this context.

Utilizing the restructuring of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina as a site for examination, this paper builds off of a larger year-long qualitative critical race case study on the reproduction of white racial dominance via the charter school authorization and application process. The perspectives of African American youth, educators, and community members are foregrounded to illustrate the pronounced racialized properties of current neoliberal school reform that hinge on the ontological erasure and material disposability of Black bodies and space.

Extending Anyon’s historical political economic analysis by placing it in conversation with critical race and anti-colonial theories, this paper argues that neoliberal charter school reforms specifically, and U.S. public education generally are spaces/ “zones” of abjection for Black students and communities. Furthermore, this paper suggests, the zones of (non) being are a founding western structural antagonism that serves as a prerequisite for white accumulation, dominance, and gauges of humanity.

Author

• Kevin Lawrence Henry, University of Arizona