Rent, Race, and the Struggle Over Space: Charter School Co-Location Policy and the Racial Logic of Neoliberal Restructuring in Urban Education

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

Abstract

Based on findings from research into charter school policy in New York City and theoretical social analysis of the embeddedness of educational policy within the dynamics of the broader urban political economy (Anyon, 1997, 2014), this presentation contends that recent reforms mandating the co-location of charter schools within existing public school spaces reflect and reinforce what George Lipsitz (2011) describes as the white spatial imaginary: a philosophy of and approach to arranging the use, value, and meaning of urban places in such a way as to profitably link racial subjugation and segregation to the opening up of new educational markets for the city’s primarily white economic elite. This presentation draws upon the disciplines of political economy, critical race theory, cultural geography, and sociology. Utilizing data drawn from network, document, and policy discourse analysis, the author describes the asset flows that accompany co-location, ranging from rental fees, New Market Tax Credits, bond issuance and debt financing to outlays in the form of infrastructural and other capital investments.

Findings suggest that, in spite of co-location advocates’ claims of expanding educational opportunity and redressing racial inequalities, charter school co-location reform not only ideologically obscures the production and exploitation of racialized opportunity and vulnerability structures, but has also realigned, if not reinforced, the continued misallocation and maldistribution of much needed space, funds, services, and resources. I argue that charter school co-location reform, couched in the fallacious “official antiracism” of the neoliberal state (Melamed, 2011), has created new opportunities for privileged profit extraction for the city’s white-dominated ruling class at the expense of working class and poor youth and families of color. The presentation concludes that, because it exacerbates educational and spatial inequalities, charter school co-location reform and the white spatial imaginary that it serves demand new, radical ways of thinking about educational opportunity and will describe emerging alternative imaginaries for more just and humane arrangements.

Author

• Jeremy P Benson, Rhode Island College