Economic Crisis, Charter School Expansion, and Coercive Neoliberal Urbanism in the United States

• In Event: Market Mechanisms and Education Inequities: Experiences From Chile, India, South Africa, Canada, and the United States

Abstract

Purpose. This paper examines the political economy and racial politics of education markets in the USA, specifically state support for charter schools. Charter school enrollment grew from 2008-09 to 2014-15 in ten of the largest urban school districts, e.g., roughly 50% in the District of Columbia, 200% in Chicago, 400% in New York City (National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, 2015). The paper examines this urban charter school expansion in relation to municipal austerity policies and their racial dimensions and situates Black and Latino/a community resistance in this context.

Theoretical Perspective. The paper situates charter growth in scholarship on urban political economy and critical geography and city governments’ mobilization of particular “socio-economic imaginaries” and institutional arrangements to develop, institutionalize, and politically entrench neoliberal, market-based and finance-driven economic, political, social, and spatial urban restructuring (Peck & Theodore, 2012). In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, cities imposed an “extreme economy” of “austerity urbanism” (Peck, 2012) and privatization of public goods as a strategy to restore fiscal solvency and investor confidence, promote growth, and compete globally (Oosterlynck & Gonzalez, 2012). Understanding crisis-driven public austerity as racialized “accumulation by dispossession” (Camp, 2016; Harvey, 2003) and state coercion (Camp & Heatherton, 2016) provides an analytical framework for mass school closings and charter expansion in Black and Latino/a low-income urban communities.

Method and Data Sources. The paper draws on multiple data sources. Focusing on Chicago, with reference to other cities, the author reviewed publicly available school district data, reports by independent and charter school advocacy organizations, school district planning documents, and public media to examine charter school expansion and its public rationale. The author also reviewed reports, websites, and newsletters of financial investment companies focused on charter school investment (bonds, real estate, school management companies). The paper also draws on the author’s extensive qualitative and quantitative research on Chicago education policy and community response over the past 15 years and GIS mapping of charter expansion and school closings.

Results. The author finds that closing public schools and turning them over to private operators constitutes conversion of Black and Latino/a students and schools into lucrative private investment opportunities while excluding parents and communities of color from decisions that dissolve locally elected school governing bodies and replace public schools with privately operated and governed charter schools. The author argues this furthers political exclusion of already politically marginalized low-income communities of color, amounts to state abandonment of Black communities, and constitutes racialized coercive urban governance.

Scholarly Significance. The paper extends critical literature on education markets and equity and neoliberal urban policy (Author 2011). Employing a racial lens, it proposes that urban school closings and concomitant charter expansion constitute the commodification of not only schools but Black and Latinx students and community space. It contends the state is essentially abandoning responsibility for educating low-income Black children in specific urban areas. This has implications for how the charter school debate is framed and for considering the dialectic of Black and Latino/a resistance as claim on public space and community self-determination.

Author

• Pauline Lipman, University of Illinois at Chicago