Racial Capitalism and STEM Education in Chicago Public Schools

• In Event: 79.019 - Disrupting "Truth": Theorizing the Cultural Politics of STEM Education Through a Plurality of Perspectives

Abstract

In this paper, we analyze the role of STEM initiatives designed by city and corporate elites in Chicago and outline an alternative, grassroots vision for (STEM) education and city schools. Within a neoliberal context of gentrification, displacement, disinvestment, and privatization, STEM schools are strategic components of Chicago Public Schools (CPS) “portfolio district” that serve the interests of racial capitalism in three ways. First, STEM schools provide claims to fairness in the midst of racist school closures. Second, STEM high schools are a corporate strategy for racially stratified labor force preparation that restricts curriculum and reifies tracking. Third, curriculum restriction prioritizes corporate interests over students’ capacity to shape their communities and world.

We use Watkins’ (2001) notion of “white architects of Black education” and Robinson’s (2000) framework of racial capitalism to examine the mayor’s and corporate leaders’ designs for STEM education. We argue that these architects of Chicago education are responding to neoliberal shifts in the economy by proffering STEM education as an equity initiative even while divesting resources from Black communities. When CPS closed 50 predominantly Black schools in 2013, they invoked the logic of efficiency and cachet of STEM to argue that disinvestment in Black neighborhood schools was equitable because of opportunities at 11 new STEM schools. The Chicago architects, in Watkins’ words, “[wed] the rhetoric of equality…to the practice of racism” (p. 57).

Furthermore, Chicago’s five STEM high schools were developed using a “playbook,” authored by IBM with the goal of using urban public schools to prepare “middle skill” workers. This playbook directs schools to emphasize English, mathematics, technology, and “workplace skills,” effectively replacing science and engineering in CPS STEM schools with English and “workplace skills,” and explicitly tracking students towards lower rungs of the STEM workforce. STEM high schools’ college partnerships provide further evidence of racist tracking. The four STEM high schools located in working-class Black and Latinx communities partner with two-year colleges, while the fifth school, located in a wealthier, whiter community, partners with two prestigious private universities. Across these schools, the emphasis on “workplace values” constitutes a hidden curriculum for preparing compliant workers rather than engaged community members.

In contrast, efforts to enact self-determination within Chicago communities of color have focused on creating popular public schools that are grounded in and build upon community wisdom and culture, tied to an emancipatory vision of education, and support people in fighting for what they define as a just future for their community. We come to this work as critical mathematics and science educators, and as participants in the Chicago education justice movement, who have worked, taught, and fought for these schools alongside the community members who led these efforts. We point to socially transformative science and mathematics curricula that engage students in studying their reality to prepare them to change their world and to a vision for a sustainable community school district that has emerged from Chicago’s grassroots movement for educational justice. We conclude by offering this vision as an alternative to the architects’ STEM education.

Authors

• Daniel Morales-Doyle, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Eric Rico Gutstein, University of Illinois at Chicago