Contextualizing School Closure: Neoliberal School Reform in Oakland

• In Event: Moscone Center North Roundtable Session 9
  In Roundtable Session: Anatomy of a School Closure: A Multiproject Case Study

Abstract

This paper draws from dissertation research tracing the 2003 state takeover and the ongoing neoliberal reconstruction of the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD). Aligning with research on social networks in school reform (Ball & Junemann, 2012; Au & Ferrare, 2015), I identify major nodes of power within the takeover and the post-takeover landscape: venture philanthropy (with a focus on the Broad Foundation), Teach For America, and the local advocacy organization (GO! Public Schools) through which they operate. These groups played a major role in manufacturing, exploiting, and reproducing the district’s ongoing financial crises in order to both implement market-driven reform and privatize public land; taken together, they illustrate how national players in the education reform network converge at the level of the district.

Klein (2007) argues that neoliberal politicians and corporate interests both exploit existing crises and create new ones in order to push through market-based reform; building on this analysis, I highlight the reform network’s role in a number of concrete projects, including school closures and the privatization of district land, managing private funding, “farming” and funding school board members and administrators, and producing a ‘shadow state’ within which networked, non-state actors gain disproportionate access to democratic institutions and processes. These shifts pave the way for the real estate development and gentrification that are crucial to the reconstruction of Oakland into what Lipman (2011) calls the “global city.”

The theory of disaster capitalism provides a useful context from which to understand the closure of Roots International Academy. In this model, both natural and human-made crises are exploited and exacerbated in order to carry out market-driven restructuring. Echoing other theorists of neoliberalism, Klein holds that corporate-state actors withhold from social obligations, pushing the state in its withdrawal from public provisions and thereby creating space for the creation, or “liberation,” of new markets. However, she argues that it is not simply the withdrawal or even the reconstruction of the state that marks disaster capitalism. It is the cohesion with which old systems are destroyed and new, marketized structures are implemented, as well as the ways in which discourses of disaster and reconstruction structure our imaginations of what is possible.

Author

• Nirali Jani, Holy Names University