Community Organizing Against Market Reforms: How Organizers Frame Their Movement in Response to the Challenges of Racial Neoliberalism

• In Event: How Grassroots Activism Can Challenge Marketization of Schools

Abstract

Community organizing against privatization, charter school expansions, and school closures is fueled by the disastrous impact these reforms can have on communities and schools, including the displacement of Black and Brown students, increased racial and economic segregation, divestment from district schools, political disempowerment of teachers and residents, and trauma resulting from school closures (Buras, 2015; Danley & Rubin, 2020; Ferman, 2017; Green, 2017; Lipman, 2011; Scott & Fructher, 2009). Yet, research on market reforms in education has, until recently, largely focused on elite policy actors, and little scholarship on community organizing for educational justice explicitly examines resistance to market reforms or how the neoliberal policy context shapes organizing (Nygreen, 2017). I build upon these bodies of scholarship in order to gain insights into how communities organize against market reforms within a shifting socio-political context dominated by neoliberalism (Lipman, 2011; Nygreen, 2017). Using a case study approach (Creswell, 2007; Merriam, 2007) and an analytic framework that combines social movement literature on framing (Snow, Soule, & Kriesi, 2004) and racial neoliberalism (Goldberg, 2008), I examine how community and teacher activists in Oakland, California organize against market reforms. I ask: how and why did organizers shift their framings over the years since the initial wave of school closures in 2012 and through the months after the 2019 teacher strike?

Community organizing can play an important role in shaping education policies, though the current socio-political context certainly favors more wealthy and powerful actors. Organizers face enduring challenges of racial and class politics and limited resources that are rendered even more complex in the context of higher inequality and official anti-racism. Yet, organized resistance to the proliferation of market reforms has achieved at least partial victories in many cities (Ferman, 2017), and understanding how organizers navigate this context to effectively resist market reforms can inform the efforts of educators and researchers committed to educational justice.

My analysis of data gathered from interviews with grassroots organizers from five key groups, as well as participant observations and documents collected over a three year period, finds that organizers’ framings evolved primarily in response to three key factors: challenges and opportunities in socio-political context; their evolving analysis of power; and their attempts to achieve greater resonance with the community. Organizers have been quite adept at shifting their framings in response to social cues and emerging information, allowing them to mobilize greater sectors of the community. Yet, organizers struggled to navigate the racial neoliberal context without deepening community divisions or inadvertently undermining their own efforts (Nygreen, 2017). Building a movement against marketization in this context requires that organizers engage in continuous reflection in order to successfully traverse this volatile terrain. Moreover, participating in political education can deepen organizers’ analysis and help them frame the movement in ways that capture how race and capitalism intersect in the segrenomics (Rooks, 2017) of market reforms. The Covid-19 pandemic makes these efforts more urgent, as organizers must mount a movement capable of protecting public institutions and vulnerable communities from those who seek to exploit this crisis.

Author

• Frances Free Ramos, University of California - Berkeley