Shaping the Common Sense of School Choice and Closings: Differential Racialization, Antiblackness, and Education Justice

• In Event: "When a Conjuncture Unrolls, There Is No Going Back": Education and Social Crisis in Chicago

Abstract

Purpose and Theoretical Framework
This research centers the cultural politics of race in Chicago neoliberal education reform and resistance through an analysis of Chicago Public Schools’ school choice/closing policy, focusing on the racialized discourses surrounding the 2017-18 school closings process. Dumas, Dixson and Mayorga (2016) argue for more educational research that examines “race as a cultural-ideological formation that deeply informs policy formation, implementation, and ultimately, the scholarly and public imagination of what is deemed ‘effective’ or ‘good’ policy, and what counts as ‘fair’ or ‘just’ in the distribution of educational resources” (p. 4). Such an analysis magnifies the discursive power of race to shape the “common sense” of school choice—a linchpin of neoliberal policy—despite its failures and powerful community-union contestations (Gordon et al., 2018; Lipman, 2017).

This paper is part of a larger study that analyzes key policy moments during Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s tenure when the contradictions of and contestations to neoliberal reforms were particularly acute. Lipman (2017) argues, “CPS’ racialized neoliberal narrative is no longer hegemonic. Accumulated crises and failed policies and persistent teacher-parent-student organizing, backed up by research, have precipitated a crisis of political legitimacy” (p. 18). Given this, “how can we push the crisis from a compromise ending to a more radical rupture, or even a revolutionary resolution” (Hall & Massey, 2010, p. 58)? Studying this period of education reform and resistance provides important insights about the nature of the crisis, racial neoliberalism, and transformative possibilities.

Methods and Data
I use a comparative analytic (Cacho, 2012; Hong & Ferguson, 2011) to examine racialized discourses relating to CPS’ 2017-18 school closings process of majority low-income, Black schools near downtown and on the south side. Using ATLAS.ti, I analyze CPS public meeting transcripts and official documents (Chicago Public Schools, 2017), news and social media, and fieldnotes.

Conclusion and Significance
As the legitimacy crisis of CPS neoliberal reforms intensifies, I argue colorblind discourses of school “failure” and “underutilization” to justify school choice and closings and obscure their racial impact are insufficient. Thus, CPS has adopted neoliberal multiculturalism (Melamed, 2011) as its official anti-racist discourse which has “valued its beneficiaries as multicultural, reasonable, law-abiding, and good global citizens and devalued the dispossessed as monocultural, backward, weak and irrational…[lacking] the proper neoliberal subjectivity” (p. 44).

Neoliberal multiculturalism serves as a powerful explanatory force for continued educational inequities through the inclusion of “non-Black people of color … as evidence of the end of racial animus and racial barriers” (Dumas, 2016), fueling anti-solidarity. As Kim (2018) writes, “White supremacy is a powerful force, but one that is circumscribed by anti-Blackness … White is best, but the most important thing is not-Blackness” (p. 226). Notably, the insidiousness of anti-Black racism also manifests in fights for education equity. As this research illustrates, community struggles to stop CPS school closures necessitate targeted communities to prove their value through neoliberal metaphors and metrics of “not-Blackness.” This calls for social movements to center opposition to anti-Blackness to strengthen challenges to neoliberal policy and racial capitalism.

Author

• Rhoda Rae Gutierrez, University of Illinois at Chicago
  Presenting Author