Complicating the Southern "County Advantage": Market-Based Education Policy, Politics, and Modern Metropolitan Stratification

• In Event: Pushing the Boundaries of Education Policy: The Political Economy of Racialized Punishment, Privatization, and Resistance

Abstract

Historians intervene in the grand narrative of post-World War II metropolitan stratification and demonstrate how schools were active and mutually constitutive in constructing segregation between cities and suburbs, (Lassiter, 2012). Rather than passive recipients of conditions created by housing policy, historical analyses illuminate the ways school, housing, and city policies converged to construct racially segregated cities and suburbs in the post-World War II era (Benjamin, 2012, Dougherty, 2012; Erickson, 2016). Contemporary residential segregation is shaped by the proliferation of independent jurisdictions through division (Bischoff, 2008). This is particularly salient in county-based school districts in the U.S. South, which facilitated the most integrated school districts in the country when coupled with court-ordered desegregation efforts (Reardon & Yun, 2003; Taylor, Frankenberg, Siegel-Hawley, 2019). As school district fragmentation negatively effects racial segregation between districts (Bischoff, 2008), county secession is a contemporary tool for segregation, driven by the politics of local control of schools and education resources (Frankenberg, Siegel-Hawley, & Diem, 2017; Taylor et al., 2019).
Drawing upon interviews, document analysis, and spatial methods, this case study explores the trajectory of privatization of educational policy at the intersection of race, space, and capital in a racially segregated county in the U.S. South from 2000 to the present. Although segregation between the city and suburbs within the county facilitated black representation in local school board and city council within the city core, political power over education was reshaped by local, state, and federal alignment for market-based educational reforms concentrated in the city, which targeted private and public financial resources on education initiatives facilitated by a state takeover agency and private management of public schools. This paper captures when, where, and how shifting spatial boundaries between the majority Black city and surrounding majority white suburbs took place through policy tools that were driven by the racial politics of local control of public schools, such as annexation and county secession. I argue that the proliferation of market-based reforms in black spaces must be understood within the history of how local fiscal capacity hinged on the extraction of black neighborhoods in two ways: 1) local extraction of city’s financial resources to develop neighboring white suburbs and 2) global extraction from majority black neighborhoods through racially exploitative housing policies with subprime loans. Additionally, the paper details the power dynamics of elite’s emphasis on city branding and development undergirded by an well-funded organizational network of market-based education reforms (policy, research, advocacy, service delivery, private governance), while undermining the development of similar infrastructure for economic and development policies that foster community stability such as living wages and neighborhood revitalization. This paper illuminates how political power over educational policy is impacted by the trajectory of extraction and development of racialized spaces within a Southern segregated county, further complicating the south’s “county advantage” through shifting boundaries. Additionally, the study uncovers the possibilities of broader justice-oriented policy alternatives advocated by Black community members within and beyond the educational sector.

Author

• Rachel E. Williams, University of Wisconsin - Madison
  Presenting Author