Neoliberal Discourses, Anti-Blackness, and School Police Abolition: Visions of Race, Safety, and Belonging Across Urban School Districts

• In Event: Education Policies, Market-Based Discourses, and the Black Radical Imagination: Why Envisioning Matters for Race, Place, and Justice

Abstract

The second paper, “Neoliberal Discourses, Antiblackness, and School Police Abolition: Visions of Race, Safety, and Belonging Across Urban School Districts” looks backward and forward. For decades, researchers have documented how neoliberal ideologies inform the structure and spirit of the educational enterprise from assessments to curriculum and discipline. Lipman (2011) argues that “neoliberalism is an ensemble of economic and social policies, forms of governance, and discourses and ideologies, that promote individual self-interest, unrestricted flows of capital...and sharp retrenchment of the public sphere” (p. 6). More than just a suite of policies, neoliberalism is, as Lipman notes, an “ideological project to change the soul” by manufacturing discourses that work to normalize current social arrangements as “just the way things are.” Because policies are, in part, discourses (Ball, 1994; Fairclough 2011) that shape and reflect the social world, they become a crucial site of interrogation for understanding pressing problems in education, including school safety and police.

While school police have a longstanding presence in public schools, recent policy decisions have called for termination of their contracts. Such calls present an opportunity to investigate how education stakeholders frame their support and opposition to district police changes. Across the US, local stakeholders have gathered at school board meetings to voice their opinions about decisions to disinvest in school police. Despite the significance of public opinion in shaping the policymaking process (Kingdon, 2003), educational policy scholars have underutilized public comments to interrogate the underlying discourses used to support or oppose policy visions and changes.

This paper offers a critical analysis of the discourses that stakeholders use to frame their support for or opposition to the removal of school police via public comments offered at school board meetings in twenty urban districts nationwide. To critically examine stakeholders’ comments, this scholar draws on critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2011; Gee, 2011). Specifically, he examines how stakeholders frame their arguments, traces evidence of neoliberal race-neutral discourses about school safety and “crime,” and interrogates what such framings reveal about anti-blackness, criminality, and belonginess. Findings show how racial inequalities and unequal relations of power get obscured through discursive practices that legitimize school police. Further, findings suggest why, for some, police abolition is seemingly outside the realm of educational possibility.

Stakeholders’ public opinions merit consideration for several reasons. Public comments serve an important democratic function by providing citizens with the opportunity to influence public opinion and set future policy agendas and visions. As such, public comments enable citizens to engage the policy process and “provide information on how agencies and their actions shape and are shaped by the publicly expressed views of individuals and groups” (Livermore et al., 2018). Second, public comments centered on the decision to remove police from schools reveal how dominant discourses are internalized and then leveraged against policy change. Ultimately, this researcher exposes the explicit and latent meanings embedded in stakeholders’ sentiments about school safety and police abolition and concludes with critical reflections on the possibilities of abolition as an alternative vision.

Author

• DeMarcus A Jenkins, University of Pennsylvania