Education as Property

• In Event: Inequitable Resources, Inequitable Access: Examining the Racialized U.S. Caste System Within Schools

Abstract

In Education as Property, I use the example of residency violations in school attendance to argue that stakeholders that favor aggressive enforcement of these laws treat public education as if it were private property. I use a famous example of a jurisdiction’s prosecution of a black single mother for lying about her child’s address. This story explains how residential attendance requirements work to exclude non-resident children and punish their parents for such a transgression. I present the analysis over 100 articles from 134 unique school districts in 15 states, including newspaper and opinion pieces that specifically discussed residential violations. Using Cheryl Harris’s seminal article Whiteness as Property as a model, uncover how school officials’ rhetoric around enforcing residency laws to show that how stakeholders consider education to have the quintessential rights associated with private property.

First, [I argue that] officials treat education as transferrable, such that a taxpayer, by virtue of his contribution to the school district, assigns his or her interest in public education to the children in the district. Allowing children who do not live in the district to attend the district’s schools violates this taxpayer right. Second, [I argue that] officials acknowledge a taxpayer’s right to use and enjoy education. Homeownership gives taxpayers control over their community’s education, such that school district officials and law enforcement officials alike treat taxpayers as fiduciaries to which they owe protection. Lastly, [I argue that] officials treat education as property by allowing taxpayers to lawfully exclude others, particularly through the coercive machinery of civil and criminal penalties.[1]

My overall argument is that officials conceive of education through the lens of property through a rhetoric of property functions to justify aggressive exclusion. “Propertizing” public education is a way to buttress already established racial segregation using formally race-neutral means and rhetoric.

Author

• LaToya Baldwin Clark, University of California - Los Angeles