From Public Good to Private Gain: Charter Schools and the Racialized Enclosure of Public Education

• In Event: Contested Reforms: Fighting for an Education for the Public Good

Abstract

This theoretical essay takes up charter schooling as a form of neoliberal educational reform. This essay grapples with multiple theoretical ideas to present a novel way of thinking about charter schooling, especially charter networks, as a form of racialized enclosure. This essay uses the concept of “the commons”— a form of communal wealth that historically nourished the masses— and applies it to public education. We do so to understand the charter school movement as a form of enclosure, a move towards taking a public good and limiting access to it to create a private gain. We argue that this process acts as a form of accumulation by dispossession that is racialized in how it is enacted. We present charter schools as a form of racialized enclosure that ultimately creates a privatized gain while ultimately failing to deliver on promises of better schooling, most frequently in urban spaces.

Authors

• David Osworth, University of North Carolina- Greensboro

• M. Nathan Tanner, University of Illinois- Urban Champagne