Shareholder Schools: Racial Capitalism, Policy Borrowing, and Market-Based Education Reform in Cape Town, South Africa

• In Event: Presidential Invited Session: Learning from Black Lives Matter: Racial Capitalism and Reparative Justice in Comparative and International Education

Proposal

Marketization of education in South Africa accelerated at the crossroads of the post-apartheid democratic transition and global neoliberal turn, reflecting both educational policy impacts of the country’s protracted negotiated settlement and transnational trends. A controversial 2018 provincial amendment further entrenched marketization in the Western Cape by introducing “collaboration schools”, public-private partnerships modeled on US charter schools and UK academy schools. This paper employs critical policy ethnography to argue that racial capitalism shapes transnational market-based policy borrowing and to illustrate that a perceived portability of market reforms rests on racialized notions of the function of schooling for marginalized youth across contexts. I draw on Cedric Robinson’s analysis of capitalism as a ubiquitously racialized, interconnected global order and Neville Alexander’s insistence that antiracism must be anticapitalist, particularly in education, a site and strategy of struggle with dual potential to perpetuate or undermine racial capitalism.

Author

• Amelia Simone Herbert, Rutgers University - Newark