School Choice and Disposable Urban Communities: The Complicated Relationship Between Neoliberal Education Reform and Race

• In Event: 15.060 - MTCC Roundtable Session One
  In Roundtable Session: 15.060-7 - School Choice and Intersectionality: Comparative and International Perspectives From the United States, China, and Israel

Abstract

The first paper utilizes documentary policy analysis and ethnographic research on race and education in Milwaukee and Detroit to highlight the ways in which neoliberal urbanism (Lipman 2004, 2011; Brenner and Theodore, 2002) is differentially racialized in two fairly similar post-industrial cities in the United States. Both cities have witnessed the introduction of educational market reform discourse as a driver for radically altering the form of educational provision in "failing" urban public schools. While both cities' school systems serve disproportionately African American and Latino low-income youth and their families, this paper documents how the market-based educational reform agenda proceeded in the two cities from differing assemblages of political actors and had as primary demonstrative objective different neoliberal outcomes.

Drawing upon the fields of critical geography, political economy, urban sociology, and theories of the state and racial formation, the author contrasts a strategy of hegemonic inclusion (Gramsci, 1971) of African American voucher-supporting communities in Milwaukee with a much more hierarchically imposed educational reform model in Detroit (Pedroni, 2011). Not only were the strategies for advancing educational marketization vastly different in the two cities (hegemony versus coercion), but the primary goals of neoliberal experimenters also differed. While in Milwaukee neoliberals were primarily interested in utilizing African American disaffection from urban public schools to demonstrate the viability and political palatability of diverting public educational funds to the private sector, in Detroit the primary objective of experimentally imposing market reforms mainly in the public educational sector appears to be the buttressing of the spatial reorganization of a shrinking city for the purpose of accumulation by dispossession, particularly via the real estate market.

The contrast between the two case studies also illustrates that hegemony is not the only or primary strategy through which capital restructures the social formation and educational sector according to its wants and needs. Rather, hegemony is deployed unevenly and opportunistically, according to its ability to produce the most optimal results. Elements of both hegemony and coercion are in fact differentially visible in both contexts, however at different points and for differing audiences. This contrast and variation traces back in part to regional particularities, including locally sedimented racial histories, fluid and contrasting intersectionalities, and invested meanings. Perhaps most starkly and most revealing, the two case studies juxtapose the positioning of African American communities as politically astute and market savvy in the Milwaukee example, while incapable of self-governance and disposable (Wilson, 2004) in Detroit.

The author concludes by arguing and agreeing that neoliberal urbanism in education and beyond must be seen as a process and not as static and fixed. The forms, strategies and experimental goals of different neoliberal urbanizing projects can vary, underscoring the contingency and impermanence of actually existing neoliberalism (Brenner and Theodore, 2002). This last conclusion also reinforces that responses to neoliberalism in educational and other contexts by counter-hegemonic forces, while accounting for broader and more generalizable trends in neoliberal urbanism, must also develop locally-situated, intersectionally-informed strategies and responses.

Author

• Thomas C. Pedroni, Wayne State University