The Political Economy of Charter Expansion: Deregulation, Discipline, and Black Communities

• In Event: The Racialized Political Economy of Education: Explorations of Antiblackness Across K–16

Abstract

In this paper, charters are framed as an instantiation of the current political economy, which makes visible the implications of charter expansion in terms of race, power, and the political economy. Building on previous scholarship drawing parallels between the subprime mortgage crisis and charter schools (Green, Baker, Oluwole, & Mead, 2015), this analysis of charters is grounded in the argument that the development of capitalism at each of its iterations has been necessarily contingent on the underdevelopment of Black communities (Marable, 1983). In light of the strategic deployment of Civil Rights discourse to advance market-based educational reforms (Scott, 2013), this paper seeks to “maintain a contextualized, specified worldview that reflects the experience of Blacks (Crenshaw, 1989, p. 1349).” By leveraging an analytic that centers Black communities, analysts can see past strategic uses of obfuscating discourse and see more clearly how power relations are at work. The author illuminates the contradictory nature of contemporary political economic arrangements by contrasting the affordances of deregulation to charter operators and the heightened regulation of Black families navigating choice systems (Rooks, 2017). Parallels between the subprime mortgage crisis and charter expansion are examined to illuminate the federal role in advancing a deregulatory trajectory that constructed Black communities as a site for profit for private actors in both cases, while shedding light on the lived experiences of those navigating the aftermath of increased private actors.

Despite efforts by education advocates to recast educational equity as the empowerment of individual parent choice (Scott, 2013), evidence suggests that Black parent experiences with navigating choice systems are not characterized by empowerment, but rather limited choices between suboptimal options and selective enrollment processes endemic to schools choosing students (Patillo, 2015). Closer scrutiny of the exercise of school choice and the high stakes of making “poor choices” demonstrates the limits of choice as a proxy for the empowerment for Black families. Using a Black feminist lens, the author illuminates the role of the disciplinary state in constructing bright boundaries between districts with harsh consequences for “district hopping” rooted in the criminalization and punishment of Black mothers based on negative, controlling images consistent with historical devaluations of Black motherhood (Collins, 2001; Faw & Jabbar, 2016; Rooks, 2017). As white wealthy parents and district officials work together to protect the boundaries of their school districts from “district hopping” by hiring private investigators to confirm living arrangements and pursuing criminal charges for “educational theft” (Faw and Jabbar, 2016; Rooks, 2017), the author argues that Black students are redlined to subprime educational options within limited choice sets. White affluent communities continue to hoard educational assets accumulated through historical and ongoing processes of inequitable funding and housing policies, economic exploitation, and Black exclusion. This conceptual paper illuminates how Black underdevelopment continues through concentrated charter expansion in Black communities.

Author

• Rachel Williams, University of California - Berkeley