Severing, Burying, Latching: The Organizational Consequences of Neoliberal Education Governance

• In Event: Sociology of Education Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 25. Role of Political Forces in Education

Abstract

Neoliberal principles in education governance have created systems of accountability in which school takeovers, market-based pressures, and closures are primary levers for school improvement. The literature has examined whether or not these tools are effective at raising student achievement and the politics of community-level responses to resist these efforts, but less is known about how these shifts have affected the organizational level of social life. Using ethnographic observations, qualitative interviews, photo data, and archival data from New Orleans (an urban district comprised solely of charter schools) and neighboring Jefferson Parish (a suburban school district predominantly comprised of traditional public schools), this study focuses on how school closures and charter takeovers affect organizational level outcomes such as expressions of organizational identities, school siting decisions, and the evolution of physical space. Our typology is composed of three phenomena: severing, burying and latching. Severing reveals how market-based reforms performance-based accountability decompose schools into components that are governed by separate entities. Severing then allows for downstream organizational the downstream outcomes of burying and latching, which result from the interaction of fractional parts of closed schools with new and existing schools. Burying is the subsuming of a closed school’s prior space by a new or existing school. Burying can be a passive act or it can be one where new or existing schools engage in active erasure of a past school’s legacy or contribution. Latching occurs when a new school adopts or takes on a prior school’s identity. Latching can be a path forward from conflict, but it can obfuscate the disruptions caused by closures and other district level reforms that created closures. Taken as a whole, our typology shows the new trajectories for organizations in a policy landscape where market-based logics govern public investment and privatization allows for the entrance of new actors in public provision. As closures loom for school districts across the country and market-based reforms are continually pursued, we illuminate the inherent precarity of these arrangements and the conditions needed for organizational preservation and stability amidst these forces.

Authors

• Amanda Lu, Georgetown University

• Tia R Williams, Vanderbilt University