Policies of “Disruption” in Chicago Schools: School Pushout, Community Resistance, and Building Alternatives

• In Event: Analyzing the crisis in Chicago’s neoliberal education reform and racial neoliberal order and organizing for radical social transformation: Panel II

Proposal

This paper traces how communities in Chicago have strategized to support young people who were criminalized under school pushout (Fine, 1991; Morris, 2016; Tuck, 2012) in the form of “disruptive student” policies, truancy laws, zero tolerance, and privatization. Engaging a conjunctural analysis (Hall & Massey, 2010), the paper focuses on three periods at which the contradictions of the racial capitalist state reached points of crisis but also radical possibility. It draws from tools of institutional ethnography (Billo & Mountz, 2016; Smith, 1987) to analyze 50 years of local and national news media archives, in dialogue with newsletter archives from a coalition of alternative schools and Krueger’s experiences as a teacher within that coalition.

In the current conjuncture, the state’s official “colorblind” anti-racist discourses (Melamed, 2011) of “disruption” are juxtaposed with the material consequences of “actually existing neoliberalism” (Brenner & Theodore, 2002), showing how school pushout policies reveal broader attempts in the school district to obscure practices of racial exclusion while redistributing resources from local organizations to for-profit corporations. In the case of Chicago Public Schools closing or radically changing 203 schools between 2002 and 2018 (Lutton, Vevea, Karp, Cardona-Maguigad, & McGee, 2018), the discourses of “under-enrolled” and “under-utilized” schools are brought into the context of the nearly 60,000 school-aged youth in Chicago who were out of school in the years of the closings (Córdova & Wilson, 2017).

The current crisis has also included, and been driven by, community and teacher organizing against school pushout and towards radical alternative visions of education. Community organizing led to the formal end of zero tolerance policies in Illinois and the institution of restorative justice practices in their place in 2015. Teachers in community-based alternative schools in Chicago have led the first-ever charter school strikes in the U.S. The long-term work of critical communities in Chicago offers lessons for how we, as critical educators today, can strategize in our current conjuncture. Through analysis of critical educator responses to coercive racial neoliberal policies in Chicago historically, the study discusses what we can learn from their strategies of coalition-building across generations and across struggles and their radical envisioning of education and the broader world that we want to build together.

Author

• Stacey Krueger, University of Illinois at Chicago