Pauline Lipman

From Accountability to Privatization and African American Exclusion Chicago's “Renaissance 2010”

This article analyzes Chicagos new Renaissance 2010 school plan to close public schools and reopen them as choice and charter schools. Grounding the analysis in participatory research methods, the authors argue that Chicagos education accountability policies have laid the groundwork for privatization. They furthermore argue that Renaissance 2010 is part of a neoliberal corporate and financial urban agenda of gentrification, African American displacement, and the class conquest of the city by the middle and upper-middle classes. The authors conclude with a discussion of emerging resistance to the plan, suggesting that education may be a focal point of anti-neoliberal economic and social struggles.

Mixed-Income Schools and Housing: Advancing the Neoliberal Urban Agenda.

This article uses a social justice framework to problematize national and local policies in housing and education which propose to reduce poverty and improve educational performance of low‐income students through mixed‐income strategies. Drawing on research on Chicago, the article argues mixed‐income strategies are part of the neoliberal restructuring of cities which has at its nexus capital accumulation and racial containment and exclusion through gentrification, de‐democratization and privatization of public institutions, and displacement of low‐income people of color. The ideological basis for these policies lies in racialized cultural deficit theories that negate the cultural and intellectual strengths and undermine the self‐determination of low‐income communities of color. Neoliberal mixed‐income policies are unlikely to reduce inequality in education and housing. They fail to address root causes of poverty and unequal opportunity to learn and may exacerbate spatial exclusion and marginalization of people of color in urban areas. Building on Nancy Fraser’s model for social justice, the article concludes with suggestions toward a framework for just housing and education policy centered on economic redistribution (economic restructuring), cultural recognition (cultural transformation), and parity of political representation.

Economic Crisis, Accountability, and the State's Coercive Assault on Public Education in the USA.

This article examines education accountability as a mechanism of coercive neoliberal urban governance in the USA. Drawing on Gramscian theory of the ‘integral state’ as the dialectical synthesis of coercion, consent, and resistance, the author argues that as the crisis gives the state less room to win consent, it intensifies coercion as a strategy of governance. The author discusses three aspects of coercive state responses to the crisis in relation to education: (1) cannibalizing public education as a site of capital accumulation; (2) imposition of state austerity regimes and selective abandonment of education as a mechanism of social reproduction and legitimation in African-American communities that have become zones of disposability; and (3) governance by exclusion of African-American and Latino communities through school closings, state takeovers of elected governance bodies, and disenfranchisement. Systems of accountability are integral to this process as they make schools legible for the market, mark specific schools and school districts as pathological and in need of authoritarian governance, and justify minimalist schools in areas of urban disposability. This paper concludes with the potential of emergent resistance to dominant neoliberal education policy and argues that breaking with the framework of accountability and testing is critical to a counter-hegemonic alternative.

Renaissance 2010: The Reassertion of Ruling-Class Power through Neoliberal Policies in Chicago

The Chicago Public Schools, along with the city of Chicago itself, serve as an exemplary case of neoliberal reorganization, as corporate and governmental ‘leaders’ remake Chicago into a global city meeting the needs of capitalism. As such, Chicago provides us with an example of ‘actually existing neoliberalism,’ in which neoliberalisms goals are contradictory and contested. The focus in this article is on Renaissance 2010, a corporate proposal to reform both the city and its schools to create schools and spaces that will attract the professionals needed in a global city. Renaissance 2010 places public schooling under the control of corporate leaders who aim to convert public schools to charter and contract schools, handing over their administration to corporations and breaking the power of unions. However, as the article shows, such reforms not only disenfranchise the poor, people of color, students, parents, and educators, but also create an economically and spatially separate city. Consequently, while neoliberalism is promoted as an efficient and neutral reform, in Chicago neoliberalism faces increasing resistance.

Contesting the City: Neoliberal Urbanism and the Cultural Politics of Education Reform in Chicago.

This article examines the intertwining of neoliberal urbanism and education policy in Chicago. Drawing on critical studies in geography, urban sociology and anthropology, education policy, and critical analyses of race, the author argues that education is constitutive of material and ideological processes of neoliberal restructuring, its contestation, and the struggle for a new urban social imaginary. The paper focuses on neoliberalization of education as a social process. The data show that education policy is constitutive of racialized restructuring of urban space and managerial governance of the public sphere. While capital is a central actor, neoliberal policy also works its way into the discourses and practices of education through actions of marginalized and oppressed people working within constraints of the present situation. This suggests the need to address the (Gramscian) ‘good sense’ of neoliberal policy in a counter-hegemonic struggle for the city.

URBAN EDUCATION POLICY UNDER OBAMA

INTRODUCTION Since the publication of A Nation at Risk in 1983, under the Reagan administration, there has been an evolving shift in federal education policy from a focus on equity to economic competitiveness, markets, standards, and top-down accountability. This agenda was articulated in Bill Clinton’s Goals 2000 and encoded in George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation, ushering in an era of high-stakes testing, privatization, and “school choice.” When Barack Obama was elected president, many educators were hopeful his administration would pivot again toward equity and the reinvigoration of public education, especially in urban districts serving large proportions of lowincome students of color. However, President Obama not only embraced the neoliberal agenda, he capitalized on the economic crisis, particularly the fiscal crisis of cities and states, to escalate and expand it, embedding it in federal education funding and new federal policy, prompting education historian, Diane Ravitch, to call the Obama administration, “Bush’s third term in education.” Although framed as national policy, the impact is most felt in urban school districts, particularly in schools serving low-income students of color. In The New Political Economy of Urban Education (Lipman, 2011), I argue that these neoliberal policies are constitutive of the contested dynamics of power that shape the urban context, especially the role of capital and race in neoliberal economic, political, and spatial restructuring. Here, I situate my commentary on urban education policy under Obama at the intersection of neoliberal urbanism, race, and economic crisis—particularly the (constructed) fiscal crisis of cities.

Capitalizing on Crisis: Venture Philanthropy's Colonial Project to Remake Urban Education.

This article focuses on the increased power of venture philanthropy to shape education in urban communities of color in the USA. The author situates venture philanthropy’s expanded influence in urban school districts in the nexus of urban disinvestment, neoliberal governance, wealth concentration, and economic crisis. The author argues that billionaire philanthropists are using the fiscal crisis of the state to shape education policy and governance, operating as part of the ‘shadow state’. Capitalizing on austerity politics and their philanthropies’ embeddedness in the state and advocacy organizations, venture capitalists deploy their enormous wealth and political influence to restructure urban school districts that predominantly serve low-income African American, Latino, and other students of color. The goal of their neoliberal agenda is to restructure education to serve economic competitiveness and to open up the public education sector to capital accumulation. The fusion of the state and capital, through the interrelation of venture philanthropy and government at all scales, to impose policies of disenfranchisement, public school closings, privatization, and appropriation of Black urban space, constitutes a new colonialism. The article illustrates this dynamic through case studies of Detroit, Philadelphia, and Chicago.

Toward social movement activist research

Abstract In this article, we grapple with possibilities and dilemmas of activist scholarship in the struggle for education justice and political power. As activists and scholars, our social movement praxis seeks to produce knowledge that shifts the dominant neoliberal policy discourse, exposes racism inherent in neoliberal education policies, and supports education justice struggles. Although our work is centered in Chicago, a focus of contestation over neoliberal education policy and the right to the city, we believe this work is relevant to other US and international contexts facing similar reforms. We discuss the value of multiple forms of activist scholarship, describe the Chicago context and the principles that guide our social movement praxis, and raise dilemmas we wrestle with. We conclude with a discussion of the importance of activist research in this historical moment of global capitalist crisis, austerity politics, racist and anti-immigrant attacks in conjuncture with social movements reaching for new humane, democratic, and egalitarian social alternatives.