Description
The manifestations of destructively creative neoliberalization are evident across the urban landscape: the razing of lower income neighborhoods to make way for speculative development; the extension of market rents and housing vouchers.
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Lipman, Pauline (2011). Contesting the city: neoliberal urbanism and the cultural politics
of education reform in Chicago. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education,
32: 2, 217 — 234
Contesting the City: Neoliberal Urbanism and the Cultural Politics of Education
Reform in Chicago
Pauline Lipman
Department of Educational Policy Studies, University of Illinois at Chicago, IL, USA
…cities (including their suburban peripheries) have become increasingly important
geographical targets and institutional laboratories for a variety of neoliberal policy
experiments, from place-marketing and local boosterism, enterprise zones, tax
abatements, urban development corporations, and public-private partnerships to
workfare policies, property redevelopment schemes, new strategies of social control,
policing and surveillance and a host of other institutional modifications within the local
state apparatus. The overarching goal of such experiments is to mobilize city space as an
arena both for market-oriented economic growth and for elite consumption practices.
The manifestations of destructively creative neoliberalization are evident across
the urban landscape: the razing of lower income neighborhoods to make way for
speculative development; the extension of market rents and housing vouchers; the
increased reliance by municipalities on instruments of private finance; the privatization
of schools; the administration of workfare programs; the mobilization of entrepreneurial
discourses emphasizing reinvestment and rejuvenation; and so forth. City as Policy Lab,
Jamie Peck, Neil Brenner and Nik Theodore, 2008.
Neoliberal economic and social policies that have produced the greatest
concentration of wealth in the fewest hands in history are reshaping cities globally, as
described by Peck, Brenner and Theodore above. This is true not only for “global cities,”
command centers of the global economy (Sassen, 2006) such as New York, London, Sao
Paulo, and Tokyo, but also for the new production hearths and megopolises of the global
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South (Davis, 2005; Smith, 2002) and economically devastated urban centers such as
post-Katrina New Orleans and Detroit (Pedroni, this issue). In this paper, I focus on
neoliberal globalization enacted in Chicago, a global city that is a laboratory for
neoliberal urban restructuring in the USA.
Chicago has also been an incubator for neoliberal education policies, and I am
specifically interested in the intertwining of these policies with the neoliberal urban
agenda. In previous work I discussed the relationship of education accountability and
differentiated schools to the drive to make Chicago a global city (Lipman, 2004). Here I
focus on education privatization as a vehicle to further the neoliberal development of the
city. Drawing on critical studies in geography, urban sociology and anthropology,
education policy, and critical analyses of race, I argue first that education is constitutive
of neoliberal urban restructuring and the ideology of neoliberal urbanism (see Lipman,
2011). Second, I explore the cultural politics of neoliberalism as a social process and the
role of various social actors in neoliberalization of education.
Totalizing accounts of neoliberalism focus on the power of capital and the state to
impose a set of political and economic arrangements on the city. But a more dynamic
analysis treats neoliberalism as a social process that is materialized through the actions of
multiple social actors, not only elites but also through the engagement of people in the
“grassroots.” From this perspective, neoliberalism in education is produced on the ground
through the actions of teachers and parents who are recruited to or align themselves with
education markets and privatization. Understanding this process involves examining the
“good sense” in these policies, how they resonate with people’s lived experiences, needs
and desires (Gramsci, 1971), and how their needs are articulated to the dominant agenda.
It also involves examining the subject positions available to parents and teachers and
students in the context of neoliberal restructuring and the circulation of neoliberal
ideologies (see Apple & Oliver, 1996; Pedroni, 2007). What identities are offered to
parents or teachers or students or community members by the discourse of neoliberalism
and its material constraints, given the relative weakness of social movements to articulate
and mobilize an alternative, liberatory agenda for education and the city? Here I examine
the production of common sense around charter schools and educational choice as an
aspect of winning the consent of parents and teachers to hegemonic neoliberal urbanism.
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My analysis is based on interviews, informal conversations, observations, and
documents collected through six years of qualitative research and participation in social
movements. As political activist and scholar, I have attended dozens of coalition
meetings, community hearings, public testimonies, school board and local school
meetings, rallies, press conferences, and protests. I have collected stacks of community
manifestos, school board documents, reports by education and urban research institutions,
media reports, and school documents. I also co-authored several reports on the effects of
Chicago’s education reforms and the intersection of education, housing and community
development in the city (Lipman, Person, Koco, 2007; Fleming et al, 2009; Greenlee et
al, 2008). My participation in struggles against the neoliberalization of the city and its
schools richly informs my data and analysis. I also ground the analysis in quantitative
data and independently authored reports on economic development and education in the
city. I begin by summarizing the constitutive role of education in neoliberal urbanism in
Chicago. Then I focus on some of the actors and social processes that are furthering the
neoliberalization of education. I conclude with some implications for the contest for the
city.
Chicago -- Neoliberal Policy Lab
Brenner and Theodore (2002) write that “actually existing neoliberalism” has
involved the intervention of the state, first to destroy existing institutional arrangements,
and then to create a new infrastructure for capital accumulation. Critical geographers and
urban scholars argue that cities have become the policy labs for neoliberal experiments in
urban entrepreneurship, marketization, and competition. Peck, Brenner, and Theodore
(2008) write, “In city after city, policy experiments have been advocated in order to
unleash the latent innovative capacities of local economies, to foster a local
entrepreneurial culture, and to enhance labor market flexibility, competitiveness in place-
marketing schemes, and place-specific assets.” Cities are key sites for deregulation of
labor and attacks on unions, privatization of public infrastructure (e.g., roads, bridges,
parks) and institutions, cuts in spending for social welfare, new arenas for capital
investment, and neoliberal state forms. In short, neoliberal governance, economics, and
ideology have become the “drivers of urban change” (Hackworth, 2007, p.2).
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As the rollback of the Keynsian welfare state and the devolution of federal
responsibility for social welfare took hold in the USA in the 1980s, entrepreneurial city
governments adopted policies to spur corporate growth and competition in the global
economy. To make up for federal cuts, and driven by market ideology, local governments
turned to property and real estate taxes and debt financing (Hackworth; Smith, 2002;
Weber, 2002). They made policy decisions based on satisfying investors and real estate
developers and growth strategies. In particular, bond rating agencies, the gate keepers of
global capital markets, became a central institutional force regulating urban governments
as municipal debt, in the form of municipal bonds, and other securities generated through
real estate tax revenues and other taxes are traded in the global financial markets
(Hackworth, 2007; Weber, 2002). This began the process of the local state shifting from a
site of negotiation of conflicts between capital and labor/social movements to regulation
of the state by finance capital. The new logic of urban government is: Anything that hurts
investment is “bad” for bond ratings and thus “bad” urban policy.
Chicago is a quintessential entrepreneurial city, exemplified by World Business
Chicago (WBC). WBC is a public-private economic development corporation, chaired by
Mayor Daley and funded jointly by the City of Chicago and the private sector with a
Board of Directors made up of some of the region's leading business executives. Shaped
by the logics of transnational capital and the ideology of the market, WBC’s mission is to
increase the city’s competitive advantage (World Business Chicago). These logics
dictate a “favorable business climate” strategy offering low wages, investment
opportunities, well-trained service and production workers, and a pool of creative high-
skilled professionals and the social amenities attractive to these professionals, including
schools and housing. All this is naturalized by the depoliticized discourse of
“globalization” as a deterministic process (Wilson, 2007).
Neoliberal urbanism is also defined by a shift from government to governance:
leadership as efficient management, weak forms of democracy and public participation in
civic life, decision making by public private partnerships, and valorization of the interest
of capital as synonymous with public welfare. Decisions about zoning, community
economic development, public housing, schools, and transportation are made behind
closed doors by appointed commissions and unelected public-private bodies, validated by
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performances of public participation, and justified by the need to improve the city’s
competitive advantage. This process clearly describes Chicago where the mayor appoints
the school board, zoning commissions, local development oversight bodies, public
housing authorities, and virtually every decision-making body in the city. The local state
relegates public participation to contrived public hearings and appointed advisory groups
(Bennett, Smith, and Wright, 2006; Lipman, 2011), and justifies policy decisions by their
contribution to the city’s “revitalization” and “good business climate”.
Neoliberal governance is also “hypermarketized”; it denigrates collective
consumption and institutions” (Weber, 2002, p.520). Gutting social welfare and
privatizing public assets have become the new urban dogma. Under Mayor Richard M.
Daley, Chicago has privatized bridges, parking meters, public parking garages, schools,
hospitals, and public housing and entered into partnerships with private developers and
corporations that span real estate, schools, and development of parks and whole areas of
the city. Drawing on the discourse of “economic competitiveness,” the state also
supports labor restructuring (driving down the cost of labor) through deregulation,
outsourcing unionized jobs, casualized and contingent labor. To deal with the
contradictions produced by neoliberal policies in Chicago and nationally, the privatizing
state is also a punitive state that polices and contains immigrants, homeless people, the
dispossessed, and low-income communities of color, particularly youth, and their
potential resistance (Mitchell, 2003; Wacquant, 2008; 2001). Chicago is notorious for its
police torture scandals, gang loitering ordinance, school suspensions and expulsions of
youth of color, and brutal policing of African American and Latino communities. In
short, neoliberal urbanism has set in motion new forms of state-assisted economic, social,
and spatial inequality, marginality, exclusion, and punishment.
Facilitated by municipal government, gentrification is a pivotal sector in urban
economies (Fainstein, 2001; Hackworth, 2007; N. Smith, 2002), a key arena for financial
speculation, and a central factor in the production of spatial inequality, displacement,
homelessness, and racial containment. Reliance on property tax revenues and real estate
taxes to fund public services and to collateralize municipal bonds makes cities dependent
on, and active subsidizers of, the real estate market. In turn, municipal bonds, and other
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securities generated through real estate tax revenues and other taxes are traded in the
global financial markets (See Weber, 2002.).
Chicago is dominated by downtown mega developments and gentrification of
inner city areas and working class neighborhoods. This has been facilitated by state
subsidies to developers and other schemes to finance and support real estate
development. Chicago public officials have presided over the largest dismantling of
public housing in the USA – 19,000 units. Experts estimate that less than 15 per cent of
former residents will be able to return to the new “mixed-income” developments that
replace them (Wilen & Nayak, 2006). Most former tenants, mostly African Americans,
have been pushed into the private housing market in other very low-income
neighborhoods or out of the city altogether. Where high-rise public housing units and
working class apartments once stood, gentrification complexes of high-end town homes,
condominiums, single family houses, and upscale cafes, gyms, restaurants, boutiques, and
parks take their place. As real estate speculation pushes up property values and property
taxes, working class renters and homeowners are pushed out. In 2000, for the first time in
the USA, poverty decreased in the city and increased in the suburbs (Allard & Roth,
2010). In part, this can be attributed to gentrification and displacement of working class
and low-income people from the city, as well as to other contested, power-laden global
processes that are reconstituting whole metro regions, i.e., restructuring and racialization
of labor markets, reduction of social welfare provision, immigration of low-wage earning
immigrants, and new patterns of racial containment and contestation.
It is important to note, that despite the potency of the “global trope” --
globalization as an inevitable process and global competitiveness as the only alternative
(Wilson, 2007), neoliberal urbanism is contested in Chicago as it is globally (Leitner,
Peck & Sheppard, 2007). For example, in 2008, a coalition of unions and community
organizations fought for a living wage ordinance and stopped approval of a big box retail
store that would drive out small businesses and pay low wages. Parents, students, and
teachers have doggedly resisted neoliberal education policies, and several coalitions
challenged Chicago’s 2016 Olympics bid – which ultimately failed.
Chicago’s Renaissance 2010 – A New Market in Public Education
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The confirmation of Arne Duncan, the CEO of Chicago Public Schools (CPS),
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as
US Secretary of Education in 2009 signalled the national extension of Chicago’s urban
education agenda centered on markets and privatization. This agenda is facilitated by
mayoral control of school systems, which Chicago pioneered. It is characterized by
closing public schools to turn them over to private management organizations, tying
competitive teacher pay to student test scores, and expanding privately run but publicly
funded charter schools and “choice” while “steering education at a distance” through
testing regimes and standards. Under Duncan, these interventions are a prerequisite to
obtain new outlays of federal funding for local education at a time when cash-strapped
urban school districts face severe revenue crises (Arne Duncan: Mayors should run
schools, 2009; US Dept. of Education press release, June 25, 2009). Although the U.S.
has been moving in this direction since the 1980s, Chicago has elaborated and promoted
a national model of the larger global project to restructure schooling for economic
competitiveness and markets (e.g., Dale, 2000; Rizvi & Lingard, 2009),
The first stage of Chicago’s market-based agenda, Renaissance 2010, begun in
2004, aimed to close 60 – 70 public schools and open 100 new schools by 2010, two-
thirds as charter or contract schools (similar to charters). Charter and contract schools are
a U.S. approach to marketizing public education. They are privately operated by non-
profit or for-profit education management organizations, but receive public funds. In
Chicago they do not have democratically elected Local School Councils comprised
primarily parents and community members, as public schools do. And, as in most of the
U.S., charter and contract schools are also non-union, As of Spring 2010, CPS had
closed, consolidated, or phased out 59 schools and opened 92 (46 charter schools, 15
contract schools, and 31 public “performance”
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schools) plus six military high schools
(one for every branch of the armed services). Initially proposed to close “failing schools,”
Ren2010 morphed to consolidate and phase out schools with low-enrollment, including
successful neighborhood schools, on grounds of inefficient space utilization. CPS also
launched a corporate “turn around” strategy to fire all adults in a school, keep the
students, and turn it over to a private education manager or “turnaround specialist.”
Ren2010 has been a nationally visible and highly contested intervention in public
education. Swirling at the surface of community mobilizations, public discussions,
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private conversations, and media accounts are issues of educational equity, class and race
inequalities in the city, gentrification, community participation, individual choice, and the
role of teacher unions. The mayor and his appointed school officials contend that
Ren2010 creates “options” and “choice,” promotes innovation, and raises achievement.
There are working class, primarily Black and Latino, parents who have seen Ren2010 as
an opportunity to exercise choice in their children’s education in the hope of obtaining
something better than what is offered in their neighborhood public schools. (I examine
their perspectives in later sections of the paper.) Some primarily white, affluent parents
have also seized upon Ren2010 as an opportunity to expand selective enrolment and
magnet schools for their children. On the other hand, organized community groups and
parent organizations, the teachers union, some school reform groups, and students have
waged on-going opposition. From the outset, they claimed the plan would destabilize
communities and accelerate gentrification, increase student mobility and school violence,
harm low-income and homeless children in particular, undermine community
participation in schools, weaken unions, and privatize education (Midsouth Fact Sheet,
2004 n.d.; fieldnotes, Chicagoans United for Education press conference, July 1, 2004).
The results largely confirm their predictions. Across African American
communities, schools have been closed for low achievement even when lower
performing schools in other neighborhoods were not. In one African American
community, there is not one public high school remaining – all have been replaced with
charter schools. In Latino communities experiencing gentrification, CPS closed schools
for low enrolment, despite counter evidence (Greenlee et al, 2008; Fleming et al, 2009)
and replaced several with selective schools championed by affluent parents that most
neighborhood children cannot attend. The student mobility and danger produced by
closing schools and transferring students out of their neighborhoods have led to spikes in
violence, including student deaths (Lipman, Person & KOCO, 2007; Karp, 2009). Some
African American students were transferred to as many as four schools in three years as
one school after another was closed, and receiving schools were destabilized by the influx
of dislocated students. Moreover, the plan has not benefited most students in closed
schools who have been shuffled from one low-performing school to another (Gwynne &
de la Torre, 2009). Because most of the closed schools have been in African American
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communities where there are heaviest concentrations of African American educators,
these teachers have been particularly affected. According to the Caucus of Rank and File
Educators, more than 2,000 African American teachers and over 100 principals and
administrators lost their jobs (Schmidt, 2009).
Neoliberalism reframes democracy as the freedom to consume in the market, and
Renaissance 2010 reinforces the democratic deficits that characterize neoliberal
governance. They replace public schools with privately run and non-union charter
schools and undermine elected Local School Councils (LSCs). In a highly centralized,
corporate dominated city and mayoral regime, LSCs are one of few democratic bodies
with decision-making power. In a school system that is 91% students of color and 84%
low income, LSCs are a space where working class communities of color might contend
for power. By redistributing power to parents and community representatives, LSCs also
“asserted the capacity of ordinary citizens to reach intelligent decisions about educational
policy” (Katz, 1992, p.62). In this sense, when they are at their best, LSCs play an
important pedagogical role. They develop collective capacities of people to engage in
democratic debate and decision making about policies affecting their communities. By
undermining local governing councils, Ren2010 enforces the neoliberal preference for
governance by appointed experts and elites as a politically stabilizing environment to
implement market mechanisms (Harvey, 2005).
Beyond the stratifying impact on students and schools, Chicago’s school policies
contribute to the production of political, economic, and spatial inequalities,
marginalization, and exclusion in the city. In the following sections I elaborate this point
and examine social processes, actors, and ideologies that animate this process.
Education and restructuring urban space
Education and housing policies are historically linked in the racialized
spatialization of inequality in the U.S. Residential segregation has been the principle
mechanism for racial segregation of schooling, and schools have long been a primary
selling point to market housing in specific neighborhoods. In Chicago, policies to close
neighborhood schools in low-income communities contribute to displacement of current
residents, and policies to replace them with schools that target middle class families
support the gentrification of these areas. When Ren2010 was unveiled in 2004, the
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Chicago Metropolitan Planning Council made explicit the connection between education
and the redevelopment of former public housing sites as mixed-income developments:
Looking ahead, a number of issues should be addressed as Renaissance 2010
unfolds, including how to coordinate the development timelines of mixed-income
communities with the openings and closings of schools nearby, how to establish
ongoing communication mechanisms to report on the status and progress of
Renaissance 2010 to all of the stakeholders involved in the process, and how to
market these new schools to parents considering moving into the new mixed
income communities. (CHA Plan for Transformation Progress Report, 2004).
Neighborhood schools are particularly important anchors in communities with
persistently high unemployment, lack of programs for children and adults, and overall
disinvestment. The Ren2010 policy of closing schools and displacing children and their
teachers undermines community stability, particularly as the current economic crisis
further destabilizes working class and low-income families. If neighborhood schools bind
people to a neighborhood undergoing change, closing them is a powerful lever to nudge
people out.
“When a family sees the neighbourhood around it changing dramatically, when
their friends are leaving the neighbourhood, when the stores they patronise are
liquidating and new stores for other clientele are taking their places, and when
changes in public facilities, in transportation patterns, and in support services all
clearly are making the area less and less liveable, then the pressure of
displacement already is severe. Its actuality is only a matter of time. Families
living under these circumstances may move as soon as they can, rather than wait
for the inevitable; nonetheless they are displaced.” (Marcuse quoted in Slater,
2009, p.17).
Some African American and Latino areas of Chicago that have been disinvested
in for decades are now valuable real estate. These huge tracts of the city are now
potential sites for reinvestment and gentrification, or are already largely transformed into
middle class and upper middle class housing and retail zones. Mapping school closings
demonstrates that they have been concentrated in areas experiencing intense
gentrification or beginning to be gentrified (Greenlee et al 2008; Lipman & Haines,
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2007). By failing to provide necessary resources
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and then closing neighborhood
schools, Ren2010 facilitates displacement and dispersal of the low-income African
American and Latino families who live there. In turn, replacing their schools with
prestigious selective enrolment schools, magnet schools, and attractive charter schools
increases the neighborhood’s appeal to new middle and upper-middle class homebuyers.
This is so for schools closed both for “failure” and for low enrolment.
Underutilization of school buildings is not simply a “natural” process of demographic
shifts. Declining school enrolments are socially produced in the nexus of capital
accumulation and the cultural politics of race and class in specific places, as are
dismantling of public housing and decline of small businesses in disinvested
neighborhoods. The loss of affordable housing is the result of capital accumulation
strategies that are lubricated by the state’s support for private real estate development,
e.g., policies to raze public housing and Tax Increment Financing zones that subsidize
developers.
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As low-income working class families are pushed out or priced out of
gentrifying neighborhoods, their schools lose enrolment (Fleming et al 2009; Greenlee et
al, 2008). School underutilization then is a product of housing policies that force working
class people out of their neighbourhoods, and, in turn, underutilization furnishes a
rationale to close schools which further pushes people out and clears space for new
selective schools favored by gentrifiers . Gentrification is a pivotal sector in the city’s
economy, and this process powerfully illustrates the intertwining of housing and
education policies in the neoliberal restructuring of the city.
Urban regeneration and the cultural politics of race
Appropriation of urban space through gentrification, closing public institutions
(schools, hospitals, public housing) and state seizure of land through eminent domain is a
cultural as well material process that is produced through discourses of obsolescence,
pathology, and rejuvenation. Obsolescence is constructed as a naturalized process with
the market as a neutral arbiter of value to determine what is obsolete and should be
dismantled. Yet, the value of buildings or whole neighborhoods is actually discursively
produced, with the state strategically declaring some areas “blighted” as a precondition
for their seizure under eminent domain and for state assisted private real estate
redevelopment and gentrification. For example, Weber (2002, p.526) notes that even
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though buildings in the African American South Side of Chicago were not as old as in
other areas of the city, the city more frequently categorized them as unfit or substandard.
In turn, the dispersal of thousands of public housing families and working class residents
from their homes and schools is legitimated as “change” and “regeneration” (see Wilson,
2007). This is a class project that is also deeply racialized and enabled by white
supremacist history and ideology.
In the change/regeneration discourse there is no alternative to market-driven
restructuring of schools, housing, neighborhoods, and downtowns and dispersal of low-
income people. As Ren2010 rolled out, Chicago’s School Board president (himself a
developer) characterized oppositional parents and community members as people “who
don’t want change.” In contrast, willingness to make “tough choices” and enact
“dramatic” change is the mantra justifying closing schools and turning them over to
private operators or remaking them as boutique specialty schools neighborhood children
are generally unable to attend. Bringing this discourse to the national stage, Secretary of
Education Duncan called for “radical new thinking…ideas that are controversial and hard
and tough…the political courage to challenge the status quo” (Duncan, Mayors Should
Run, 2009). In the face of decades of disinvestment and an historically constituted
“education debt” (Ladson-Billings, 2006), neoliberal policies become the only option to
“fix” urban schools and “change” serves as a discourse of containment, stifling debate
and claiming sole authority to speak for “progress”. Invoking the epistemic authority of
the neoliberal version of reality as the only alternative denies that disinvested
communities actually “long for change” (as a community resident put it) that will
improve housing, schools, streets, job prospects, and living conditions – for them in their
communities. As a result of extreme abandonment by capital and the state, and the moral
panic created around the urban “ghetto,” the U.S. “inner city” has become a site of
extreme transition and “soft spot” for neoliberal experimentation (Hackworth, 2007) and
schools are at the center of this process.
In the USA and elsewhere, the cycle of neglect, racial containment, and
redevelopment of central cities where African Americans and Latinos live has been
justified by the discourse of the “ghetto” as dangerous and pathological and by
stigmatizing the identities of those who live there (e.g., Moynihan, 1965; Wilson, 2007).
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Haymes (1995) argues that the gentrification of African American communities is
facilitated by an urban mythology “that has identified Blacks with disorder and danger in
the city” (p.x). In the White cultural imagination the “ghetto” is a space of pathology and
lawlessness. Applauding the impending demolition of the Robert Taylor Public Housing
complex and its replacement with a monumental, privately developed-publicly
subsidized, real estate project, Chicago Tribune writers offered a narrative of the
regeneration of the area: “It’s focus is shifting from cleaning out bad elements to bringing
in good ones” (Grossman and Leroux 2006:12). In this view, a population that has
become largely expendable in the restructured labor force and “dangerous” to a global
city image of white middle-class stability and sanitized cultural diversity must be
expelled or contained (Smith, 1996; Wilson, 2007). The regeneration discourse masks the
nexus of racialized public policy and investment decisions that produced
deindustrialization, disinvestment, unemployment, and degradation of public health, the
built environment, and education in communities of color over the past 50 years. The
discourse of “failing” schools in low-income communities of color is constitutive of
framing “bad neighborhoods” in need of cleansing. Closing schools to re-open them with
new identities in turn enables the “renaissance” of the area for new middle class home
buyers.
At the same time that displacement is highly racialized, in the post-Civil Rights,
“post-racial” era, racism has been rearticulated to a discourse of culture. Strains of this
discourse run through justifications for closing schools under Ren2010. At a February
2005 press conference announcing the closing of a high school in a very low-income
African American community, the CEO of CPS explained that the school had to be
closed because it exhibited a “culture of failure.” The representation of black urban
space as pathological is yoked to the supposedly regenerative and disciplining effects of
the market. According to this racialized neoliberal logic, while public housing and public
schools breed dysfunction and failure, private management, the market, and public-
private partnerships foster entrepreneurship, individual responsibility, choice, and
discipline. The “…concepts ‘public’ and ‘private’ now act as racialized metaphors, the
private is equated with being ‘good’ and ‘white’ and the public with being ‘bad’ and
‘black’”(Haymes, 1995, p.20). This frame denies the real complexity, historicity, and role
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of African American communities as spaces of intellectual and cultural production and as
bases of political and cultural resistance and collective support in the face of racist terror
and discrimination (Fullilove, 2005; Haymes, 1995). Here the logics of capital and race
converge to provide ideological fodder for the dismantling of public housing and closing
of schools in Black communities.
For privileged consumers of gentrified areas, this ideological and material process
is intertwined with what George Lipsitz calls a racialized social warrant for competitive
consumerism and private appropriation and the racialization of space. A social warrant is a
“collectively sanctioned understanding of obligations and entitlements” that authorizes
new ways of knowing and being and transforms what is permitted and forbidden (Lipsitz,
2006a).
“[A] social warrant of competitive consumer citizenship encourages well off
communities to hoard their advantages, to seek to have their tax base used to fund
only themselves and their interests, and to displace the costs of remedying
complex social problems onto less powerful and less wealthy populations”
(Lipsitz, p.455).
It justifies the entitlement of affluent and white parents to the assets of working class and
low-income people of color – their houses, neighborhoods, and schools.
Insinuating managerialism into the public sphere
The shift to managerialism in education is part of the larger shift from
government to governance that characterizes the neoliberal state. The model of “more
and better management” (Clarke & Newman, 1997) as a solution to urban problems has
defined the leadership and administration of Chicago Public Schools. Moreover, the high
profile elaboration of managerialism in school governance has further valorized the
managerial state form in general.
This shift in education has been accomplished, in part, by centralization of power
in the state, demonstrating that the neoliberal state is not a weakened state but rather a
redirected state. In 1995 the Illinois State Legislature gave the mayor of Chicago control
of Chicago Public Schools including authority to appoint the Board of Education and top
administrative officials. Mayor Richard M. Daley appointed a Board of corporate CEOs,
bankers, and developers and a succession of managers from city administration to run the
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school district (Daley’s’ Budget Director, Paul Valas; his Chief of Staff, Arne Duncan;
his appointed head of Chicago Transit Authority, Ron Huberman). This marked a move
from educators to managers at the helm of the city’s public education system. Over the
course of 15 years this administration has entrenched a regime of markets, top-down
accountability modelled on business, and efficiency-driven performance-based “public
management” (Clark & Newman, 1997). Its latest iteration is accountability of teachers
and staff at all levels to a “performance management matrix” and evaluation of teachers
based on “value-added”, e.g., student test scores. Chicago is a national model for mayoral
control (Wong, 2009) as the lever to push through neoliberal restructuring of school
districts.
The deployment of the discourse of public management and markets in the most
extensive public institution in the city naturalizes the neoliberal managerial state form, as
a technology of power, in the city generally. Ren2010 whittles away democratic
possibilities of elected Local School Councils while charter schools are controlled by
private boards, and the school district is run by mangers. Parents are positioned as
consumers in an educational marketplace rather than citizens of the city who deserve a
quality, relevant education in their neighborhood. They are “empowered” as self-
interested school shoppers rather than participants in collective debates and struggles for
appropriate and equitable educations. Schooling is about productivity on test scores and
preparation for global economic competitiveness, not cultivation of personal and social
development. Schools are to be run like businesses, teachers treated as employees,
education as a product, and leadership as efficient management. Based on my extensive
research and interaction with teachers, administrators, and students in Chicago Public
Schools, it would be hard to overstate the ideological force of this discourse in the
production of neoliberal subjectivities (Ball, 2003; Lipman, 2004). Managerialism has
seeped into the fabric of schools at all levels and is legitimated in public discussion of
education..
Direct intervention of corporate actors
In June 2003, the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago, an
organization of the most powerful corporate, financial, and civic elites in the city, issued
a report calling for education markets as the key to improving schools (Left Behind,
16
2003). The report proposed closing “failing schools” and opening at least 100 charter
schools to increase “parental choice” and put “competitive pressure” on chronically
failing neighborhood schools. Bemoaning slow progress in raising test scores, the report
echoed neoliberal theorist Milton Freedman (1962) arguing that school improvement is
stymied because public schools are “a monopoly.” The Club’s solution was to inject
competition through the market, to promote “flexibility” by curbing union contracts, and
to dilute LSCs. This report was the blueprint for Renaissance 2010 which Mayor Daley
announced a year later at a Commercial Club event. Still dissatisfied in 2009, the Club
issued a follow-up report calling for expanding the education market (Still Left Behind,
2009).
Beyond framing the education agenda, the Club is directly engaged in its
promotion and execution. The Club created the Renaissance Schools Fund (RSF) to co-
lead Ren2010 with CPS. The RSF raised $50 million for Ren2010 new school planning,
and with CPS staff, the RSF selects new Ren2010 school operators and recruits and trains
them, develops strategies for new schools, builds public awareness and demand for
choice, and supports accountability and performance reporting of new schools.
(Renaissance Schools Fund,http://www.rsfchicago.org/About.html). The RSF is
comprised of leading corporate and banking CEOs and top CPS officials.
v
The Chief
Operating Officer of the RSF noted that the RSF is “engaged at a detailed level” and has
a “close working relationship with CPS.” (Fieldnotes, RSF Symposium, 5/6/08). Through
differential funding the RSF is also able to promote specific charter school models (Field,
05/05/05). In May 2008, the RSF hosted a gala symposium at a downtown corporate
headquarters to tout Ren2010 to corporate sponsors, charter school operators, and the
press and promote the agenda nationally. (The symposium was attended by
representatives from 14 cities.) The RSF also funds Parents for School Choice, an
organization of mainly African American parents that promotes Ren2010 and choice.
In short, Ren2010 is a public private partnership at the highest level. Capital is
stepping in to shape and oversee the implementation of a neoliberal agenda in
collaboration with the local state, reflecting a larger pattern of direct intervention by
capital in the neoliberalization of the city. Since the 1980s, the Commercial Club has
interceded directly to reshape public schools, housing and transportation policy to retool
17
the city and metro region for global economic competitiveness (Johnson, 1998). In
particular, the Club stresses the strategic importance of schools to the city’s competitive
advantage in the context of globalization e.g., education for workforce preparation and
selective public schools to attract and retain high-paid professionals (Lipman, 2004). (In
fact, many public school students are being prepared for neither. Their schools are little
more than spaces of racial regulation and containment, or worse, pathways to prison or
the military, Lipman, 2003.) In its 2009 report advocating more extensive school markets,
the Club notes that education has been a “consistent focus” of its Civic Committee from
1988 through Renaissance 2010” (Still Left, 2009, p.1).
Neoliberalization on the ground -- offering them an oar
While corporate and state actors in some sense impose the neoliberal agenda on
the city “from above”, it takes hold and is materialized through the decisions and actions
of teachers and parents on the ground. If neoliberals have succeeded in appropriating the
discourse of change, in part, this is because the power to act as a consumer has resonance
in the face of the intransigence of an exclusionary and inequitable public education
system (Pedroni, 2007) – and because no other avenues appear viable. Critical scholars
have extensively documented the racism, inequity, bureaucratic intransigence,
reproduction of social inequality, and reactionary ideologies that have pervaded public
education in the USA historically (e.g., Anyon, 1980; Apple, 2004; Irvine, 1991; Kozol,
1992). Scholars have also documented the intersection of these inequities and broader
urban and national policies (Anyon, 2005; Author, 2004). It is no accident that Chicago’s
charter schools are concentrated in very low-income African American and Latino
communities where public schools have been historically under-resourced and which bear
the scars of years of public and private disinvestment and racism. Like the failure to
maintain decent public housing and other urban infrastructure, this is a strategy of
disinvestment in public goods that furthers privatization, and, as I have argued above, the
spatial restructuring of the city.
While charter schools are part of the neoliberal agenda, they also resonate with
some parents desperate for a decent education for their children and in an environment of
school choice. The first New Schools Expo (exhibition primarily of charter school
vendors) in 2008 was held in a Ren2010 school and attended by about 700 parents and
18
students. The 2009 and 2010 Expos were in the United Airlines Club at Soldier Field
(where the Chicago Bears football team plays) and attended by over 4000. In part the
growing interest in charters is because Black and Latino students have been pushed into
the charter school market as their neighborhood schools have been closed under
Ren2010. Funded by the RSF, the Expo has the earmark of the Commercial Club’s
promotion of school choice. But the cultural politics of the Expo are more complex. The
Parents for School Choice website, albeit funded by the RSF, presents a compelling case
for opting out of neighborhood public schools. “Only 45% of Chicago Public School
students graduate from high school, and only 3 of every 100 African-American and
Latino males in Chicago Public Schools earn a college degree”
(http://www.parentsforschoolchoice.org/). Concerns with school safety, lack of academic
and social support for young black men, and lack of individual attention to students run
through the group’s materials. With the state’s persistent disregard for the claims of
working class parents, especially people of color, the “good sense” of the market speaks
to real issues even if privatization is counter to people’s long term interests (Apple &
Oliver, 1996).
Oppressed and exploited people act in conditions not of our own making. People
may choose to pragmatically work the system in the absence of collective mobilizations
and viable alternatives. Our interviews with charter school parents (Author, forthcoming)
are filled with a sense of desperation, of grasping for any viable alternative. As Ms.
Williams, a charter school parent put it, parents “are drowning in the middle of the sea.”
If “someone rows up in a boat and offers them an oar” (charter school), they’re going to
take it “because it’s better than nothing.” Parents voiced a common litany of frustrations
with neighborhood public schools: lack of individual attention to students’ academic
needs, lack of communication and responsiveness to parents, paucity of resources and
programs, large class sizes, incompetent or uncaring teachers, too much focus on test
prep, low graduation rates, and especially for Latinos we interviewed, lack of safety.
They did not claim ideological allegiance to school markets or privatization. Their choice
of a charter school was tactical, pragmatic. Ms. King, a charter school parent who
participated in lobbying state legislators to raise the state cap on charter schools, claimed
that “divisive” charter school debates don’t take into account that parents feel like they
19
“need better options” and “just want to do what’s best for their child.” In fact, most
parents voiced support for public schools in general, and African American parents spoke
nostalgically of their own public school experiences. But they rejected the diminished
education served up by schools obsessed with high stakes tests; they aspired to a more
holistic educational experience, and were fed up with their inability to effect change for
their children.
What parents wanted is entirely possible within public education, but the strategy
for achieving it is bounded by the neoliberal discourse of markets and choice and
grounded in the frustration of consistently trying and failing to get change in their public
schools. Markets allow for some agency – they extend the identity of “empowered”
consumer to everyone. In reality, the USA has a long history of school choice for a
privileged few through selective public schools, elite private schools, and a parallel
system of parochial schools for working and middle class students who can afford them.
An applicant to a charter school enters the realm of the privileged with the opportunity to
select and be selected, to exercise choice vs. the great mass who are undifferentiated
recipients of what the state doles out. The association of charter schools with private,
magnet, and selective schools echoes through parent interviews.
Ms. King: “It’s almost like a private school but it’s not.”
Ms. Williams: “So that, to me, felt like a more private, more personal type of
environment because I went to a Catholic grammar school and it reminded me
kind of that setting. So I like that.”
Moreover, because every charter school advertises its specialness, the charter school
market seems to generalize the opportunity to attend a school of distinction. There is a
powerful good sense in this logic given the deeply stratified and inequitable system of
public education in the US and the willingness of the wealthy and privileged to opt out.
Charter schools are another arena for capital accumulation facilitated by the cycle
of racialized disinvestment, devaluation, and reinvestment in urban areas (Brenner &
Theodore, 2002). They are part of the neoliberal restructuring of cities as nearly all
aspects of urban life are commodified, and public goods are appropriated for private
profit in the neoliberal remix of “accumulation by dispossession” (Harvey, 2004). In
Chicago, the dramatic expansion of charter schools is promoted by a high level public
20
private partnership (Renaissance 2010) between the mayor and powerful corporate and
financial interests (Commercial Club of Chicago) who are authorized to make decisions -
- without public oversight -- about the education of the city’s over 400,000 school
children, 92% of whom are children of color and 85% are low-income. This
commodification of social life represents not only a capital accumulation strategy but a
social imaginary of a market driven city in which “citizens” are differentially rewarded
competitive consumers whose success depends on their entrepreneurship and individual
effort. In this sense, charter schools are part of the re-norming and revaluing of urban
social relations and subjectivities. However, marketization of education is materialized on
the ground through the actions of parents and teachers (who choose to teach in charter
schools, Author, 2009) and embedded in the historical failures and exclusions of public
education, as is the marketization of public housing and other public services. Looked at
this way, neoliberalism is a process that works its way into the discourses and practices
of the city through the actions of not just elites, but also marginalized and oppressed
people acting within the constraints and limitations of the historical moment.
Conclusion
The struggle over education is part of the contest for the city, but, so far,
education has not been mentioned much in struggles for housing, living wage jobs, public
transit, and access to public space, or against police abuse and exclusion. But Chicago
illustrates that education is intertwined with the neoliberalization of cities. This is
manifested by its role in displacement of people of color and gentrification of their
communities and its contribution to racialized discourses of pathology that legitimate
racial exclusion and expropriation of their communities for capital accumulation.
Education policy also instantiates and promotes managerial state discourses and practices
and the privatization of public institutions. This is accomplished through a multiplicity of
social actors – capital in alliance with the state but also parents seizing on charter schools
as an answer to the failings of their public schools. Against a background of disinvested
and disrespectful public schools and relatively weak progressive social movements, the
market offers a space for agency. For some parents, the subject position of “empowered
consumer” is preferable to that of “public school parent” supplicant to intransigent and
inequitable schools.
21
The discourse of education markets, managerialism, and choice is part of a larger
neoliberal ideological current that circulates in the city. However, it is not determined
that neoliberal discourses will be accepted; they are read in different ways. While some
parents choose charter schools and actively organize for them, others see them as a threat
to public education and part of gentrifying their community, and they mobilize to
challenge privatization (Author, 2007). There are also initiatives on the ground to create
alternatives. This energy is materialized in several social justice high schools in the city,
robust practices of critical and culturally relevant pedagogy, the model of a hunger strike
by Mexican parents that won a state of the art high school in their community, and a
burgeoning education for liberation movement among youth, teachers, and cultural
workers in the city. These interconnected projects embody seeds of re-visioned public
education that is liberatory and democratic. Importantly, what they want is fundamentally
similar to the charter school parents we interviewed.
In periods when ruling classes consolidate a hegemonic social bloc and reshape
common sense around its program (as has been the case with neoliberalism over the past
25 years), and progressive social movements are relatively weak, oppressed people may
tactically ally with elements of the dominant agenda (Pedroni, 2007). This situation
nevertheless points to the provisional nature of hegemony and the potential for counter-
hegemonic movements organized around a liberatory agenda that is grounded in people’s
needs and aspirations. But winning the battle of common sense against a neoliberal social
imaginary of possessive individualism, competition, and consumption will require
forging a new social imaginary of a truly inclusive and democratic urban commons
(Fraser, 1997; Pedroni, 2009). Part of that is redefining what we mean by public
education, who participates in shaping it, and what kind of society it previsions.
22
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i
Arne Duncan was CEO of Chicago Public Schools from 2001-2008 when he was
appointed U.S. Secretary of Education by newly elected President Obama. Under Duncan
Chicago embarked on an ambitious program of marketization of public education.
ii
Performance schools are Renaissance 2010 public schools with a five year renewable
performance contract with CPS
iii
My fieldnotes include accounts of CPS withdrawing support staff, teachers, and
resources from struggling schools which were later closed for failure.
iv
Tax Increment Financing (TIF) is a development tool. The city declares an area
‘blighted’ and property tax revenues for schools, libraries, parks and other public works
are frozen for 23 years with all growth in revenues put into a fund to support
development.
25
v
The RSF is headed by the Chairs of McDonald’s Corporation and Northern Trust Bank,
a partner in a leading corporate law firm, the CEO of Chicago Community Trust (a major
local corporate/banking foundation), the retired Chair of the Tribune Corporation, and top
CPS officials.
doc_606043750.pdf
The manifestations of destructively creative neoliberalization are evident across the urban landscape: the razing of lower income neighborhoods to make way for speculative development; the extension of market rents and housing vouchers.
1
Lipman, Pauline (2011). Contesting the city: neoliberal urbanism and the cultural politics
of education reform in Chicago. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education,
32: 2, 217 — 234
Contesting the City: Neoliberal Urbanism and the Cultural Politics of Education
Reform in Chicago
Pauline Lipman
Department of Educational Policy Studies, University of Illinois at Chicago, IL, USA
…cities (including their suburban peripheries) have become increasingly important
geographical targets and institutional laboratories for a variety of neoliberal policy
experiments, from place-marketing and local boosterism, enterprise zones, tax
abatements, urban development corporations, and public-private partnerships to
workfare policies, property redevelopment schemes, new strategies of social control,
policing and surveillance and a host of other institutional modifications within the local
state apparatus. The overarching goal of such experiments is to mobilize city space as an
arena both for market-oriented economic growth and for elite consumption practices.
The manifestations of destructively creative neoliberalization are evident across
the urban landscape: the razing of lower income neighborhoods to make way for
speculative development; the extension of market rents and housing vouchers; the
increased reliance by municipalities on instruments of private finance; the privatization
of schools; the administration of workfare programs; the mobilization of entrepreneurial
discourses emphasizing reinvestment and rejuvenation; and so forth. City as Policy Lab,
Jamie Peck, Neil Brenner and Nik Theodore, 2008.
Neoliberal economic and social policies that have produced the greatest
concentration of wealth in the fewest hands in history are reshaping cities globally, as
described by Peck, Brenner and Theodore above. This is true not only for “global cities,”
command centers of the global economy (Sassen, 2006) such as New York, London, Sao
Paulo, and Tokyo, but also for the new production hearths and megopolises of the global
2
South (Davis, 2005; Smith, 2002) and economically devastated urban centers such as
post-Katrina New Orleans and Detroit (Pedroni, this issue). In this paper, I focus on
neoliberal globalization enacted in Chicago, a global city that is a laboratory for
neoliberal urban restructuring in the USA.
Chicago has also been an incubator for neoliberal education policies, and I am
specifically interested in the intertwining of these policies with the neoliberal urban
agenda. In previous work I discussed the relationship of education accountability and
differentiated schools to the drive to make Chicago a global city (Lipman, 2004). Here I
focus on education privatization as a vehicle to further the neoliberal development of the
city. Drawing on critical studies in geography, urban sociology and anthropology,
education policy, and critical analyses of race, I argue first that education is constitutive
of neoliberal urban restructuring and the ideology of neoliberal urbanism (see Lipman,
2011). Second, I explore the cultural politics of neoliberalism as a social process and the
role of various social actors in neoliberalization of education.
Totalizing accounts of neoliberalism focus on the power of capital and the state to
impose a set of political and economic arrangements on the city. But a more dynamic
analysis treats neoliberalism as a social process that is materialized through the actions of
multiple social actors, not only elites but also through the engagement of people in the
“grassroots.” From this perspective, neoliberalism in education is produced on the ground
through the actions of teachers and parents who are recruited to or align themselves with
education markets and privatization. Understanding this process involves examining the
“good sense” in these policies, how they resonate with people’s lived experiences, needs
and desires (Gramsci, 1971), and how their needs are articulated to the dominant agenda.
It also involves examining the subject positions available to parents and teachers and
students in the context of neoliberal restructuring and the circulation of neoliberal
ideologies (see Apple & Oliver, 1996; Pedroni, 2007). What identities are offered to
parents or teachers or students or community members by the discourse of neoliberalism
and its material constraints, given the relative weakness of social movements to articulate
and mobilize an alternative, liberatory agenda for education and the city? Here I examine
the production of common sense around charter schools and educational choice as an
aspect of winning the consent of parents and teachers to hegemonic neoliberal urbanism.
3
My analysis is based on interviews, informal conversations, observations, and
documents collected through six years of qualitative research and participation in social
movements. As political activist and scholar, I have attended dozens of coalition
meetings, community hearings, public testimonies, school board and local school
meetings, rallies, press conferences, and protests. I have collected stacks of community
manifestos, school board documents, reports by education and urban research institutions,
media reports, and school documents. I also co-authored several reports on the effects of
Chicago’s education reforms and the intersection of education, housing and community
development in the city (Lipman, Person, Koco, 2007; Fleming et al, 2009; Greenlee et
al, 2008). My participation in struggles against the neoliberalization of the city and its
schools richly informs my data and analysis. I also ground the analysis in quantitative
data and independently authored reports on economic development and education in the
city. I begin by summarizing the constitutive role of education in neoliberal urbanism in
Chicago. Then I focus on some of the actors and social processes that are furthering the
neoliberalization of education. I conclude with some implications for the contest for the
city.
Chicago -- Neoliberal Policy Lab
Brenner and Theodore (2002) write that “actually existing neoliberalism” has
involved the intervention of the state, first to destroy existing institutional arrangements,
and then to create a new infrastructure for capital accumulation. Critical geographers and
urban scholars argue that cities have become the policy labs for neoliberal experiments in
urban entrepreneurship, marketization, and competition. Peck, Brenner, and Theodore
(2008) write, “In city after city, policy experiments have been advocated in order to
unleash the latent innovative capacities of local economies, to foster a local
entrepreneurial culture, and to enhance labor market flexibility, competitiveness in place-
marketing schemes, and place-specific assets.” Cities are key sites for deregulation of
labor and attacks on unions, privatization of public infrastructure (e.g., roads, bridges,
parks) and institutions, cuts in spending for social welfare, new arenas for capital
investment, and neoliberal state forms. In short, neoliberal governance, economics, and
ideology have become the “drivers of urban change” (Hackworth, 2007, p.2).
4
As the rollback of the Keynsian welfare state and the devolution of federal
responsibility for social welfare took hold in the USA in the 1980s, entrepreneurial city
governments adopted policies to spur corporate growth and competition in the global
economy. To make up for federal cuts, and driven by market ideology, local governments
turned to property and real estate taxes and debt financing (Hackworth; Smith, 2002;
Weber, 2002). They made policy decisions based on satisfying investors and real estate
developers and growth strategies. In particular, bond rating agencies, the gate keepers of
global capital markets, became a central institutional force regulating urban governments
as municipal debt, in the form of municipal bonds, and other securities generated through
real estate tax revenues and other taxes are traded in the global financial markets
(Hackworth, 2007; Weber, 2002). This began the process of the local state shifting from a
site of negotiation of conflicts between capital and labor/social movements to regulation
of the state by finance capital. The new logic of urban government is: Anything that hurts
investment is “bad” for bond ratings and thus “bad” urban policy.
Chicago is a quintessential entrepreneurial city, exemplified by World Business
Chicago (WBC). WBC is a public-private economic development corporation, chaired by
Mayor Daley and funded jointly by the City of Chicago and the private sector with a
Board of Directors made up of some of the region's leading business executives. Shaped
by the logics of transnational capital and the ideology of the market, WBC’s mission is to
increase the city’s competitive advantage (World Business Chicago). These logics
dictate a “favorable business climate” strategy offering low wages, investment
opportunities, well-trained service and production workers, and a pool of creative high-
skilled professionals and the social amenities attractive to these professionals, including
schools and housing. All this is naturalized by the depoliticized discourse of
“globalization” as a deterministic process (Wilson, 2007).
Neoliberal urbanism is also defined by a shift from government to governance:
leadership as efficient management, weak forms of democracy and public participation in
civic life, decision making by public private partnerships, and valorization of the interest
of capital as synonymous with public welfare. Decisions about zoning, community
economic development, public housing, schools, and transportation are made behind
closed doors by appointed commissions and unelected public-private bodies, validated by
5
performances of public participation, and justified by the need to improve the city’s
competitive advantage. This process clearly describes Chicago where the mayor appoints
the school board, zoning commissions, local development oversight bodies, public
housing authorities, and virtually every decision-making body in the city. The local state
relegates public participation to contrived public hearings and appointed advisory groups
(Bennett, Smith, and Wright, 2006; Lipman, 2011), and justifies policy decisions by their
contribution to the city’s “revitalization” and “good business climate”.
Neoliberal governance is also “hypermarketized”; it denigrates collective
consumption and institutions” (Weber, 2002, p.520). Gutting social welfare and
privatizing public assets have become the new urban dogma. Under Mayor Richard M.
Daley, Chicago has privatized bridges, parking meters, public parking garages, schools,
hospitals, and public housing and entered into partnerships with private developers and
corporations that span real estate, schools, and development of parks and whole areas of
the city. Drawing on the discourse of “economic competitiveness,” the state also
supports labor restructuring (driving down the cost of labor) through deregulation,
outsourcing unionized jobs, casualized and contingent labor. To deal with the
contradictions produced by neoliberal policies in Chicago and nationally, the privatizing
state is also a punitive state that polices and contains immigrants, homeless people, the
dispossessed, and low-income communities of color, particularly youth, and their
potential resistance (Mitchell, 2003; Wacquant, 2008; 2001). Chicago is notorious for its
police torture scandals, gang loitering ordinance, school suspensions and expulsions of
youth of color, and brutal policing of African American and Latino communities. In
short, neoliberal urbanism has set in motion new forms of state-assisted economic, social,
and spatial inequality, marginality, exclusion, and punishment.
Facilitated by municipal government, gentrification is a pivotal sector in urban
economies (Fainstein, 2001; Hackworth, 2007; N. Smith, 2002), a key arena for financial
speculation, and a central factor in the production of spatial inequality, displacement,
homelessness, and racial containment. Reliance on property tax revenues and real estate
taxes to fund public services and to collateralize municipal bonds makes cities dependent
on, and active subsidizers of, the real estate market. In turn, municipal bonds, and other
6
securities generated through real estate tax revenues and other taxes are traded in the
global financial markets (See Weber, 2002.).
Chicago is dominated by downtown mega developments and gentrification of
inner city areas and working class neighborhoods. This has been facilitated by state
subsidies to developers and other schemes to finance and support real estate
development. Chicago public officials have presided over the largest dismantling of
public housing in the USA – 19,000 units. Experts estimate that less than 15 per cent of
former residents will be able to return to the new “mixed-income” developments that
replace them (Wilen & Nayak, 2006). Most former tenants, mostly African Americans,
have been pushed into the private housing market in other very low-income
neighborhoods or out of the city altogether. Where high-rise public housing units and
working class apartments once stood, gentrification complexes of high-end town homes,
condominiums, single family houses, and upscale cafes, gyms, restaurants, boutiques, and
parks take their place. As real estate speculation pushes up property values and property
taxes, working class renters and homeowners are pushed out. In 2000, for the first time in
the USA, poverty decreased in the city and increased in the suburbs (Allard & Roth,
2010). In part, this can be attributed to gentrification and displacement of working class
and low-income people from the city, as well as to other contested, power-laden global
processes that are reconstituting whole metro regions, i.e., restructuring and racialization
of labor markets, reduction of social welfare provision, immigration of low-wage earning
immigrants, and new patterns of racial containment and contestation.
It is important to note, that despite the potency of the “global trope” --
globalization as an inevitable process and global competitiveness as the only alternative
(Wilson, 2007), neoliberal urbanism is contested in Chicago as it is globally (Leitner,
Peck & Sheppard, 2007). For example, in 2008, a coalition of unions and community
organizations fought for a living wage ordinance and stopped approval of a big box retail
store that would drive out small businesses and pay low wages. Parents, students, and
teachers have doggedly resisted neoliberal education policies, and several coalitions
challenged Chicago’s 2016 Olympics bid – which ultimately failed.
Chicago’s Renaissance 2010 – A New Market in Public Education
7
The confirmation of Arne Duncan, the CEO of Chicago Public Schools (CPS),
i
as
US Secretary of Education in 2009 signalled the national extension of Chicago’s urban
education agenda centered on markets and privatization. This agenda is facilitated by
mayoral control of school systems, which Chicago pioneered. It is characterized by
closing public schools to turn them over to private management organizations, tying
competitive teacher pay to student test scores, and expanding privately run but publicly
funded charter schools and “choice” while “steering education at a distance” through
testing regimes and standards. Under Duncan, these interventions are a prerequisite to
obtain new outlays of federal funding for local education at a time when cash-strapped
urban school districts face severe revenue crises (Arne Duncan: Mayors should run
schools, 2009; US Dept. of Education press release, June 25, 2009). Although the U.S.
has been moving in this direction since the 1980s, Chicago has elaborated and promoted
a national model of the larger global project to restructure schooling for economic
competitiveness and markets (e.g., Dale, 2000; Rizvi & Lingard, 2009),
The first stage of Chicago’s market-based agenda, Renaissance 2010, begun in
2004, aimed to close 60 – 70 public schools and open 100 new schools by 2010, two-
thirds as charter or contract schools (similar to charters). Charter and contract schools are
a U.S. approach to marketizing public education. They are privately operated by non-
profit or for-profit education management organizations, but receive public funds. In
Chicago they do not have democratically elected Local School Councils comprised
primarily parents and community members, as public schools do. And, as in most of the
U.S., charter and contract schools are also non-union, As of Spring 2010, CPS had
closed, consolidated, or phased out 59 schools and opened 92 (46 charter schools, 15
contract schools, and 31 public “performance”
ii
schools) plus six military high schools
(one for every branch of the armed services). Initially proposed to close “failing schools,”
Ren2010 morphed to consolidate and phase out schools with low-enrollment, including
successful neighborhood schools, on grounds of inefficient space utilization. CPS also
launched a corporate “turn around” strategy to fire all adults in a school, keep the
students, and turn it over to a private education manager or “turnaround specialist.”
Ren2010 has been a nationally visible and highly contested intervention in public
education. Swirling at the surface of community mobilizations, public discussions,
8
private conversations, and media accounts are issues of educational equity, class and race
inequalities in the city, gentrification, community participation, individual choice, and the
role of teacher unions. The mayor and his appointed school officials contend that
Ren2010 creates “options” and “choice,” promotes innovation, and raises achievement.
There are working class, primarily Black and Latino, parents who have seen Ren2010 as
an opportunity to exercise choice in their children’s education in the hope of obtaining
something better than what is offered in their neighborhood public schools. (I examine
their perspectives in later sections of the paper.) Some primarily white, affluent parents
have also seized upon Ren2010 as an opportunity to expand selective enrolment and
magnet schools for their children. On the other hand, organized community groups and
parent organizations, the teachers union, some school reform groups, and students have
waged on-going opposition. From the outset, they claimed the plan would destabilize
communities and accelerate gentrification, increase student mobility and school violence,
harm low-income and homeless children in particular, undermine community
participation in schools, weaken unions, and privatize education (Midsouth Fact Sheet,
2004 n.d.; fieldnotes, Chicagoans United for Education press conference, July 1, 2004).
The results largely confirm their predictions. Across African American
communities, schools have been closed for low achievement even when lower
performing schools in other neighborhoods were not. In one African American
community, there is not one public high school remaining – all have been replaced with
charter schools. In Latino communities experiencing gentrification, CPS closed schools
for low enrolment, despite counter evidence (Greenlee et al, 2008; Fleming et al, 2009)
and replaced several with selective schools championed by affluent parents that most
neighborhood children cannot attend. The student mobility and danger produced by
closing schools and transferring students out of their neighborhoods have led to spikes in
violence, including student deaths (Lipman, Person & KOCO, 2007; Karp, 2009). Some
African American students were transferred to as many as four schools in three years as
one school after another was closed, and receiving schools were destabilized by the influx
of dislocated students. Moreover, the plan has not benefited most students in closed
schools who have been shuffled from one low-performing school to another (Gwynne &
de la Torre, 2009). Because most of the closed schools have been in African American
9
communities where there are heaviest concentrations of African American educators,
these teachers have been particularly affected. According to the Caucus of Rank and File
Educators, more than 2,000 African American teachers and over 100 principals and
administrators lost their jobs (Schmidt, 2009).
Neoliberalism reframes democracy as the freedom to consume in the market, and
Renaissance 2010 reinforces the democratic deficits that characterize neoliberal
governance. They replace public schools with privately run and non-union charter
schools and undermine elected Local School Councils (LSCs). In a highly centralized,
corporate dominated city and mayoral regime, LSCs are one of few democratic bodies
with decision-making power. In a school system that is 91% students of color and 84%
low income, LSCs are a space where working class communities of color might contend
for power. By redistributing power to parents and community representatives, LSCs also
“asserted the capacity of ordinary citizens to reach intelligent decisions about educational
policy” (Katz, 1992, p.62). In this sense, when they are at their best, LSCs play an
important pedagogical role. They develop collective capacities of people to engage in
democratic debate and decision making about policies affecting their communities. By
undermining local governing councils, Ren2010 enforces the neoliberal preference for
governance by appointed experts and elites as a politically stabilizing environment to
implement market mechanisms (Harvey, 2005).
Beyond the stratifying impact on students and schools, Chicago’s school policies
contribute to the production of political, economic, and spatial inequalities,
marginalization, and exclusion in the city. In the following sections I elaborate this point
and examine social processes, actors, and ideologies that animate this process.
Education and restructuring urban space
Education and housing policies are historically linked in the racialized
spatialization of inequality in the U.S. Residential segregation has been the principle
mechanism for racial segregation of schooling, and schools have long been a primary
selling point to market housing in specific neighborhoods. In Chicago, policies to close
neighborhood schools in low-income communities contribute to displacement of current
residents, and policies to replace them with schools that target middle class families
support the gentrification of these areas. When Ren2010 was unveiled in 2004, the
10
Chicago Metropolitan Planning Council made explicit the connection between education
and the redevelopment of former public housing sites as mixed-income developments:
Looking ahead, a number of issues should be addressed as Renaissance 2010
unfolds, including how to coordinate the development timelines of mixed-income
communities with the openings and closings of schools nearby, how to establish
ongoing communication mechanisms to report on the status and progress of
Renaissance 2010 to all of the stakeholders involved in the process, and how to
market these new schools to parents considering moving into the new mixed
income communities. (CHA Plan for Transformation Progress Report, 2004).
Neighborhood schools are particularly important anchors in communities with
persistently high unemployment, lack of programs for children and adults, and overall
disinvestment. The Ren2010 policy of closing schools and displacing children and their
teachers undermines community stability, particularly as the current economic crisis
further destabilizes working class and low-income families. If neighborhood schools bind
people to a neighborhood undergoing change, closing them is a powerful lever to nudge
people out.
“When a family sees the neighbourhood around it changing dramatically, when
their friends are leaving the neighbourhood, when the stores they patronise are
liquidating and new stores for other clientele are taking their places, and when
changes in public facilities, in transportation patterns, and in support services all
clearly are making the area less and less liveable, then the pressure of
displacement already is severe. Its actuality is only a matter of time. Families
living under these circumstances may move as soon as they can, rather than wait
for the inevitable; nonetheless they are displaced.” (Marcuse quoted in Slater,
2009, p.17).
Some African American and Latino areas of Chicago that have been disinvested
in for decades are now valuable real estate. These huge tracts of the city are now
potential sites for reinvestment and gentrification, or are already largely transformed into
middle class and upper middle class housing and retail zones. Mapping school closings
demonstrates that they have been concentrated in areas experiencing intense
gentrification or beginning to be gentrified (Greenlee et al 2008; Lipman & Haines,
11
2007). By failing to provide necessary resources
iii
and then closing neighborhood
schools, Ren2010 facilitates displacement and dispersal of the low-income African
American and Latino families who live there. In turn, replacing their schools with
prestigious selective enrolment schools, magnet schools, and attractive charter schools
increases the neighborhood’s appeal to new middle and upper-middle class homebuyers.
This is so for schools closed both for “failure” and for low enrolment.
Underutilization of school buildings is not simply a “natural” process of demographic
shifts. Declining school enrolments are socially produced in the nexus of capital
accumulation and the cultural politics of race and class in specific places, as are
dismantling of public housing and decline of small businesses in disinvested
neighborhoods. The loss of affordable housing is the result of capital accumulation
strategies that are lubricated by the state’s support for private real estate development,
e.g., policies to raze public housing and Tax Increment Financing zones that subsidize
developers.
iv
As low-income working class families are pushed out or priced out of
gentrifying neighborhoods, their schools lose enrolment (Fleming et al 2009; Greenlee et
al, 2008). School underutilization then is a product of housing policies that force working
class people out of their neighbourhoods, and, in turn, underutilization furnishes a
rationale to close schools which further pushes people out and clears space for new
selective schools favored by gentrifiers . Gentrification is a pivotal sector in the city’s
economy, and this process powerfully illustrates the intertwining of housing and
education policies in the neoliberal restructuring of the city.
Urban regeneration and the cultural politics of race
Appropriation of urban space through gentrification, closing public institutions
(schools, hospitals, public housing) and state seizure of land through eminent domain is a
cultural as well material process that is produced through discourses of obsolescence,
pathology, and rejuvenation. Obsolescence is constructed as a naturalized process with
the market as a neutral arbiter of value to determine what is obsolete and should be
dismantled. Yet, the value of buildings or whole neighborhoods is actually discursively
produced, with the state strategically declaring some areas “blighted” as a precondition
for their seizure under eminent domain and for state assisted private real estate
redevelopment and gentrification. For example, Weber (2002, p.526) notes that even
12
though buildings in the African American South Side of Chicago were not as old as in
other areas of the city, the city more frequently categorized them as unfit or substandard.
In turn, the dispersal of thousands of public housing families and working class residents
from their homes and schools is legitimated as “change” and “regeneration” (see Wilson,
2007). This is a class project that is also deeply racialized and enabled by white
supremacist history and ideology.
In the change/regeneration discourse there is no alternative to market-driven
restructuring of schools, housing, neighborhoods, and downtowns and dispersal of low-
income people. As Ren2010 rolled out, Chicago’s School Board president (himself a
developer) characterized oppositional parents and community members as people “who
don’t want change.” In contrast, willingness to make “tough choices” and enact
“dramatic” change is the mantra justifying closing schools and turning them over to
private operators or remaking them as boutique specialty schools neighborhood children
are generally unable to attend. Bringing this discourse to the national stage, Secretary of
Education Duncan called for “radical new thinking…ideas that are controversial and hard
and tough…the political courage to challenge the status quo” (Duncan, Mayors Should
Run, 2009). In the face of decades of disinvestment and an historically constituted
“education debt” (Ladson-Billings, 2006), neoliberal policies become the only option to
“fix” urban schools and “change” serves as a discourse of containment, stifling debate
and claiming sole authority to speak for “progress”. Invoking the epistemic authority of
the neoliberal version of reality as the only alternative denies that disinvested
communities actually “long for change” (as a community resident put it) that will
improve housing, schools, streets, job prospects, and living conditions – for them in their
communities. As a result of extreme abandonment by capital and the state, and the moral
panic created around the urban “ghetto,” the U.S. “inner city” has become a site of
extreme transition and “soft spot” for neoliberal experimentation (Hackworth, 2007) and
schools are at the center of this process.
In the USA and elsewhere, the cycle of neglect, racial containment, and
redevelopment of central cities where African Americans and Latinos live has been
justified by the discourse of the “ghetto” as dangerous and pathological and by
stigmatizing the identities of those who live there (e.g., Moynihan, 1965; Wilson, 2007).
13
Haymes (1995) argues that the gentrification of African American communities is
facilitated by an urban mythology “that has identified Blacks with disorder and danger in
the city” (p.x). In the White cultural imagination the “ghetto” is a space of pathology and
lawlessness. Applauding the impending demolition of the Robert Taylor Public Housing
complex and its replacement with a monumental, privately developed-publicly
subsidized, real estate project, Chicago Tribune writers offered a narrative of the
regeneration of the area: “It’s focus is shifting from cleaning out bad elements to bringing
in good ones” (Grossman and Leroux 2006:12). In this view, a population that has
become largely expendable in the restructured labor force and “dangerous” to a global
city image of white middle-class stability and sanitized cultural diversity must be
expelled or contained (Smith, 1996; Wilson, 2007). The regeneration discourse masks the
nexus of racialized public policy and investment decisions that produced
deindustrialization, disinvestment, unemployment, and degradation of public health, the
built environment, and education in communities of color over the past 50 years. The
discourse of “failing” schools in low-income communities of color is constitutive of
framing “bad neighborhoods” in need of cleansing. Closing schools to re-open them with
new identities in turn enables the “renaissance” of the area for new middle class home
buyers.
At the same time that displacement is highly racialized, in the post-Civil Rights,
“post-racial” era, racism has been rearticulated to a discourse of culture. Strains of this
discourse run through justifications for closing schools under Ren2010. At a February
2005 press conference announcing the closing of a high school in a very low-income
African American community, the CEO of CPS explained that the school had to be
closed because it exhibited a “culture of failure.” The representation of black urban
space as pathological is yoked to the supposedly regenerative and disciplining effects of
the market. According to this racialized neoliberal logic, while public housing and public
schools breed dysfunction and failure, private management, the market, and public-
private partnerships foster entrepreneurship, individual responsibility, choice, and
discipline. The “…concepts ‘public’ and ‘private’ now act as racialized metaphors, the
private is equated with being ‘good’ and ‘white’ and the public with being ‘bad’ and
‘black’”(Haymes, 1995, p.20). This frame denies the real complexity, historicity, and role
14
of African American communities as spaces of intellectual and cultural production and as
bases of political and cultural resistance and collective support in the face of racist terror
and discrimination (Fullilove, 2005; Haymes, 1995). Here the logics of capital and race
converge to provide ideological fodder for the dismantling of public housing and closing
of schools in Black communities.
For privileged consumers of gentrified areas, this ideological and material process
is intertwined with what George Lipsitz calls a racialized social warrant for competitive
consumerism and private appropriation and the racialization of space. A social warrant is a
“collectively sanctioned understanding of obligations and entitlements” that authorizes
new ways of knowing and being and transforms what is permitted and forbidden (Lipsitz,
2006a).
“[A] social warrant of competitive consumer citizenship encourages well off
communities to hoard their advantages, to seek to have their tax base used to fund
only themselves and their interests, and to displace the costs of remedying
complex social problems onto less powerful and less wealthy populations”
(Lipsitz, p.455).
It justifies the entitlement of affluent and white parents to the assets of working class and
low-income people of color – their houses, neighborhoods, and schools.
Insinuating managerialism into the public sphere
The shift to managerialism in education is part of the larger shift from
government to governance that characterizes the neoliberal state. The model of “more
and better management” (Clarke & Newman, 1997) as a solution to urban problems has
defined the leadership and administration of Chicago Public Schools. Moreover, the high
profile elaboration of managerialism in school governance has further valorized the
managerial state form in general.
This shift in education has been accomplished, in part, by centralization of power
in the state, demonstrating that the neoliberal state is not a weakened state but rather a
redirected state. In 1995 the Illinois State Legislature gave the mayor of Chicago control
of Chicago Public Schools including authority to appoint the Board of Education and top
administrative officials. Mayor Richard M. Daley appointed a Board of corporate CEOs,
bankers, and developers and a succession of managers from city administration to run the
15
school district (Daley’s’ Budget Director, Paul Valas; his Chief of Staff, Arne Duncan;
his appointed head of Chicago Transit Authority, Ron Huberman). This marked a move
from educators to managers at the helm of the city’s public education system. Over the
course of 15 years this administration has entrenched a regime of markets, top-down
accountability modelled on business, and efficiency-driven performance-based “public
management” (Clark & Newman, 1997). Its latest iteration is accountability of teachers
and staff at all levels to a “performance management matrix” and evaluation of teachers
based on “value-added”, e.g., student test scores. Chicago is a national model for mayoral
control (Wong, 2009) as the lever to push through neoliberal restructuring of school
districts.
The deployment of the discourse of public management and markets in the most
extensive public institution in the city naturalizes the neoliberal managerial state form, as
a technology of power, in the city generally. Ren2010 whittles away democratic
possibilities of elected Local School Councils while charter schools are controlled by
private boards, and the school district is run by mangers. Parents are positioned as
consumers in an educational marketplace rather than citizens of the city who deserve a
quality, relevant education in their neighborhood. They are “empowered” as self-
interested school shoppers rather than participants in collective debates and struggles for
appropriate and equitable educations. Schooling is about productivity on test scores and
preparation for global economic competitiveness, not cultivation of personal and social
development. Schools are to be run like businesses, teachers treated as employees,
education as a product, and leadership as efficient management. Based on my extensive
research and interaction with teachers, administrators, and students in Chicago Public
Schools, it would be hard to overstate the ideological force of this discourse in the
production of neoliberal subjectivities (Ball, 2003; Lipman, 2004). Managerialism has
seeped into the fabric of schools at all levels and is legitimated in public discussion of
education..
Direct intervention of corporate actors
In June 2003, the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago, an
organization of the most powerful corporate, financial, and civic elites in the city, issued
a report calling for education markets as the key to improving schools (Left Behind,
16
2003). The report proposed closing “failing schools” and opening at least 100 charter
schools to increase “parental choice” and put “competitive pressure” on chronically
failing neighborhood schools. Bemoaning slow progress in raising test scores, the report
echoed neoliberal theorist Milton Freedman (1962) arguing that school improvement is
stymied because public schools are “a monopoly.” The Club’s solution was to inject
competition through the market, to promote “flexibility” by curbing union contracts, and
to dilute LSCs. This report was the blueprint for Renaissance 2010 which Mayor Daley
announced a year later at a Commercial Club event. Still dissatisfied in 2009, the Club
issued a follow-up report calling for expanding the education market (Still Left Behind,
2009).
Beyond framing the education agenda, the Club is directly engaged in its
promotion and execution. The Club created the Renaissance Schools Fund (RSF) to co-
lead Ren2010 with CPS. The RSF raised $50 million for Ren2010 new school planning,
and with CPS staff, the RSF selects new Ren2010 school operators and recruits and trains
them, develops strategies for new schools, builds public awareness and demand for
choice, and supports accountability and performance reporting of new schools.
(Renaissance Schools Fund,http://www.rsfchicago.org/About.html). The RSF is
comprised of leading corporate and banking CEOs and top CPS officials.
v
The Chief
Operating Officer of the RSF noted that the RSF is “engaged at a detailed level” and has
a “close working relationship with CPS.” (Fieldnotes, RSF Symposium, 5/6/08). Through
differential funding the RSF is also able to promote specific charter school models (Field,
05/05/05). In May 2008, the RSF hosted a gala symposium at a downtown corporate
headquarters to tout Ren2010 to corporate sponsors, charter school operators, and the
press and promote the agenda nationally. (The symposium was attended by
representatives from 14 cities.) The RSF also funds Parents for School Choice, an
organization of mainly African American parents that promotes Ren2010 and choice.
In short, Ren2010 is a public private partnership at the highest level. Capital is
stepping in to shape and oversee the implementation of a neoliberal agenda in
collaboration with the local state, reflecting a larger pattern of direct intervention by
capital in the neoliberalization of the city. Since the 1980s, the Commercial Club has
interceded directly to reshape public schools, housing and transportation policy to retool
17
the city and metro region for global economic competitiveness (Johnson, 1998). In
particular, the Club stresses the strategic importance of schools to the city’s competitive
advantage in the context of globalization e.g., education for workforce preparation and
selective public schools to attract and retain high-paid professionals (Lipman, 2004). (In
fact, many public school students are being prepared for neither. Their schools are little
more than spaces of racial regulation and containment, or worse, pathways to prison or
the military, Lipman, 2003.) In its 2009 report advocating more extensive school markets,
the Club notes that education has been a “consistent focus” of its Civic Committee from
1988 through Renaissance 2010” (Still Left, 2009, p.1).
Neoliberalization on the ground -- offering them an oar
While corporate and state actors in some sense impose the neoliberal agenda on
the city “from above”, it takes hold and is materialized through the decisions and actions
of teachers and parents on the ground. If neoliberals have succeeded in appropriating the
discourse of change, in part, this is because the power to act as a consumer has resonance
in the face of the intransigence of an exclusionary and inequitable public education
system (Pedroni, 2007) – and because no other avenues appear viable. Critical scholars
have extensively documented the racism, inequity, bureaucratic intransigence,
reproduction of social inequality, and reactionary ideologies that have pervaded public
education in the USA historically (e.g., Anyon, 1980; Apple, 2004; Irvine, 1991; Kozol,
1992). Scholars have also documented the intersection of these inequities and broader
urban and national policies (Anyon, 2005; Author, 2004). It is no accident that Chicago’s
charter schools are concentrated in very low-income African American and Latino
communities where public schools have been historically under-resourced and which bear
the scars of years of public and private disinvestment and racism. Like the failure to
maintain decent public housing and other urban infrastructure, this is a strategy of
disinvestment in public goods that furthers privatization, and, as I have argued above, the
spatial restructuring of the city.
While charter schools are part of the neoliberal agenda, they also resonate with
some parents desperate for a decent education for their children and in an environment of
school choice. The first New Schools Expo (exhibition primarily of charter school
vendors) in 2008 was held in a Ren2010 school and attended by about 700 parents and
18
students. The 2009 and 2010 Expos were in the United Airlines Club at Soldier Field
(where the Chicago Bears football team plays) and attended by over 4000. In part the
growing interest in charters is because Black and Latino students have been pushed into
the charter school market as their neighborhood schools have been closed under
Ren2010. Funded by the RSF, the Expo has the earmark of the Commercial Club’s
promotion of school choice. But the cultural politics of the Expo are more complex. The
Parents for School Choice website, albeit funded by the RSF, presents a compelling case
for opting out of neighborhood public schools. “Only 45% of Chicago Public School
students graduate from high school, and only 3 of every 100 African-American and
Latino males in Chicago Public Schools earn a college degree”
(http://www.parentsforschoolchoice.org/). Concerns with school safety, lack of academic
and social support for young black men, and lack of individual attention to students run
through the group’s materials. With the state’s persistent disregard for the claims of
working class parents, especially people of color, the “good sense” of the market speaks
to real issues even if privatization is counter to people’s long term interests (Apple &
Oliver, 1996).
Oppressed and exploited people act in conditions not of our own making. People
may choose to pragmatically work the system in the absence of collective mobilizations
and viable alternatives. Our interviews with charter school parents (Author, forthcoming)
are filled with a sense of desperation, of grasping for any viable alternative. As Ms.
Williams, a charter school parent put it, parents “are drowning in the middle of the sea.”
If “someone rows up in a boat and offers them an oar” (charter school), they’re going to
take it “because it’s better than nothing.” Parents voiced a common litany of frustrations
with neighborhood public schools: lack of individual attention to students’ academic
needs, lack of communication and responsiveness to parents, paucity of resources and
programs, large class sizes, incompetent or uncaring teachers, too much focus on test
prep, low graduation rates, and especially for Latinos we interviewed, lack of safety.
They did not claim ideological allegiance to school markets or privatization. Their choice
of a charter school was tactical, pragmatic. Ms. King, a charter school parent who
participated in lobbying state legislators to raise the state cap on charter schools, claimed
that “divisive” charter school debates don’t take into account that parents feel like they
19
“need better options” and “just want to do what’s best for their child.” In fact, most
parents voiced support for public schools in general, and African American parents spoke
nostalgically of their own public school experiences. But they rejected the diminished
education served up by schools obsessed with high stakes tests; they aspired to a more
holistic educational experience, and were fed up with their inability to effect change for
their children.
What parents wanted is entirely possible within public education, but the strategy
for achieving it is bounded by the neoliberal discourse of markets and choice and
grounded in the frustration of consistently trying and failing to get change in their public
schools. Markets allow for some agency – they extend the identity of “empowered”
consumer to everyone. In reality, the USA has a long history of school choice for a
privileged few through selective public schools, elite private schools, and a parallel
system of parochial schools for working and middle class students who can afford them.
An applicant to a charter school enters the realm of the privileged with the opportunity to
select and be selected, to exercise choice vs. the great mass who are undifferentiated
recipients of what the state doles out. The association of charter schools with private,
magnet, and selective schools echoes through parent interviews.
Ms. King: “It’s almost like a private school but it’s not.”
Ms. Williams: “So that, to me, felt like a more private, more personal type of
environment because I went to a Catholic grammar school and it reminded me
kind of that setting. So I like that.”
Moreover, because every charter school advertises its specialness, the charter school
market seems to generalize the opportunity to attend a school of distinction. There is a
powerful good sense in this logic given the deeply stratified and inequitable system of
public education in the US and the willingness of the wealthy and privileged to opt out.
Charter schools are another arena for capital accumulation facilitated by the cycle
of racialized disinvestment, devaluation, and reinvestment in urban areas (Brenner &
Theodore, 2002). They are part of the neoliberal restructuring of cities as nearly all
aspects of urban life are commodified, and public goods are appropriated for private
profit in the neoliberal remix of “accumulation by dispossession” (Harvey, 2004). In
Chicago, the dramatic expansion of charter schools is promoted by a high level public
20
private partnership (Renaissance 2010) between the mayor and powerful corporate and
financial interests (Commercial Club of Chicago) who are authorized to make decisions -
- without public oversight -- about the education of the city’s over 400,000 school
children, 92% of whom are children of color and 85% are low-income. This
commodification of social life represents not only a capital accumulation strategy but a
social imaginary of a market driven city in which “citizens” are differentially rewarded
competitive consumers whose success depends on their entrepreneurship and individual
effort. In this sense, charter schools are part of the re-norming and revaluing of urban
social relations and subjectivities. However, marketization of education is materialized on
the ground through the actions of parents and teachers (who choose to teach in charter
schools, Author, 2009) and embedded in the historical failures and exclusions of public
education, as is the marketization of public housing and other public services. Looked at
this way, neoliberalism is a process that works its way into the discourses and practices
of the city through the actions of not just elites, but also marginalized and oppressed
people acting within the constraints and limitations of the historical moment.
Conclusion
The struggle over education is part of the contest for the city, but, so far,
education has not been mentioned much in struggles for housing, living wage jobs, public
transit, and access to public space, or against police abuse and exclusion. But Chicago
illustrates that education is intertwined with the neoliberalization of cities. This is
manifested by its role in displacement of people of color and gentrification of their
communities and its contribution to racialized discourses of pathology that legitimate
racial exclusion and expropriation of their communities for capital accumulation.
Education policy also instantiates and promotes managerial state discourses and practices
and the privatization of public institutions. This is accomplished through a multiplicity of
social actors – capital in alliance with the state but also parents seizing on charter schools
as an answer to the failings of their public schools. Against a background of disinvested
and disrespectful public schools and relatively weak progressive social movements, the
market offers a space for agency. For some parents, the subject position of “empowered
consumer” is preferable to that of “public school parent” supplicant to intransigent and
inequitable schools.
21
The discourse of education markets, managerialism, and choice is part of a larger
neoliberal ideological current that circulates in the city. However, it is not determined
that neoliberal discourses will be accepted; they are read in different ways. While some
parents choose charter schools and actively organize for them, others see them as a threat
to public education and part of gentrifying their community, and they mobilize to
challenge privatization (Author, 2007). There are also initiatives on the ground to create
alternatives. This energy is materialized in several social justice high schools in the city,
robust practices of critical and culturally relevant pedagogy, the model of a hunger strike
by Mexican parents that won a state of the art high school in their community, and a
burgeoning education for liberation movement among youth, teachers, and cultural
workers in the city. These interconnected projects embody seeds of re-visioned public
education that is liberatory and democratic. Importantly, what they want is fundamentally
similar to the charter school parents we interviewed.
In periods when ruling classes consolidate a hegemonic social bloc and reshape
common sense around its program (as has been the case with neoliberalism over the past
25 years), and progressive social movements are relatively weak, oppressed people may
tactically ally with elements of the dominant agenda (Pedroni, 2007). This situation
nevertheless points to the provisional nature of hegemony and the potential for counter-
hegemonic movements organized around a liberatory agenda that is grounded in people’s
needs and aspirations. But winning the battle of common sense against a neoliberal social
imaginary of possessive individualism, competition, and consumption will require
forging a new social imaginary of a truly inclusive and democratic urban commons
(Fraser, 1997; Pedroni, 2009). Part of that is redefining what we mean by public
education, who participates in shaping it, and what kind of society it previsions.
22
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i
Arne Duncan was CEO of Chicago Public Schools from 2001-2008 when he was
appointed U.S. Secretary of Education by newly elected President Obama. Under Duncan
Chicago embarked on an ambitious program of marketization of public education.
ii
Performance schools are Renaissance 2010 public schools with a five year renewable
performance contract with CPS
iii
My fieldnotes include accounts of CPS withdrawing support staff, teachers, and
resources from struggling schools which were later closed for failure.
iv
Tax Increment Financing (TIF) is a development tool. The city declares an area
‘blighted’ and property tax revenues for schools, libraries, parks and other public works
are frozen for 23 years with all growth in revenues put into a fund to support
development.
25
v
The RSF is headed by the Chairs of McDonald’s Corporation and Northern Trust Bank,
a partner in a leading corporate law firm, the CEO of Chicago Community Trust (a major
local corporate/banking foundation), the retired Chair of the Tribune Corporation, and top
CPS officials.
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