"Urban education and its contexts have changed in powerful ways. Old paradigms are being eclipsed by global forces of privatization and markets and new articulations of race, class, and urban space. ...These factors and more set the stage for Pauline Lipman's insightful analysis of the relationship between education policy and the neoliberal economic, political, and ideological processes that are reshaping cities in the United States and around the globe.
Using Chicago as a case study of the interconnectedness of neoliberal urban policies on housing, economic development, race, and education, Lipman explores larger implications for equity, justice, and ""the right to the city"". She draws on scholarship in critical geography, urban sociology and anthropology, education policy, and critical analyses of race. Her synthesis of these lenses gives added weight to her critical appraisal and hope for the future, offering a significant contribution to current arguments about urban schooling and how we think about relations between neoliberal education reforms and the transformation of cities. By examining the cultural politics of why and how these relationships resonate with people's lived experience, Lipman pushes the analysis one step further toward a new educational and social paradigm rooted in radical political and economic democracy."
This article examines the dialectics of Chicago’s neoliberal education policies and the grassroots resistance that parents, teachers, and students have mounted against them. Grounding the analysis in ...racial capitalism and neoliberal urban restructuring, I discuss interconnections between neoliberal urban policy, racism, and education to clarify what is at stake for communities resisting Chicago’s policies. The paper describes deep and pervasive racial inequities, school closings, privatization, and disenfranchisement driving organized opposition and the labor-community alliance at the center of organized resistance. I argue that neoliberal education policy is racialized state violence, and education is a battleground for racial justice and Black self-determination. I conclude with observations on Chicago’s experience so far that might be useful in other contexts.
This article focuses on the increased power of venture philanthropy to shape education in urban communities of color in the USA. The author situates venture philanthropy's expanded influence in urban ...school districts in the nexus of urban disinvestment, neoliberal governance, wealth concentration, and economic crisis. The author argues that billionaire philanthropists are using the fiscal crisis of the state to shape education policy and governance, operating as part of the 'shadow state'. Capitalizing on austerity politics and their philanthropies' embeddedness in the state and advocacy organizations, venture capitalists deploy their enormous wealth and political influence to restructure urban school districts that predominantly serve low-income African American, Latino, and other students of color. The goal of their neoliberal agenda is to restructure education to serve economic competitiveness and to open up the public education sector to capital accumulation. The fusion of the state and capital, through the interrelation of venture philanthropy and government at all scales, to impose policies of disenfranchisement, public school closings, privatization, and appropriation of Black urban space, constitutes a new colonialism. The article illustrates this dynamic through case studies of Detroit, Philadelphia, and Chicago.
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4.
High stakes education Lipman, Pauline
2004, 20040229, 2003, 2004-01-30, 2004-02-29, 20030101
eBook, Book
Noted scholar Pauline Lipman explores the implications of education accountability reforms, particularly in urban schools, in the current political, economic, and cultural context of intensifying ...globalization and increasing social inequality and marginalization along lines of race and class.
Pauline Lipman is Associate Professor of Education Policy Studies and Research and Director of the Institute for Teacher Development and Research at DePaul University, Chicago.
"Anyone who really wants to understand urban school reform must read High Stakes Education . In it, Lipman deals with both the macro and micro socio-cultural issues of urban schools. She deftly weaves together the political and the personal to tell a story that should outrage every caring citizen." - Gloria Ladson-Billings, Professor, University of Wisconsin-Madison
This article examines the intertwining of neoliberal urbanism and education policy in Chicago. Drawing on critical studies in geography, urban sociology and anthropology, education policy, and ...critical analyses of race, the author argues that education is constitutive of material and ideological processes of neoliberal restructuring, its contestation, and the struggle for a new urban social imaginary. The paper focuses on neoliberalization of education as a social process. The data show that education policy is constitutive of racialized restructuring of urban space and managerial governance of the public sphere. While capital is a central actor, neoliberal policy also works its way into the discourses and practices of education through actions of marginalized and oppressed people working within constraints of the present situation. This suggests the need to address the (Gramscian) 'good sense' of neoliberal policy in a counter-hegemonic struggle for the city.
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This article examines education accountability as a mechanism of coercive neoliberal urban governance in the USA. Drawing on Gramscian theory of the 'integral state' as the dialectical synthesis of ...coercion, consent, and resistance, the author argues that as the crisis gives the state less room to win consent, it intensifies coercion as a strategy of governance. The author discusses three aspects of coercive state responses to the crisis in relation to education: (1) cannibalizing public education as a site of capital accumulation; (2) imposition of state austerity regimes and selective abandonment of education as a mechanism of social reproduction and legitimation in African-American communities that have become zones of disposability; and (3) governance by exclusion of African-American and Latino communities through school closings, state takeovers of elected governance bodies, and disenfranchisement. Systems of accountability are integral to this process as they make schools legible for the market, mark specific schools and school districts as pathological and in need of authoritarian governance, and justify minimalist schools in areas of urban disposability. This paper concludes with the potential of emergent resistance to dominant neoliberal education policy and argues that breaking with the framework of accountability and testing is critical to a counter-hegemonic alternative.
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Since the publication of A Nation at Risk in 1983, under the Reagan Administration, there has been an evolving shift in federal education policy from a focus on equity to economic competitiveness, ...markets, standards, and top-down accountability. This agenda was articulated in Bill Clinton's Goals 2000 and encoded in George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation, ushering in an era of high-stakes testing, privatization and "school choice." President Obama not only embraced the neoliberal agenda, he capitalized on the economic crisis, particularly the fiscal crisis of cities and states, to escalate and expand it, embedding it in federal education funding and new federal policy,.
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Responses to the neoliberal project to restructure education and its relationship to neoliberal urban development are discussed. In the neoliberalization of social policy and the neoliberal political ...economy of cities, education has been deemed a crucial sector. Consequences of privatization and austerity measures for public schools and its role in social reproduction are also explored.
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This article uses a social justice framework to problematize national and local policies in housing and education which propose to reduce poverty and improve educational performance of low-income ...students through mixed-income strategies. Drawing on research on Chicago, the article argues mixed-income strategies are part of the neoliberal restructuring of cities which has at its nexus capital accumulation and racial containment and exclusion through gentrification, de-democratization and privatization of public institutions, and displacement of low-income people of color. The ideological basis for these policies lies in racialized cultural deficit theories that negate the cultural and intellectual strengths and undermine the self-determination of low-income communities of color. Neoliberal mixed-income policies are unlikely to reduce inequality in education and housing. They fail to address root causes of poverty and unequal opportunity to learn and may exacerbate spatial exclusion and marginalization of people of color in urban areas. Building on Nancy Fraser's model for social justice, the article concludes with suggestions toward a framework for just housing and education policy centered on economic redistribution (economic restructuring), cultural recognition (cultural transformation), and parity of political representation.
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This address was given as the plenary presentation to the 24th Annual Conference of the Coalition for Urban and Metropolitan Universities, Chicago, Illinois, October 23, 2018.
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