Over the past twenty years, neoliberal education reforms have gained increasing momentum across the United States, emphasizing school choice, market discipline, standardized testing, high-stakes evaluation, privatized management, and the reframing of public education as a site for capital investment. This special issue examines the intersections between neoliberal education reform strategies and questions of social justice, community development, and urban policy. Many of the articles were first presented at the inaugural Education Reform, Communities and Social Justice research conference at Rutgers University’s Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy.

The articles speak to the political economy of urban education and its entanglement with “development”; how race matters in school selection and attitudes toward school closure; where and how resistance to charter schools and high stakes testing has been mobilized; and the racialized reach and impact of zero-tolerance discipline policies. The articles also focus on how parents, educators, and students are navigating the radically redesigned landscape of school “choice.” With a wide-angle view of the policies and practices born in neoliberal logics, these articles reveal the consequences, the resistance, and the alternatives, infused with a sense of outrage, equity and hope.

View the journal here: https://juablog.com/2020/06/30/special-issue-preview-and-video-presentations-unequal-schools-and-communities-a-critical-examination-of-neoliberal-education-reform/

Abstract:
This article considers the intersection of school closure recommendations in Philadelphia in 2013 with neighborhood race and class demographics and explores how neighborhood stakeholders situated themselves in space in protesting school closures. Quantitative analysis reveals that census tracts where schools were slated for closure had disproportionately lower income and higher representation of African American residents than those tracts without closure recommendations. Qualitative analysis of testimony at public meetings and subsequent interviews with neighborhood stakeholders highlights 3 ways in which stakeholders invoked their spatial positionality on this landscape: (1) by framing school closure as confirmation and perpetuation of past place-based inequities and marginalization, (2) by describing school closure as a burden unequally borne by poor and African-American communities, and (3) by portraying school closure as a harbinger of displacement. The article highlights the ways in which stakeholders rooted schools in place in racialized political economic space, countering the aspatial logics of marketized school reforms.

http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/ItFvf3zYMpzDeYtag9VQ/full