The New Political Economy of Urban Education: Neoliberalism, Race, and the Right to the City

Abstract

The book, the result of six years of activism and research into school and urban reform in Chicago, begins with a brief overview of neoliberalism. Following this, the first chapter presents Lipman’s central argument: neoliberal urban and education policies, supported and informed by White supremacist ideologies, displace African American and Latino/a working class communities as part of a project to attract urban investment. The second chapter expands upon this claim, linking post-Fordist global capitalism and White supremacy to school reform and urban policies in Chicago. The third chapter presents an analysis of the Chicago Public School Board’s Renaissance 2010 policy document and exposition of how policy actors use it together with federal education policies to further the marketization and disinvestment of public education in Chicago. In the fourth chapter, Lipman critiques mixed income housing and schooling policies and the discourses that underpin both while building further support for her claim that urban reform and school reform are part of the same neoliberal urban initiative. She finds that while framed in egalitarian rhetoric, mixed-income urban development and education policies are implicitly supported by racist discourses that disavow the structural problems facing African American and Latino/a working class communities. Moreover, the recodification of poverty as a cultural problem devalues these communities as spaces of intellectual and cultural production