Shaping the Common Sense of Chicago’s Racialized Neoliberal Education Project, A Comparative Analysis

This research is focused on race and the dialectic of Chicago neoliberal education reform and resistance. In this study, I analyze the racial discourses and the cultural politics of race of key school choice policy moments under the administration of former mayor Rahm Emanuel (2011-2019), during which the contradictions of and contestations to Chicago’s racialized neoliberal education project intensified the crisis of legitimacy of this neoliberal conjuncture. Using a comparative racialization analysis, the three policy moments I examine include: 1) the resumption of school closings in 2018—after a moratorium following the historic closures of 50 public schools in 2013—during which Chicago Public Schools targeted majority low income and African American schools; 2) the 2015 charter school expansion into the Latinx southwest side and whiter north side of the city; and 3) the increase in appointments of people of color to head the district, what I call a new racialized managerialism. I find that during this crisis period, Chicago Public Schools shifted toward what Jodi Melamed calls neoliberal multiculturalism as the official state anti-racist discourse to manage the crisis, and that neoliberal austerity and school choice intensify and are relegitimized by anti-black racism which undermine opportunities to build solidarity to challenge neoliberal education policy. Thus, to build toward a more transformative, anti-racist, redistributive educational reform agenda requires a deeper understanding of anti-blackness as a structure that shapes the common sense of neoliberal school choice and undermines collective life.