Educational reforms and policy over the past 3 decades have drastically altered the landscape of the city. But, these transformations to education have not occurred in a vacuum, nor have they occurred in accordance with neat and tidy boundaries that divide academic disciplines. Indeed, the neoliberal restructuring of public education is but one facet in the global counterrevolution by capitalist forces to reinsert capital accumulation underpinning uneven geographical development of the city. As Malott and Ford (2015) write, “If one examines the current neoliberalization of U.S. public schools outside of this context, then one will only have a partial and therefore inadequate understanding of the dynamics at work” (p. 60). This, generally speaking, is the stage upon which Pauline Lipman’s (2011) book, The New Political Economy of Urban Education: Neoliberalism, Race, and the Right to the City was conceived. By situating the neoliberal restructuring of Chicago within this context, Lipman illustrates an essential task that social activists, academics, and critical scholars must undertake—that is, to dissolve academic disciplinary boundaries to crossover and meet head-on the central mechanisms driving capitalist division of labor and exploitation. Lipman formulates a political-economic framework that coalesces critical geography, urban and cultural studies, and critical policy analysis to “understand the dialectics of the present situation in order to transform it” (p. 3). Lipman’s book includes an editor’s introduction by Michael Apple and six chapters ending with the call of Henri Lefebvre’s “right to the city” for a new social imaginary.Following the editor’s introduction, Lipman’s introduction sets the stage for the chapters that follow. Lipman draws on the work of the critical geographer David Harvey to mobilize the city as a vantage point to unearth the mechanism at work in the privatization of public education and, in general, the neoliberal restructuring of the urban environment to an “entrepreneurial postwelfare city” (p. 19). Marxist philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre’s conception of the “right to the city” provides Lipman with an entry point for diagnosing the neoliberal attack on public education and public housing and also opens dialogue on the “right” to transform the city: Chicago. This neoliberal attack is not only material and economic but also ideological and political; it is aimed at reconstituting what is public by reducing social relations to exchange within the market, where competition creates unnatural levels of inequality. Lipman underpins the project by drawing on theoretical perspectives across disciplines to formulate a new political-economic framework of urban education. This framework informs the project as a case study, in which Lipman conducts ethnographic fieldwork and action research by recursively moving from social activist for political-economic transformation to critical scholar conducting interviews, document analysis, and participant observation in the community to make visible the abstract processes of capital dispossession and accumulation. Lipman’s powerful, multidisciplinary approach exposes the vulgar, where “radical ruptures open a space for transformative solutions” (p. 16) to make explicit the “need to move beyond capitalism” (p. 17).In Chapter 2, Lipman’s political-economic framework illustrates appropriateness for decoding the processes of neoliberalism around class and race in the cityscape, notably because approaches “that do not take political economy into consideration can be subsumed within and made to work to perpetuate capitalist economic and social relations” (Malott re-scaling signifies the interplay between “global and local in the creation of new political, social, and economic relations” (p. 24)—in a word, “glocalization.” Through glocalization, the disadvantaged in terms of race and class are dispossessed through systematic processes of housing gentrification and educational reforms that limit the collective participation of parents and community members. Importantly, Lipman writes, “neoliberalism reframes how we think about the city—who has a right to live there, what constitutes a ‘good’ neighborhood, and what kinds of economic development are possible” (p. 33). Thus, for Lipman cities are constitutive of not only material spaces, but also socially constructed perceptual spaces.Chapter three directs our attention to the closing and restructuring of public schools as privatized spaces (i.e., military schools, charter school, and contract schools) in low-income, majority Black and Hispanic places of the city. Public education in Chicago has been subjected to a variety of reforms (e.g., 1988 Local School Reform Act, 1995 top-down accountability reform, and Renaissance 2010 Ren, 2010) that have shifted discourses of public education to “neoliberal newspeak” (Cabalin, 2013, p. 11). Lipman situates these educational reforms by highlighting the dialectical contradiction between free-market, neoliberal capitalism and the centralization of governance, where in 1995 the democratically elected Chicago school board was replaced by mayoral control. Although not explicitly stated by Lipman, the concentration of mayoral control and the use of state power for public-private restructuring of the urban environment for capital accumulation draws a tight parallel with the U.S.-backed overthrow of Chile’s democratically elected president on September 11, 1973 and the installment of his replacement, a military dictator, Augusto Pinochet. While Chile served as an experiment for neoliberalism guided by a dictator and Chicago economist, Milton Friedman, Chicago has been the laboratory for neoliberal policy experiments under the concentrated control of the mayor to reconstitute public education and housing through public-private partnerships. Reconstituting what was once public and making it private occurs through the generation of shifting discourses where democracy becomes a choice in a market. According to Lipman, “democracy is equated with the freedom to consume the market, and the ideal citizen is the consumer” (p. 62). Neoliberal transformations controlling “the right to the city” and public education have also overlapped with public housing.In Chapter 4, Lipman works to unmask Chicago’s mixed-income housing, which serves to restrict access to the “right to the city” for the most disadvantage people, where “the subtext is race” (p. 75). Public housing is destroyed and replaced by smaller mixed-income, privately managed units, resulting in displaced residents not being guaranteed housing, a process that occurred in Chicago under the HOPE IV initiative (e.g., income mixing in the classroom to improve education performance). The project of mixed income housing (along with the destruction of nearby neighborhood schools) is central to not only class but also racial discrimination. As Lipman notes, “public housing is one of the few remaining obstacles to gentrification” (p. 43). Indeed, Lipman suggests that mixed-income housing is a neoliberal strategy “which has at its nexus capital accumulation and racial containment and exclusion through gentrification” (p. 75). This strategy is “rooted in historical metaphors of White supremacy” (p. 75). Lipman, however, does not present an argument against mixed income housing and schools; rather, she explains how such practices are intertwined with neoliberal discourses and the public-private mechanisms that are central in the displacement of purposes and potentialities for more equitable access to the city. According to Lipman, mixed-income policies negate four central points: (a) poverty, racism, unemployment, and school “failure” without implicating political-economic structures; (b) urban architecture/aesthetics that cannot resolve ideological barbarism and its devastating social consequences; (c) misappropriating the colonial model of middle class values; (d) further democratizing society by imposing relocation and resocialization policies with no regard for race or culture.In Chapter 5, Lipman, along with coauthor Cristen Jenkins, approaches the neoliberal transition from government to governance by examining venture corporate philanthropy. Recalling Chapter 1, “the shift from government by elected state bodies and a degree of democratic accountability to governance by experts and managers and decision making by judicial authority and executive order is central to neoliberal policy making” (p. 13). Throughout the chapter, Lipman connects the reduction of public funding with the emergence, control, and unaccountability of corporate venture philanthropy organizations such as the Gates Foundation, Walton Foundation, and Eli Broad Foundation, in shaping urban education policy where public education and public housing are transformed into sources for capital accumulation. By drawing on Harvey’s work, Lipman challenges common sense rhetoric where the dispossession of low-income communities is inextricably linked to the emergence of “billionaire capitalists who influence policy through the largess of their foundations” (p. 103). These foundations have become political actors able to set and reset educational policy agendas while mobilizing grass roots organizations to support their hegemonic agenda. Freire (1970) best explained venture philanthropy when he wrote that for the continued expression ofIn Chapter 6, Lipman transitions to the built environment to examine the charter school and to further explore “choice” and the cultural politics of teachers’ and parents’ lived experiences through which neoliberal policies have materialized. The charter school has served as the central mechanism for bringing public education into the market. As Ford (2014) writes, “the regime of high-stakes standardized testing is implemented in order to monitor and police the productiveness of the school and to ensure that only knowledge that is oriented toward the demands of the current market place is being taught” (p. 790). Lipman examines the historical context of charter school growth throughout the United States and in Chicago before interpreting and connecting the appeal for charter schools with the experiences and desires of teachers and parents. This appeal is inherently paradoxical, as charter schools serve the needs of capitalists and parents and teachers insofar as they are “located in neoliberal ideology and the logic of capital but also in aspirations of communities for educational and cultural self-determination and teachers’ desire for greater professional autonomy” (p. 121). Indeed, such an appeal is justified, Lipman indicates, because public schools have “historically been raced, gendered, classed, and sexed spaces complicit in the reproduction of social inequalities” (p. 145). But, are these consequences not rooted in neoliberal, capitalistic colonialism? As Noam Chomsky argues, “This goes way back to the origins of the public education system.… There’s a two-tiered system, and it goes right to the present” (Wubbena, 2015, p. 3). Lipman closes the chapter by asking,It is on this sentiment that I will briefly provide comment.Capitalism depends on the re/production of labor power to generate surplus value (Marx, 1867/1967). It is in the logic of surplus value that positionality becomes essential for understanding both resistance and reproduction. The discourse of the “failing public school” is inherently reproductive, but so too is the discourse of choice in that once a choice has been made it serves to reproduce invariance. That is, “by beginning with inequality, proves it, and by proving it, in the end, is obliged to rediscover it again and again … a distance discursively invented and reinvented so that it may never be abolished” (Ranciere, 1991, p. xix). This process is not a product of public schools per se, but rather the re/production of surplus labor power rooted in the social relations of capitalism. It is, therefore, important to “understand the dialectics of the present situation in order to transform it” (p. 3). Yet, Lipman seems to conflate good sense with common sense when interpreting parents’ logic for choosing charter schools (e.g., “appeal to agency, community, brotherhood, family, academic rigor, college opportunity” p. 142) even though they did not claim ideological allegiance to privatization. Rather, this common sense logic illustrates a failure to penetrate hegemonic discourse to unmask the logic of capitalism. As Lakeoff (2002) notes, the “persistent and terribly damaging myth about our economy, namely, that in the American economy poverty can, in principle, be eliminated—only if there was better education.… This is simply false. Our economy as it is presently structured requires substantial poverty” (p. 420).Lipman’s concluding chapter draws together the central themes running throughout the book to set forth a new social imaginary, one in which she admittedly has trouble grappling with and naming. It is, however, difficult to name something that “was created by a powerful constellation of economic and political forces that have appropriated the city as their own” (p. 160). This leaves space for us to question just what is “good education” (Wubbena, 2015). Is it doing and knowing what is expected and that which we already have a vocabulary for explaining? Or is it an education based on thinking and knowledge that we cannot conceive of or yet conceptualize—that is, one that we have “trouble grappling with and naming.” Lefebvre’s “right to the city” is central to transforming city space and building counterhegemonic movements that unite differences. Lipman argues for a transformative education—a critical pedagogy—capable of maximizing human development based on a political and economic democracy. Lipman’s political economic framework helps to “‘connect the dots’ between immediate issues and larger systems of oppression and exploitation play a crucial leadership role in moving the education movement toward a systemic analysis and strategic orientation” (p. 163). By reframing neoliberal discourse and extending the boundaries of possible discussion, Lipman calls on making global connections to build solidarity and expose the roots of capitalism’s recursive processes of crisis and recovery. Lipman’s book is an accessible text and offers a powerful framework to work toward a nonreformist reform model of the society we wish to have and the one we cannot yet imagine.
Zane C. Wubbena (Mon,) studied this question.