Considering Classes, Races, and Neighborhoods in Building Classroom Rapport and Understanding School Closures

While neoliberal approaches have been applauded for creating transparency and measurable accountability, and on the other scholars have argued that these approaches undermine the goals of education/higher education itself, causing burn out for teachers and widening racial and class divisions for students. This presentation describes the everyday language that constructs responsibility over the course of a semester in a remedial reading community college classroom, and the ways in which those constructions linguistically connect to other concepts widely attributed to neoliberal—business approaches and mindsets integrated into non-businesses (e.g. standardized testing, speed/acceleration, performance measurements, learning ‘outcomes,’ accountability, etc.).

NYC’s Renewal school program, announced in late-2014, was positioned as a sharp turn away from the path of closing struggling schools. Yet over the program’s four years, fourteen Renewal schools were closed and 9 were merged into other schools. These closures and consolidations disproportionately impacted students of color, low-income students, and other high-needs subgroups. Drawing on data from 10 Renewal school closure decisions, I synthesize the equity concerns voiced by community members of Renewal schools slated for closure and explore the (race-neutral) discourses and framings the DOE used in response to those concerns.

This paper will investigate Penn’s interventions into West Philadelphia public schools during the 1960s and 70s, as part of its campaign to make the neighborhood more friendly to its core constituencies. The main source of information for the paper is interviews conducted with neighborhood residents who experienced these interventions as students, teachers, staff and parents. I will cross-reference interview data with the official depictions of these programs given in institutional documents. Through a historical example, this paper will explore the role of education in gentrification, which at that time was just beginning to emerge as an urban phenomenon.