Opening Act: Neocolonial Urban Education Reform and the Detroit Public Schools

Abstract

Background/Context:

Urban educational systems have garnered focused examination as bastions of educational inequity, particularly along race and class cleavages. These systems are often cited as inefficient bureaucratic institutions plagued by financial mismanagement and political corruption that produce dismal achievement outcomes. Contemporary educational research demonstrates that neoliberal education reforms exacerbate racialized inequity, but we are less clear on the terms of this racialized inequity.

Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study:

This article explores how we may deepen our conception of ghettoization, as espoused by Jean Anyon and others, and expand what is termed the social context of education to include a broader colonial history of the underdevelopment and control of educational institutions. This article examines the 1999 state-legislated intervention of the Detroit Public Schools (DPS) district, also known as Michigan Public Act 10. The reform transformed the district’s governance structure, which dissolved local elected control over the school system and centralized educative power in the city’s mayor and state governor. The key research question animating this analysis centers understanding the political economic impetus and effects of this educational reform. Engaging an internal colonial analytical framework, this article is a theory-driven analysis of the underlying dynamics that made the state-legislated reform possible. This analysis of the Detroit reform motivates a critical engagement of the colonial logics that have shaped the ontological position of colonial subjects, while conducting research that examines neoliberal urban education reform.

Introduction

In 1999, the Detroit Public Schools (DPS) served approximately 179,000 students (Mackinac Policy Center, 2006). But the DPS no longer serves students. State-imposed reform legislation partitioned the district into two fiscal entities. In conjunction with state law, by June 2016 the DPS was under the fiscal authority of an emergency manager. The state-imposed emergency manager, Judge Steven Rhodes, served as transitional manager of the new district. The new Detroit Public Schools Community District (DPSCD) opened Tuesday, September 6, 2016, operating 97 schools with approximately 45,000 students enrolled—a fraction of the students originally under the authority of the former DPS (Meekhof, 2016). The original district, established in 1842, now exists only as a fiscal entity to pay off accumulated debt. This 2016 measure was the cumulative effect of decades of political economic domination of the city and its schools.

There are several pieces that have contextualized the road to 2016, including the eventual financial receivership of the city and the city schools, ideological battles waged before and on the Board of Education, and racialized urban redevelopment ventures imposed by a nexus of anti-Black and anti-poor political economic elite (Detroiters Resisting Emergency Management, 2016; Guyette, 2014, 2015; Kruth, 2016; Pedroni, 2011; We the People of Detroit Research Collective, 2016; Wylie-Kellerman, 2017). These counter-perspectives contrast sharply with popular discourses that conceptualized Detroit as a wasteland, incapable of self-governance. Instead, these critical perspectives illuminate the linked fate of Detroit’s political economy and the public school system, and further exhume the social movements that created educational alternatives within and beyond the system. As Jean Anyon (1997) might contend, the story of the rise and fall of the DPS cannot be understood without analysis of its social context.

This article examines what might be considered the opening act of the fall of the DPS amid the advent of neocolonial urban education reform. The state intervention in the district occurred in a policy context wherein racialized political economic interests mediated educational decision-making. The analysis contributes to a contextualization of how race and class operate as mutually constitutive contexts of a system of oppression, rather than as independent relations of domination. This reform functioned to maintain the fragility of a hegemonic social order, contingent on the proper functioning of state-sanctioned institutions.

Urban Educational Disparity as an Outcome of State-Sanctioned Spatialized Racism

Urban educational systems have garnered focused examination as bastions of educational inequity, particularly along race and class cleavages (Katznelson & Weir, 1988; Kozol, 1991; Tyack, 1974). These systems are often cited as inefficient bureaucratic institutions plagued by financial mismanagement and political corruption that produce dismal achievement outcomes. However, critical education researchers argue that educational administrative practices and achievement outcomes are relational to the broader social context in which school systems are situated (Anyon, 1997; Bowles & Gintis, 1976; Lipman, 2011). In the past 30 years, market-oriented school reforms have been heralded as solutions to educational inequity, particularly for large urban districts that serve poor and working-class racialized communities (Chubb & Moe, 1992; Scott, 2009). Literature has considered the impact of market-oriented reform in urban educational systems (Buras, 2011; Lipman, 2011; Saltman, 2007) mired by what Anyon (1997) describes as urban ghettoization. This literature argues that market reforms in urban locales have intensified and created new forms of racialized educational inequity. In this landscape of educational reform, state, corporate, and philanthropic elite are tapped as experts to champion market-oriented practices of accountability and efficiency as solutions to urban educational inequity. Despite the purported focus on improving achievement outcomes, a key finding of this literature is that traditional notions of democratic engagement have been sharply reduced in some cases and reconfigured alongside market ideals in others (Kantor, 2015; Wells et al., 2002).

Such critical policy analyses have clarified the relationship between reforms marketed as “achievement focused” and the processes by which such measures have been implemented. Analyses of school reform in cities such as Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, and New Orleans highlight the heterogeneity of neoliberalism, and how its adaptive nature has co-opted the language of democracy and civil rights (Buras, 2011; Cucchiara, 2008; Lipman, 2002, 2011; Pedroni, 2011). This does not mean that we are witnessing a dying democratic project; rather, we are undergoing a remaking of democracy in the image of the market (Kantor, 2015). A key premise of neoliberalism contends that unfettered markets and the application of market logic to the public sphere is a catchall solution to social inequality. Scholars affirm that “democratic” in educational contexts has not merely been reduced but has shifted to the purview of a coalition of elite interests shaped by venture capitalists, nonprofits, municipal leadership, and philanthropic policy actors (Lipman, 2006, 2011; Pedroni, 2011; Shipps et al., 1999). However, this research has been less helpful in providing a conceptual language through which to delineate the effects of such reforms in contexts of preexisting educational disenfranchisement. Nonetheless, the interaction of market-oriented reforms and historical patterns of racial and economic oppression contributing to preexisting educational disenfranchisement is undertheorized. Analysis of the development of urban cities is critical, as these sites are acutely shaped by racism and class antagonisms (Barlow, 2003; Rhomberg, 2007; Sugrue, 2005). Such analysis may help to contextualize our understanding of the function and effects of urban education reform amid global shifts.

Alongside the urban industrialization of the 1930s and 1940s, urban cities experienced dynamic demographic change as waves of Black people and other racialized ethnic minorities migrated to Northern and Midwestern industrial centers in the wake of ongoing racial violence and economic oppression. The confluence of racialized civic policy, anti-Black neighborhood associations, and racialized labor discrimination produced a geography of spatial racism (Lipsitz, 2007; Sugrue, 2005). Federal and state policies were central to this process. Barlow’s (2003) analysis of the ascendance of a hegemonic White middle class from 1945 to 1975 demonstrates how corporations, educational systems, local and federal housing policies, and Jim Crow practices colluded in the creation of structural racism that characterized the terms of racialized existence prior to the advent of globalization. The Federal Housing Authority (FHA), for example, made subsidies available that doubled private home ownership but participated in what has been termed redlining, which advocated the use of racial covenants (Barlow, 2003). In this way, the state has been an integral actor in the creation of spatial racism.

As state-sanctioned institutions, schools—more so than any other urban institution—came to reflect and actively (re)produce urban patterns of racial segregation. While urban centers were carved alongside the confluence of these racialized policies, few educational studies situate their analysis within this sociohistorical context. In the case of the DPS, attention to the nexus of social forces that have produced educational inequity is urgent and necessary. In Radical Possibilities, Anyon (2014) explains, “Failing public schools in cities are, rather, a logical consequences of the U.S. political economy—and the federal and regional policies and practices that support it” (p. 5). This assertion is particularly poignant for Detroit schools, yet easily maligned in discussion of their education trajectory.

In this article, I examine the 1999 state-legislated intervention of the DPS district, also known as Michigan Public Act 10. Applying internal colonial theory as an analytic provides a framework through which to grapple with the political effects of this reform in the context of preexisting racial and economic oppression. Michigan lawmakers crafted Public Act 10 at the request of Michigan’s Republican Governor John Engler. No Detroit lawmaker served on the legislative committee that crafted the reform bill. The reform transformed the district’s governance structure, which dissolved local authority over the school system and centralized educative power in the city’s mayor and state governor. The Detroit mayor was now vested with the authority to appoint a six-member reform Board of Education with an additional seventh member gubernatorial appointee. This reform board would be empowered to hire a chief executive officer in lieu of a district superintendent. I argue that the reform functioned as a neocolonial strategy of political domination in a context of preexisting educational disenfranchisement.

The key research question animating my analysis centers understanding the political economic effects of this educational reform. The analysis emphasizes the broader policy context of implementation and how it reconfigured the political terms of domination congruent with the global realignment of capital and power. To provide background on the district, I offer a brief overview of the DPS district at the time of reform coupled with a demographic and economic analysis of the city. I follow this with a review of three extant studies of the 1999 reform and discuss useful findings and core limitations of this existing research. Then, I provide an overview of my analytical framework. I move into analysis and close with a discussion regarding the broader implications of what an internal colonial analytic can offer contemporary political economic analysis in urban educational contexts.

At a Glance: An Overview of the DPS

Historical analysis of the DPS demonstrates the development of an urban education system interstitial to the rise of an expansive racialized civic architecture (Stephenson, 1962). The founding of the DPS superseded the Detroit common schools in 1842. The district’s founding and expansion was concomitant with a general practice of racial segregation with the establishment of Colored School No. 1 (Katzman, 1973; Williams, 2014). The legitimation and confluence of oppressive social forces produced a racialized Detroit geography and political economic structure (Boyle, 2004). Schools were core structures in Detroit’s expansion as an urban power, and in this way central to legitimizing its racialized geography. School feeding patterns followed racialized patterns of housing segregation (Henry, 1955). Over time, the inner-city ring of Detroit schools was predominantly occupied by Black students, while the outer ring of schools remained predominantly White (Gregory, 1967). The school governance hierarchy aligned and legitimized this pattern of racial segregation. These patterns were contested as grassroots coalitions challenged their legitimization and domination, while offering alternative approaches to education (Boggs, 1998, 2011; Boyd, 2017; Gregory, 1967). By the 1960s, while hailed nationally as a bastion of progressive liberalism, lived experience within the confines of these oppressive structures ushered in an era of Black radical labor militancy (Georgakas & Surkin, 2012).

In 1966, the DPS was organized into 22 constellations comprised of several elementary schools, a few junior high schools, and a high school. Four of these constellations were almost completely Black and five were nearly completely White (Johnson, 2008). From 1966 to 1971, student militancy would gain the attention and focus of Detroit’s League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW), a Black worker organization with strong community ties and a horizontal approach to social struggle (Hamlin, 2013). The LRBW was founded in relation and response to the oppression and exploitation of Black workers (“League,” n.d.). Offering an analysis of capitalism and racism, the LRBW’s influence on students produced a powerful indictment of the role of schools in maintaining an oppressive social order. For these students, challenging the symbiotic relation of school and a future confined to working in area “plant-ations” was a movement goal.

By the 1970s, Detroit’s educational system inextricably reflected racialized housing segregation, shaped by federal, state, and local policy action and inaction. In the fall of 1970, in response to a regressive state action barring attempts to reconfigure school feeder patterns to circumvent racial segregation (“Informational Bulletin,” 1970), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) brought suit against the city and state on behalf of parents citing the Detroit Board of Education’s commissioning of new school buildings in segregated neighborhoods as a failure of state policy (Dimond, 2005; Jones, 2016). The trial lawyer for the plaintiffs, Nathaniel Jones, made the case that boards of education are local proxies to state authority, and thus deleterious board actions are failed state policy that requires state remediation beyond Detroit borders. Lower courts affirmed and strengthened Jones’s arguments, yet the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately ruled 5-4 that suburban districts were not complicit in the process of Detroit’s segregated educational system and thus could not be subjected to a desegregation plan (Khalifa et al., 2016). Milliken v. Bradley I (Green & Gooden, 1974) is “vitally important to understanding the current educational conditions in Detroit and its surrounding suburbs because it helped to accelerate the racial and structural inequities that were, and still are, at play across metro Detroit” (Green & Gooden, 2016, pp. 1–2).

Capital flight and White flight to the suburbs occurred in tandem, creating a context that challenged the gains of Black labor radicalism. Coupled with automation and the globalization of capital, these dynamics produced a context in which Black Detroit remained excluded from political access and economic power. The effects of these realignments were reflected acutely in the educational sphere. By the 1990s, the aftermath of Milliken v. Bradley I contributed to the development of entrenched anti-city bias, particularly mobilized at the state level of governance. The governance structure of the DPS has a long history of being intertwined with city and state government. Public Act 319 marked the first comprehensive school code as it applied to Detroit, effectively linking management of the Detroit schools with governmental oversight (Citizens Research Council of Michigan, 2004).

This first comprehensive approach to school management in 1927 “defined and created a close relationship between the board of education and the municipal government” (Citizens Research Council of Michigan, 2004, p. 2). This codified the school district as a department falling under the jurisdiction of the city. In 1949, Public Act 2 granted the Detroit Board of Education fiscal independence. The School Code of 1976, which was revised in 1982, served as the standing school code at the time of the 1999 reform. Despite the close connection between state government and school governance, it is Detroit’s population size and demographic characteristics that set it apart from the other school districts in the state (Citizens Research Council of Michigan, 2004).

According to 2000 Census data, the City of Detroit’s population totaled 951,270. Black people represented 82% of the total population, making it the second-largest Black-majority city in the nation. A report issued by the Wayne State University Center for Urban Studies (WSU CUS) found that the Detroit metropolitan area reflected the most racially uneven region in the nation. A nearby suburb, Livonia, was found to be the Whitest city in the nation at 96%. In the Detroit metropolitan region, “approximately 9 out of every 10 African Americans . . . reside in five cities” (WSU CUS, 2002, p. 1). In addition, 2000 Census data revealed that 26% of Detroiters were living under poverty levels (WSU CUS, 2002). In 1999, the city’s local elected power structure was governed by Mayor Dennis Archer, the second African American Democrat to lead the city. Local elected officials were also predominantly African American. At the time of the reform implementation, the state’s governor maintained that the reformed governance structure did not violate the franchise because a bulk of authority would be vested in the city’s mayor. As Detroiters had voted in the mayor, the argument held that local stakeholders would remain a part of the governance structure through proxy electoral power. Furthermore, the formally elected school board could continue to meet and advise the reform board, although the school board would not be compensated and the reform board was not obligated to heed advisement.

Prior Examinations of the 1999 State Takeover

Previous examinations of the 1999 reform focus on achievement outcomes, the political process, and the racialized debates underlying reform implementation. Political scientist Wilbur Rich (2009) argues that the reform resulted from local stakeholders’ collective failure to transform achievement outcomes. Describing this coalition of stakeholders as the public school cartel (PSC), Rich (2009) asserts, “These [achievement] failures created an atmosphere that allowed a Republican state legislature to repudiate local control in Detroit’s case and to turn over the system to City Hall” (p. 152). For Rich, the failure of the PSC was the focal issue that legitimized state intervention.

However, legislative analysis of reform scope and language does not support achievement concerns as the primary impetus. Education historian Jeffrey Mirel (2004) offers a broader perspective that contextualizes modifications of state educational law as interstitial to state intervention plausibility. He documents the rise of a political imbalance between Detroit and suburban lawmakers, shaped over time and in relation to Detroit’s social history of ghettoization and suburbanization of power and capital. Mirel’s analysis of the shaping of a political imbalance helps to illuminate the dynamics of Detroit’s policy landscape. Mirel (2004), like Rich, cites the decline of district academic standards alongside fiscal crisis as determinative factors shaping the reform’s legitimacy. The function of racism figures notably in Mirel’s analysis as he asserts, “[As] Republicans came to dominate every branch of the Michigan government, it became increasingly difficult to separate race and politics” (p. 143). Such analysis is an important insight as it serves to illustrate the interaction of a state of political imbalance as relational to racial difference. Yet, in this account, political affiliation and the historical entanglement of race and political economy appear as tertiary concerns, rather than determinative material forces.

In contrast to Rich’s and Mirel’s reference to achievement outcomes as a priori concerns animating the 1999 state takeover, education theorist Barry Franklin (2003) argues that the reform was really about “two distinct, but related conflicts” (p. 106), neither explicitly educational. These conflicts, Franklin contends, included a concern over (a) the struggle for governance of the district schools and (b) the struggle for political control of the city. Franklin’s analysis seemingly asserts that the reform was by all accounts a struggle over political control of the city schools. Secondary, at best, were notions of how schools should be managed or how school governance may be relational to achievement outcomes. Franklin argues that diverse stakeholders understood that control over the Detroit educational governance apparatus would have educational implications. However, in this struggle for control of the city schools, not all stakeholders were positioned equitably as a result of political power imbalance. As Franklin (2003) candidly asserts, “Republicans at the state level could act notwithstanding the opposition of Detroit democrats” (p. 111). Furthermore, as the reform debates ensued, neither opponents nor supporters of the reform framed their argument in strictly educational achievement terms. Franklin (2003) argues that support had in fact less to do with “belief in any particular set of educational ideas but motivated by more pragmatic concerns” (p. 107).

It stands to reason that the pragmatic concerns for each constituency reflected larger sociopolitical considerations, but what these are has yet to be examined. Unlike other urban cities, in the wake of automation, Detroit’s economy could not boast an appeal to new modes of production. Suburbanization and globalization of the manufacturing industry had sharply curtailed majority-Black Detroit’s access to economic power. In this way, the rationale for the fight for control over the city would seem rather nebulous. What was there to be won? Education theorist Thomas Pedroni (2011) has suggested contemporary policy maneuvers in Detroit demonstrate the heterogeneity of neoliberal education reforms. Pedroni (2011) argues that despite Detroit’s failure to claim a top spot in the global cities hierarchy, “There is an acute sense in which Detroit must locate its niche role not within a national economy, but rather in a new global framework” (p. 210). In this way, Pedroni’s examination of contemporary Detroit education policy illuminates its centrality as part of a broader urban agenda. This agenda closed schools, thereby decimating the surrounding school community, making land ripe for capitalist speculation.

In relation to Pedroni’s contemporary analysis, I contend that to understand the state-sanctioned 1999 Detroit schools takeover, we must account for what might be specific to how racialization and political economic processes have shaped the city and its schools. The determinative role of these factors may also illuminate how race is more than epiphenomenal of economic relations of production, but rather central and co-constitutive. In the next section, I unpack central tenets of internal colonial theory, a theoretical and methodological analytic that I employ.

Framework for Analysis: Internal Colonial Model

The concept of internal colonialism evolved, in part, out of the activism and social thought of 1960s Black and Third World social movement activists. Movement thinkers argued that the racial and economic oppression faced by African Americans was relational to the colonial domination of the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia by European nations (Cruse, 1962; Ture & Hamilton, 1992). The 1960s represents a unique moment in the political history of the United States, reflecting the internationalization of consciousness and political struggle. Racial minorities engaged in diverse and transformative social struggles advancing issues that included demands for community control of neighborhood institutions, political sovereignty, and economic justice. Domestic activists were influenced by the radical social thought of anticolonial struggles in Latin America, Asia, and Africa (Elbaum, 2006; Kelley, 2003; Pulido, 2006). Writing in 1967, Ture and Hamilton (1992) argue that Black people in the United States exist in a “colonial relationship to the larger society, a relationship characterized by institutional racism” (p. 6). They explain that a hegemonic White power structure defines the terms of African American incorporation into the democratic and capitalist social system, a differential process based on racial ideology. This assertion is also referred to as the semi-colony thesis in that the relationship between Black people in the United States and White society is distinct from the classic colonial relationship, yet the structural and ideological relation of domination, the colonial relationship, is present and enduring.

The convergence of the inadequacy of the civil rights framework for the task of redistributive justice and the emergence of Third World anticolonial struggle gave way to the ascendance of internal colonialism or the semi-colony thesis as a mode of analysis. The semi-colony thesis also gained traction in academic discourse and was termed interchangeably as the internal colonial model. In addition, Barrera (1979/2002) explains that the concept of internal colonialism captured the internalization of oppression or “colonial mentality,” as anticolonial thinkers Frantz Fanon (2004) and Albert Memmi (1965/1991) examined in their analysis of the psychology of colonialism (Barrera, 1979/2002, pp. 188–189). The concept of internal colonialism illuminated this dimension of the domestic colonial condition (Cruse, 1962; Ture & Hamilton, 1992) as well as the racialized economic structure constituting the terms of U.S. racial minorities’ incorporation. The concept of internal colonialism has been used as a method of critique in social science (Allen, 1992; Barrera et al., 1972; Blauner, 1969) and has been extended through the concept of neocolonialism (Nkrumah, 1966). The semi-colony thesis contextualizes the contemporary status of racial minorities within a broader history of chattel slavery as constitutive of the genesis of U.S. capitalism, differential racialization, and political economic incorporation of racial ethnic minorities into the polity.

Applying this conceptual frame to the case of Detroit requires interrogation of the interaction of race, class, and land theft, as well as the political economic effects of this convergence. In the following analysis, I emphasize the racialized economic relation on which the broader system pivots. Detroit’s economic dependence on external actors and political isolation indicates a colonial social system (Barrera, 1979/2002). The formation of this colonial social system is relational to the social formation of Detroit as a majority racial ethnic city. Second, I examine specific features of the reform by conceptualizing the interaction of state and the local Detroit governance structure as a neocolonial administrative apparatus (Allen, 1992). Finally, I argue that given the hegemonic colonial domination of Detroit, democratic rights of racial minorities must be situated within a historical context of political powerlessness (Barrera et al., 1972). This will situate the dissolution of democratic oversight of the Detroit school board within a historical context of de facto political exclusion of racial minorities.

Analysis

This is a theory-driven analysis, structured into four sections. The first demonstrates the internal colonial power structure in which Detroit is situated (Allen, 1992, 2005; Pinderhughes, 2010). This section examines the interaction of racial and economic oppression that shapes and constrains the local political structure evidenced in the production of the reform policy. The second section defines what Allen describes as a neocolonial administrative class that mobilizes racial ideologies (Barrera, 1979/2002) in the perpetuation of political domination. The third section examines the essential condition of political powerlessness (Barrera et al., 1972) as a lens to analyze reform opposition discourse and attempts to invoke claims to citizenship. The final section explores what an internal colonial analytic can offer contemporary urban educational policy analysis.

Detroit’s Education Policy Landscape: A Colonial Social System

In this section, I draw on a tool of internal colonialism termed external administration to provide an analysis of Detroit’s political economic structure. I then examine the genesis of the 1999 education reform through an analysis of the mechanisms that structure Detroit’s political domination. Informed by settler colonial analysis, the problematic of the educational system in Detroit began before the creation of the system with the founding of the city in 1701. Economic motives drove the colonization and subsequent industrialization of Detroit; the land was colonized as a French fur trade outpost in 1701. Fur trading came to dominate the region’s economy.

The territory was ceded to the British in 1760 and came under U.S. rule in the late 1700s. As historian Tiya Miles (2017) excavates, the American claim to Detroit is sometimes cited as 1783 or 1796, but what is clear is that despite the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 mitigation of slavery in the new American territory, the final ordinance language contained a fugitive slave clause preserving the property rights of existing slaveholders. As Miles (2017) explains, “Slavery and colonialism were bundled together in Detroit as in the rest of North America, creating a complex ecosystem of exploitation and resistance” (p. 3). It is important to understand that this territory was originally under the domain of precolonial forms of settlement but was brought into the colonial social system through the French, British, and the U.S. nation-states. Each nation is complicit in the development of a structure of settler colonization, which scholars describe as a violent genocidal imperative to expand land acquisition (Hixson, 2013; Veracini, 2010; Wolfe, 1998). Few studies have examined the interaction of settler colonialism and chattel slavery. However, existing literature does emphasize how land theft was central to the expansion of capitalism (Barrera, 1979/2002; King, 2013), forged through the violent structure of an enslaved labor force. In Detroit, the Northwest Ordinance integrated slaveholder power into the emergent political economic structure.

The structuring of the American economy was the outcome of cultural and physical genocide, physical exploitation, and psychological violence that constituted a relation of domination. Schools played a role in the formation of the settler colonial structure. For example, Jacobs’s (2006) historical archival analysis of Native American boarding schools illuminates the pervasive settler colonial logic that influenced school practices. This logic centered on the eradication of indigenous knowledge systems and in effect legalized corporeal punishment and ideological violence within schools. This state-sanctioned educational approach ensured the maintenance of the social order.

Simultaneously, a cursory review of the history of African American education documents that “a central feature in the 400-year history of oppression has been the denial and subsequent control of education” (Watkins, 2005, p. 1). Critical education research has interrogated how philanthropic foundations and social science institutions have become interstitial to a larger apparatus involved in control of education (Anderson, 1988; Watkins, 2005). While emancipation and differential Americanization programs brought Native Americans and African Americans into the polity, differential political economic and educational processes characterized each group’s integration into the American economy and mainstream society. Extant literature has examined these differential processes (Omi & Winant, 2015) as emergent research continues to indict and demonstrate the differential racialization process (Woo, 2016) and its effects on social life (McNair, 2019; Wun, 2016). Drawing on these works and other scholarly elucidations of the internal colonial model (Blauner, 1969; Pinderhughes, 2010), I conceptualize Detroit as an internal colony, which constituted the political landscape in which the architecture of the 1999 state intervention of the DPS emerged.

External Administration as a Mechanism of Internal Colonialism

In 1999, Detroit’s African American population was the majority demographic, which would suggest that the local government and economic system would reflect city demographics and interests. However, Blauner (1969) points to several tools of domination that perpetuate a relation of domination in spite of formal equality seemingly guaranteed through access to representative democracy. A key factor Blauner describes is that of external administration. Blauner (1969) describes this tool as a requirement of colonization “in which members of the colonized tend to be administered by representatives of the dominant power. There is an experience of being managed by outsiders in terms of ethnic status” (p. 396). Despite Detroiters being represented in their local and state political apparatus, the broader White power structure constrained the ability of the Detroit electorate to stave off passage of the reform. How this unfolded with regard to the particular city/state political economic interaction is illustrated through analysis of Detroit’s political economic history.

An internal colony may serve different economic functions constitutive to capitalist needs. A key desire in capitalist accumulation is a reserve labor force. Cities absorb this surplus labor force. Racial ethnic minorities are subordinately located within the city’s occupational structure. Analysis of Detroit’s racialized manufacturing industry in the postwar era reflects this assertion (Georgakas & Surkin, 2012). In the 1960s, Black autoworkers resisted these practices and organized outside of the United Auto Workers infrastructure to condemn the convergence of union officials and corporate bosses in perpetuating a system of racialized economic exploitation. Detroit’s LRBW emphasized how the racialized economic structure of the automotive industry was reflected across all dimensions of civil society, including education and housing. Racial ethnic minorities were concentrated in subordinated occupations, while White flight and capital flight reshaped the contours of the city. The first African American mayor of Detroit, Coleman A. Young, reflects that on inauguration day January 2, 1974, automobile production was at its lowest level since the 1950s (Young & Wheeler, 1994). For example, Chrysler reduced its workforce from 130,000 to 50,000 in the 1950s. The postwar era brought rampant shifts locally and nationally. Unemployment rose to 20% in 1958, yet the population continued to grow (Young & Wheeler, 1994).

Young notes that, by the 1990s, the overall local manufacturing industry reduced its workforce by 400,000 (Young & Wheeler, 1994). Darden and Thomas (2013) analyze quantitative data from this period of dramatic shifts, illuminating that as Black people became the most populous demographic in the city, Whites and capital suburbanized the region, leaving the inner city to suffer from decades-long bouts of unemployment and concentrated poverty. Furthermore, as automobile production slowed, African Americans relegated to the bottom-most tier of the economic structure suffered disproportionate losses. As the auto industry functioned as the primary economic mode—employing thousands in Detroit, and millions nationally—any change in this structure produced political and therefore social effects. Examining regional employment data from 1967 to 2002, Darden and Thomas (2013) assert, “The primary reason blacks have been impacted most severely economically is segregation, both occupational and residential. Black workers tend to be concentrated in production jobs, which is where the biggest industrial losses have occurred” (p. 222).

The outcome of this nexus of forces created a regional context where Black people became more physically isolated from access to jobs than any other group (Darden & Thomas, 2013). These demographic and economic shifts were undoubtedly reflected in new political relationships throughout the region and state. Young’s election to the mayoral seat came at a time when Whites were literally fleeing, capital was reorganizing itself, and postwar federal and urban policies were working in tandem with these shifts. Young rose to the helm of a political structure inheriting the cumulative effects of previous political economic decisions. Research has engaged in such analysis of the interaction of public policy in tandem with race, class, and spatial cleavages in shaping material outcomes (Barlow, 2003; Davis, 2006; Koval et al., 2006). The isolation of the city economically worked in tandem with political isolation at the city/state level. Detroit became a literal racial enclave (Young & Wheeler, 1994). Darden and Thomas (2013) explain, “By the time Young took office in 1974, angry whites had repeatedly defeated millage votes, leaving Detroit’s public schools nearly bankrupt, and white flight of the middle class had eroded the city’s tax base” (pp. 199–200). Detroit’s political isolation and economic subordination, mitigated by racial ideologies, limited the ability of public office to effect change.

As early as 1996, Michigan’s governor, John Engler, had begun to publicly suggest a plan to centralize school governance authority in the mayoral office with significant gubernatorial assumed power (Rich, 2009). In his January 1997 state address, Engler proposed a takeover plan for all failing state schools, but singularly articulated the case of Detroit in this public pronouncement (“Takeover Timeline,” 2004). In the same month, Engler brought a state intervention proposal to the floor of the Michigan legislature, which was met with less than enthusiastic response and therefore never moved forward. Also in 1997, the Detroit Board of Education adopted a new reform plan, crafted by post–Kerner Commission blue ribbon committee turned nonprofit organization, New Detroit, Inc., targeting school finance and administrative concerns. However, on the 1-year anniversary of the adopted reform plan, New Detroit issued a contentious report citing the inability of district administrators and board members to reconcile the outlined concerns of the 1997 reform plan.

In 1999, Engler once again pitched the centralization of educational authority in city mayors. The pitch became articulated in a legislative proposal that shook the political terrain of Michigan amid assertions of racism and mass disenfranchisement. Engler was a career politician of the Republican Party, having served in the state legislature prior to his run for the gubernatorial seat. He was also heavily invested in economic revitalization projects that included the privatization of several state services. Engler was reelected in 1998; however, the Detroit vote went to Democratic gubernatorial candidate Geoffrey Fieger. Subsequently, Engler was able to usher in his last term as governor with a state intervention of DPS.

Engler met with legislators to craft the proposed reform, which became known as Senate Bill No. 297, a revision of the state educational code. No Detroit lawmaker served as a primary sponsor of this bill. The bill passed in the Michigan Senate

by a vote of 30 to 7, with 3 of the 7 opposing votes coming from Detroit’s five senators. In the Michigan House of Representatives, the vote was 66 to 43 in favor . . . with all of Detroit’s representatives opposing it. (Helen Moore et al. v. Detroit School Reform Board, 2002)

Engler publicly described the reform as modeled after a similar plan in place in the Chicago Public Schools. In 1995, the Illinois Legislature passed a sweeping reform bill targeting the Chicago schools. The Illinois bill dissolved Chicago’s elected board of education and centralized authority in the mayor’s office. The reform vested the mayor with the authority to appoint a board of education that would nominate a district chief executive officer, a new office to the education landscape (Lipman, 2002).

In Detroit, educational stakeholders maintained that increased school funding would tremendously increase the ability of the elected board of education to effectively implement programs advocated by parents and community members. However, the reform’s governance overhaul and lofty goals were not accompanied by an increased school budget. The Senate Fiscal Agency (1999) noted that the bill would have no fiscal impact. Funding would not be affected, and school appropriations would remain the same. It was estimated that the school districts selected to undergo reform would not incur new costs. However, fiscal authority would also be under the purview of the mayor, the reform school board, and the chief executive officer. This market-oriented reform advocated no increase in school funding expenditures, while centralizing school and spending authority in an externally mediated administrative apparatus.

The social structure of the regional power apparatus continued to operate on rather nebulous terms. Detroit could, in a subjugated political economic context, continue to enact policies locally that did not completely align with the interests of the broader social structure. At the same time, regional politics worked to contain and limit the ability of this fringe city to challenge the dominant power structure. At the level of local oversight and public opinion on matters related to the racialized political economic structure throughout the state, Detroiters and their governmental representatives did consistently challenge the legitimacy of the social mandates. The 1999 education reform was not about achievement or political control of the city; it was about the consolidation of class power, constitutive to racism. To accomplish this goal, consolidation of political power over local institutions through state mandate was the technique through which political economic goals could be sustained and legitimized. The state intervention ensured that funding would not increase, obscuring economic oppression of a people and their infrastructure. This legitimized the regional political economic relationships that had successfully thwarted the city’s attempts to reconstruct itself since the 1960s.

This section demonstrates that the architecture of Detroit’s education reform occurred in a context of an internal colonial political structure. The reform functioned as a tool of political domination necessary to accomplish the goals of a neocolonial administrative strategy. That is, Detroit’s educational system was a prime site through which to reconfigure the political economic relationship of domination. Simply put, the existence of traditional democratic educational governance structures was antagonistic to the regime. Furthermore, the strategy also served to undercut oppositional criticism that cited decades of economic disinvestment in the city as linked to inequitable distribution of educational resources resulting in educational underachievement. In the next section, I revisit the tools of external administration through Allen’s concept of neocolonial administration and the role of Black Elected Officials (BEOs). In the reform discourse at both the local and legislative levels, proponents of the reform emphasized that Detroit’s elected mayor would be vested with considerable authority. Their argument relied heavily on the assertion that the mayor would be a proxy for direct democracy. I examine this contention in relation to the broader neocolonial administrative strategy of political domination.

Neocolonial Administration: BEOs

Tools of political domination are central in the (re)organization of the internal colony. The edifice constructed to maintain internal social control is described as a neocolonial administrative class. This formation is complex as it may include members of the colonized population. However, Allen (1992) describes its structural purposes as a “ghetto buffer class, clearly committed to the dominant American institutions and values on the one hand, and on the other, in rejuvenating the black working class and integrating it into the American economy” (p. 194). BEOs can be understood as a complex yet relational component of the neocolonial administrative class.

Allen (2005) explains that in the years following 1960s urban unrest and subsequent state-sanctioned repression, there have been record elections of BEOs in cities. Despite the optimism that this transformation of representation would achieve political autonomy, BEOs have remained politically dependent on the Democratic Party. Because of the White power structure’s hegemonic control of the political process, BEOs have been accountable to the Democratic Party instead of the Black community (Allen, 2005). Allen (2005) explains that the cities in which Black mayors were elected “were becoming increasingly black and poor and economically stagnant as white businesses and the white [and black] middle class fled to the suburbs” (p. 6). This created a class of mayors whose symbolic political power was subject to their ability to remain responsive to the White power structure “while at the same time channeling social unrest in the streets and communities into electoral battles and city council politics” (Allen, 2005, p. 6). Black-led cities in the 1990s, which included Baltimore, Atlanta, Detroit, and the District of Columbia, faced similar social contexts with embattled mayoral attempts to institute educational change (Henig et al., 1999).

In Detroit, demographic change and a nexus of radical social movements led to the 1973 election of the city’s first African American Mayor Coleman A. Young. The former union steward and social activist was succeeded by Dennis Archer, at the helm during the 1999 reform. Mayor Archer’s tenure was marked by a tumultuous reception. Archer had not won the majority vote in the 1993 primary election but was successful in the general election. His administration was criticized for heavy emphasis on working in tandem with suburban interests. The analysis of the preceding administration of Young is complex. Young emerged out of the Black left political movement and was highly critical of suburban infringement in the city policy setting. As a state senator in 1969, Young worked alongside the Black Student United Front (BSUF), LRBW, and the West Central Organization to advance legislation in the Michigan Legislature designed to force the desegregation issue in Detroit. Yet, during his tenure, not even Young could combat the effects of regional political domination on his local efforts.

In 1998, Archer was subject to a recall campaign, though it was unsuccessful (Franklin, 2003). This is critical to note. First, Michigan’s governor at the time of reform was not elected by Detroit’s electorate. Furthermore, Detroit’s mayor was highly contested, particularly by the urban poor. Yet, the reform centralized authority over the city schools in the mayor and governor. In addition, an under-analyzed feature of the reform is the power of the governor to appoint a proxy representative to the board who retained sole veto power. The reform’s official language stipulated that the majority of appointees to the board must be residents of Detroit (State of Michigan 90th Legislature Regular Session of 1999, 1999); however, my focus is on understanding the transformation of the governance structure as constitutive of neocolonial strategy. I have argued that Detroit’s political structure serves the interests of the White power structure. I then contended that all forms of democratic engagement amid such conditions are undeniably delimited by a mechanism of political domination advanced by a managerial class that includes BEOs. I also want to emphasize that the 1999 reform is more than an intensification of these dynamics: It is a neocolonial strategy designed to further integrate the colonized into a more efficient corporate approach to management, responsive to global capital relations.

A previous examination of the reform described it as a failure because the local grassroots educational stakeholders refused to condone the policy (Rich, 2009). However, I argue that the reform was successful because it effectively mobilized the neocolonial administrative class to impose the reform despite local discontent. The reform was not about education nor political control of the city in an era of rising unrest and ongoing resistance. Continuous capture of the city through domination of its educational system enabled a concerted approach to external management aligned with market desires. In the next section, I continue my analysis of democratic dissolution amid a condition of political domination. I offer an alternative framework through which to describe this democratic retrenchment that places racialized disenfranchisement in a historical context. This shift provides a method through which to consider the prospect of political freedom within a larger neocolonial strategy.

Political Powerlessness: Limits of Democracy for Colonized Subjects

A prominent response to the reform’s dissolution of direct democratic control of the school reform board was that authority would be vested in Detroit’s mayor. This was emphasized in documents prepared by the House Legislative Analysis Section (HLAS):

The right to vote coupled with the act of voting form the bedrock of democracy. Without self-rule and the right of self-determination within a community, representative democracy is eliminated and participatory democracy is denied. To over-turn a local election, remove elected officials, and suspend voting rights is un-American; further, it is unconscionable. (HLAS, 1999, p. 9)

The response to this argument stated,

The concerns being raised about the stability of the citizens of Detroit to elect their own school board as well as fears of disenfranchisement are understandable, but it should be noted that the bill would vest the authority to appoint a reform board in a locally elected official, the mayor of Detroit. (HLAS, 1999, p. 9)

Allen (1992) explains how Black people, as an ethnic group, were systematically prevented from entering the political process as fully enfranchised citizens. Allen (1992) documents this relation of disenfranchisement as the outcome of racist ideology that legitimized enslavement; subsequently, this racist ideology ensured that in economic practice, Black people were denied participation even when it would benefit White industrialists. Racism made full political integration impossible in the post–Civil War era (Du Bois, 1968). Unlike Whites, who were able to use local city government as a leverage point in the cultivation of political power, African Americans were prevented from such an integrationist pathway. At the time of the reform, Detroit had an elected Black mayor and other Black local and state legislative representatives, yet the local government structure remained part of and beholden to the broader hegemonic power structure. The essential relation of political powerlessness had not changed.

Access to democratic freedom has historically been mitigated by racial ideology. This is foundational to the U.S. settler state, with the legalization of enslavement simultaneous with the birth of this nation, the Three-Fifths Compromise, and state-sanctioned physical and cultural genocide of Indigenous peoples being but a few examples. Yet, given that the hegemonic power structure and the dynamics of capital are continually in flux, domination does not exist in absolute terms, as historical and contemporary analyses demonstrate (Dill et al., 2016; Sung, 2018; Tarlau, 2016). Emancipation, desegregation, the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts each demonstrate an effort by the oppressed and allies to reconcile the espoused democracy of the United States with concrete racialized economic political practices. Despite the subordinated positionality of racial ethnic minorities in the country, the right to vote seemingly provides a space to contest dominant practice. A roundtable forum hosted by the Detroit News prior to the reform passage provided an opportunity for local residents and elected board members to discuss their perceptions of the reform. Detroiter Ben Washburn’s analysis demonstrates the deeply layered history of the franchise’s significance for racial ethnic peoples. Washburn exclaimed,

I grew up in ’50s and ’60s, and I know what black folks have gone through in terms of earning their rights to vote. People have been lynched. People have been beaten and harassed. It’s a deep-seated issue, so we’re going to be defensive about this. (Harmon & Brand-Williams, 1999, p. 15A)

Another Detroiter, Reverend Thomas Jackson, asserted, “Everybody that’s voting on this thing to take away my right to vote are (legislators from) another area, I don’t have the right to vote them out of office. That’s wrong. That’s racist” (Harmon & Brand-Williams, 1999, p. 15A).

Detroit social and civic leaders also provided perspective. Days after the reform passage, N. Charles Anderson, president and CEO of the Detroit Urban League, declared, “I don’t like the notion where we’ll [be] becoming a district that responds to a multitude of masters . . . It was important for us to maintain local control” (Brand-Williams, 1999, p. 10A). Detroiter and political analyst Adolph Mongo added, “Detroit is truly a ghetto . . . Any time you can’t control your community from within and those who control live outside your community . . . you’re living in a ghetto” (Brand-Williams, 1999, p. 10A). Local residents engaged in political critique, drawing attention to the interaction of racial ideology and political power. The internal colonial model interrogates this perspective by centering the economic relations that tether ideological and political relationships. In addition, the reform effort centered on circumventing the franchise, an action that demonstrates the significance of local democratic autonomy. Electoral power barred the external administration from particular types of local interventions. In this way, circumventing the franchise through state power provides a legal mechanism to reproduce oppression.

A group of opposed education stakeholders, which included five citizens and 10 organizations, brought suit against the reform act. The suit named the reform act, reform board, appointed education officials, Mayor Archer, and Governor Engler as complicit in violation of the Voting Rights Act and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution. The courts found in favor of the defendants. The plaintiffs charged that the reform was crafted specifically to disenfranchise Detroiters, despite the rhetoric that the reform could be applied to school districts throughout Michigan. The official language of the reform targeted districts with more than 100,000 students; however, at the time of reform passage, only Detroit met this requirement. The next largest district in the state was the City of Grand Rapids, with a public school population of 27,000. The defendants detailed that during the legislative debates, Detroit lawmakers offered amendments to the bill that would allow for the local electorate to vote on the proposed plan, but these proposals failed. The plaintiffs filed suit in September 1999, and the final ruling was decided in June 2002.

I will discuss two central aspects of the court’s ruling. The first ruling considered whether the state failed to provide a sufficient achievement-based justification for the reform. The second ruling considered whether the reform act itself was a violation of the Voting Rights Act. The response to the plaintiffs’ charges demonstrated the significance of the reform in the context of what Barrera et al. (1972) describe as a condition of political powerlessness. The plaintiffs had argued their case before various levels of the court system. Herein, I focus on the summary judgment of their final appeal issued by the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. As a legal document, the judgment is particularly significant. Given the charges filed on the basis of violation of franchise rights, the court interpreted key provisions of the U.S. Constitution, including the Voting Rights Act. I argue that the legal rulings demonstrate the convergence of interests between state government and the federal court system, an alliance key to the reproduction of a neocolonial urban strategy. This alliance advanced a neocolonial model of school reform, a tool of political domination.

First, in an attempt to dispute the charges that educational underachievement warranted state intervention, plaintiffs consulted educational researchers and produced testimony by them:

According to Dr. Gibson, the high dropout rates of the DPS are misleading because they treat students who move to other school districts as dropouts. This practice, in Dr. Gibson’s view, artificially inflates the dropout rates between urban school districts like Detroit and more affluent school systems, because students in the former tend to move more frequently than do those in the latter. (Helen Moore et al. v. Detroit School Reform Board, 2002)

Dr. Haney performed a statistical analysis comparing the MEAP scores of various school districts in Michigan. He concluded that extreme poverty of many residents in Detroit’s school district accounted for the lower MEAP scores of its students. (Helen Moore et al. v. Detroit School Reform Board, 2002)

This testimony argued that the educational justifications advanced by the state elide the impact of poverty on achievement outcomes and also produced inaccurate drop-out data. Furthermore, these educational researchers charged that in regard to allegations of financial mismanagement, the DPS student population required increased fiscal appropriation given the particular needs of DPS students:

The plaintiffs represented the affidavits and deposition testimony of various individuals in support of their claims. They offered, for example, the deposition testimony of William Aldridge, the former chief financial officer of the school system, in an attempt to show that the MSRA failed to address the financial problems confronting the DPS. Aldridge stated the DPS required higher expenditures than other school districts because of the costs associated with providing security, transportation, free or reduced lunch programs, and mental health professionals, and that its students faced unique challenges. (Helen Moore et al. v. Detroit School Reform Board, 2002)

Former DPS Chief Financial Officer William Aldridge argued that central to the ability of the DPS administrative structure to govern effectively was the broader economic context facing Detroit students. Furthermore, both educational researchers Gibson and Haney provided quantitative analysis that linked achievement outcomes to broader issues of social-class difference. However, the court ultimately rendered these assertions moot.

Second, the plaintiffs argued that the implementation of the reform violated the Voting Rights Act. The plaintiffs reasoned that the reform was a specialized plan that targeted the city of Detroit. At the time of the reform, 60% of the state’s Black population resided in Detroit. From this standpoint, the plaintiffs argued that racial bias underscored the imperative to disenfranchise the citizens of Detroit:

The plaintiffs insist that, in addition to this evidence of disproportionate impact, the legislative process surrounding the enactment of MSRA supports a finding of intentional discrimination. (Helen Moore et al. v. Detroit School Reform Board, 2002)

The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ultimately dismissed all of the plaintiffs’ claims. The court upheld the defendant’s claim that the reform was crafted from a standpoint of general application as it never named a particular district in its official legislative language. In addition, the court found that the plaintiffs failed to provide evidence that the state willingly sought to discriminate against citizens of Detroit on the basis of race. The courts concluded by characterizing the complaints as “general dissatisfaction”—a disagreeable experience, but nonetheless an outcome of a democratic process:

These complaints, rather than constituting evidence of a discriminatory motive, indicate a general dissatisfaction with the legislative process that preceded the enactment of the MSRA. Allegations that the Legislature acted with haste and did not engage in extensive fact-finding might be legitimate and even a valid critique of its behavior, but it does not lead to an inference of racial discrimination. Similarly, the Legislature’s rejection of amendments and choice of methods to address the perceived problems of the DPS is simply the operation of the democratic process . . . Nor do they present any historical background that would suggest a desire to discriminate against African Americans. (Helen Moore et al. v. Detroit School Reform Board, 2002)

These legal findings effectively legitimized the reform mandate from a constitutional and democratic perspective. A coalition of state power and neocolonial strategy prevailed against grassroots assertions of disenfranchisement. This is significant. First, the reform as a mechanism of neocolonial strategy was imposed on the DPS district. Central to this was the reification of a condition of political powerlessness.

Second, the state’s ability to circumvent a local vote through deployment of legal precedent demonstrates the role of the legal apparatus as a constitutive dimension of political domination. Thus, the political rights of Detroit residents were delimited by a convergence of the neocolonial administrative class and the federal legal apparatus, a strategy of political domination. The net effect was legitimation of the internal colonial political structure in Detroit. This legitimation provided the neocolonial strategy a necessary advancement in its administration. The market-oriented approach to school management, codified in state law and supported by federal power, (re)integrated Detroit’s educational system into the neocolonial social structure.

Conclusion

The dynamics of the globalization of capital have ushered in an era of societal upheaval (Barlow, 2003; Harvey, 2005; Koval et al., 2006). Curriculum theorist William H. Watkins (2012b) links this upheaval to a fundamental change in the dominant mode of production, arguing that social and political life is being reorganized around technical advancement and accompanying market ideology commonly referred to as neoliberalism. The nature of the reorganization of society has spurred much debate because of the heterogeneity (Kim et al., 2018) and contrasting policy practices through which neoliberalism has unfolded at all levels of social and political life (Harvey, 2005; Watkins, 2012a). Educational systems, as interstitial to the social complex, and contested institutions are key sites through which experimentation and advancement of the neoliberal political economic agenda is occurring.

While Anyon may have not described ghetto conditions as a colonial formation, there are threads of connection to my analysis. In describing the process of ghettoization in Newark, Anyon (1997) cites the cumulative effects of demographic shifts amid an influx population of African Americans, a shift concomitant with racially segregative housing and labor policies, buttressed and abetted by state and federal policies. The effects of local and federal housing policy—namely, redlining practices accompanying the 1934 National Housing Act and establishment of the FHA—cannot be understated. As Anyon (1997) explains, FHA practices “enshrined segregation as public policy” and facilitated the suburbanization of home ownership opportunity nationally (p. 63). The rise of anti-city bias at the level of state political process is an outcome of such segregative policies that shaped a political imbalance between suburbs and cities. Yet, as opposed to viewing the rise of anti-city bias as an incidental but concerning outcome, analysis of the 1999 Detroit schools takeover herein suggests this school reform maneuver was an outcome of a historical colonial relation of domination. Michigan Public Act 10 functioned as a neocolonial strategy of political domination in a context of preexisting political economic oppression.

Anyon insists that post–1960s urban educational trajectories represent a period of cumulative effect of political economic practices at the local, state, and federal levels—compounded by global shifts. Importantly, this viewpoint challenges the mythology that purports that as racialized communities came to occupy positions of educational authority, and brought collective challenge against educational oppression, a decline in education standards ensued (Anyon, 1997). Extending and perhaps contributing to a broader contextualization, I argue that the Detroit 1999 education reform was not about achievement concerns or political control over the city, but the consolidation of racial and class power. Subjugation of a reserve labor force is a constitutive desire of the colonial system, and control of schools brings ideological efficiency to this process. Engaging an internal colonial analytic in relation to the maturation and development of racism and economic oppression, this article follows in the tradition of Ghetto Schooling by denaturalizing the myth of urban educational institutions as inherent bastions of racialized inequity, a myth that perpetuates pathological ideas concerning inner-city youth and their communities.

Research analyzing the political economic context of urban educational reform supports the central assertions in this article’s analysis; however, what I have suggested diverges from this research in important ways. First, it is important to engage what educational policy analysis has helped us understand. For example, Lipman (2002, 2011) has found uneven effects of market-oriented reform in the Chicago context, marked by systemic retrenchment of democratic shared authority in school governance structures. Furthermore, Buras and Lipman describe the exacerbated educational inequities experienced by communities of color and the poor in the New Orleans and Chicago educational policy landscapes. These inequities are the outcome of educational agendas linked to broader global city agendas (Sassen, 2010) in which displacement and exclusion of historically disenfranchised people are key strategies in the reconstitution of urban political economies. Yet, exclusion and displacement does not equate to a grand disappearance of these communities.

Much to the contrary, racialized people remain central to the neoliberal reorganization of society. Lipman demonstrates this in a 2002 study that found students of color concentrated in segregated neighborhood schools relegated to tertiary educational programs that will likely lead to job prospects in the service economy. Occupational categories are stratified along racial lines and necessary in the new global economy. Buras (2011) explains how the strategy of accumulation by dispossession (see also Harvey, 2006) functions to privatize the educational resources of urban racialized communities to extend the market to new terrain. Educational policy animated by neoliberal ideals has enabled a deregulated space in which government and corporate elite act as market surveyors amid what is popularly considered the public sphere.

When considering the ascendance of market-oriented educational reform, scholars argue that this struggle centers expansion of neoliberalism, and its legitimization, across all facets of the social structure. Evidence to date has validated this perspective. However, this assertion elides the historical material and ideological dimensions of this process, which the internal colonial model, as an analytical framework, is able to delineate. The internal colonial model demonstrates how racial oppression and economic power are contexts of a system of oppression. From this standpoint, I argue that the 1999 state intervention and its successor policies constitute a technique of neocolonial governance. Important to this assertion is what is meant by insistence on the colonial relationship, which structures the Detroit social system. In extant research considering the new political economy of urban education, omission of the colonial social system’s interaction with neoliberal reform models eclipses the colonial logics that sanction state intervention. This logic functions as a demarcation of humanity, the decisive factor in the determination of the right to self-governance in liberal democracy.

This article argues for a critical reading of the colonial logics that have shaped the ontological position of colonial subjects amid “formal” legal incorporation into the polity. I have argued that conceptual devices associated with the internal colonial framework, the colonial social system, neocolonial administration, and political powerlessness illuminate how the architecture that enabled the 1999 DPS reform developed in a context of an internal colonial social system. Detroit is a geopolitical territory forged through the theft of land and enslavement/trade of bodies. The colonial logics underlying Detroit’s founding were integrated into the local legal apparatus and over time expanded to regional- and state-level governance structures.

In closing, I argue that the Detroit case advances three primary assertions of the function of a market-oriented approach to educational reform amid colonial contexts. The first is the reification of political powerlessness. The usurpation of enfranchisement within a reality of preexisting educational disenfranchisement was a stage in the subordination of a colonized population meant to bring the colonized strata and the land they inhabit into (re)alignment with the new social order. The reform was necessary despite the preexisting colonial condition of abject political and economic oppression given the advent of neoliberal capitalism (Harvey, 2005). The dominant power structure mobilized political power to discipline the colonized population to the new regime and maintain economic domination of Black Detroit. Control over the Detroit educational apparatus performs a strategic technique of colonial governance, central to system preservation and further expansion of the colonial power structure. Control over Detroit schools enables control over the social lives of Detroit children and, by proxy, entire communities. As Miles (2017) reminds, in the aftermath of the 1787 Northwest Ordinance, “Colonialism and slavery would remain braided together in the new national terrain” (p. 98).

Second, the successful institutionalization of the reform model, predicated on colonial logics, enables the state’s transformation of its role and relationship to the market and dispossessed communities. For example, suppose the relationship of the state and market to the dispossessed, in educational terms, led to what Anyon (1997) described as a process of urban ghettoization, which created the conditions that made dismal educational practices not only a possible outcome but the logical one. In that case, the legitimization of a market-oriented reform through state mandate reifies the colonial social system. In response to educational disparities, the state offers market solutions. There is no other way.

Finally, the third assertion is twofold. The racial status of elected officials of internal colonies does not elide the possibility of co-optation by the neoliberal colonial power structure. Conversely, the new economic regime actively recruits and legislates its new policies through this political formation or what Allen terms the neocolonial administrative class. The racial ethnic status of electoral elite is of little relevance to the prospect of freedom from colonial rule. In Detroit, the mayor who ushered in this reform was African American. Yet, Detroit depended on external control of its economy, and the local political system was buttressed by the broader White power structure that enabled external political control over policy setting in the city. This relation of dependency expressed the greater reality of what might be explained as the limitations of democracy for the colonized.

This limitation of democracy became explicit after radical attempts by grassroots education stakeholders to charge the reform as unconstitutional, a violation of fundamental voting rights guaranteed by citizenship. Also dismissed were Gibson’s and Haney’s efforts to demonstrate how Detroit education outcomes were linked to broader issues of social class, which Anyon’s research has critically documented and argued. Examination of the outcomes of these appeals, and the context in which the appeals were made, demonstrates the limits of political process for colonial subjects. Citizenship, from this standpoint, is not merely unstable (Barlow, 2003; Brown, 2003; Harvey, 2005) but an impossibility for the colonized. The colonial social system constructs the terms of enfranchisement; thus, even amid legal incorporation, internal colonial populations are differentially recognized through a nexus of policies and laws that, on one hand, affirm formal rights but, on the other hand, reject the need for the extension of such rights based on extenuating circumstances, in this case educational underachievement.

Internal colonial theory situates analysis of the political status of racial minorities within a broader materialist history of chattel slavery as constitutive to the genesis of U.S. capitalism, differential racialization processes, and political economic incorporation of racial ethnic minorities into the polity. Contemporary educational research demonstrates that neoliberal education reforms exacerbate racialized inequity (Kantor, 2015), but what are the terms of this racialized inequity? Do we understand it as the outcome of ghettoization policies, as originally espoused by Anyon and others, or do we continue the work of expanding what is termed the social context of education to include a broader colonial history of the underdevelopment and control of educational institutions?

Future Directions Amid Colonial Contexts

In Radical Possibilities, Anyon (2014) put forth an assertion that some may find controversial. She calls into question even nurturing, democratic small schools as frankly unable to transform societal-level political economic oppression. Anyon suggests that educators advance their efforts, even well-intentioned efforts, in a manner responsive and cognizant of the broader dynamics at play so that we may be meaningfully and collectively responsive. This battle cry is perhaps more pressing than ever. Anyon’s (2014) conception of the “educational policy panoply” demands attention beyond individual “good” classrooms. It is not enough to publish progressive prose, or donate funds to transgressive efforts, but, as she urges, we must engage in educational struggle as a collective across axes of struggle.

In the wake of what Ruth Gilmore (2002) has termed the fatal “coupling of power and difference signified by racism” (p. 15), grassroots Detroit continues to build dynamic counter-hegemonic praxis. Although Detroit has always had silos of freedom spaces, in the past 10 years community-led organizations have coalesced around central fronts of struggle. Economic justice, water as a human right, educational liberation, and land-based struggles have garnered the attention of a nexus of youth, students, teachers, local activists, residents, popular educators, and allies (Popielarz, 2018; We the People of Detroit Research Collective, 2016). The effects of political economic oppression have not suppressed the will to live and flourish. Keep the Vote/No Takeover, a Detroit affiliate of the national Journey for Justice Alliance, continues to provide local guidance in the struggle for political, and thereby ideological, control of the city schools. The Detroit Independent Freedom Schools (DIFS)—nurtured into being by members of Keep the Vote, We the People of Detroit, and seasoned Detroit school teachers, alumni, and community kin—creates educational spaces (We the People of Detroit Research Collective, in press) that continue the work of movement-based pedagogy (Perlstein, 2002) and African-centered education (Rickford, 2016) as implemented in the former DPS prior to the 1999 takeover. We the People’s youth contingent and Freedom School participants have more recently led student strikes to condemn a continued practice of youth erasure in policy setting and advance the urgent need of access to safe drinking water (Rahal, 2018).

As Watkins (2005) encouraged through historical excavation, “Oppression and protest are inextricably linked” (p. 1). Despite attempts by neoliberal ideals and neocolonial administrators to transform the image of Detroit to attract global capital, the history of Detroit radicalism demonstrates the willingness to resist hegemonic domination and actualize alternatives. In wake of the 1967 Detroit rebellion, and a violent history of racialized economic oppression, militant Black workers founded the LRBW. By 1968, in relation to the underlying principles animating the League’s efforts, the BSUF came to represent a network of school-based Black student organizations. At its height, the BSUF was active in 22 of the district’s high schools. From 1968 to 1971, the BSUF organized and/or supported seven student-led strikes and developed two Freedom Schools alongside these protest efforts (Hicks, 2009). Students and Black workers came to understand that the ideological work of schools and exploitative practices of industry functioned as contexts of a system of oppression. As in 1968, with the recent Detroit student strikes in mind, a resurgence in citywide mobilization along multiple fronts of struggle is seemingly in development, if not already present.

In this article, I have endeavored to present an examination of the nexus of forces laying siege to the city and its schools. Key herein is the vital understanding that race and political economy operate as contexts of a system of oppression. This framework is perhaps most normatively employed among the radical grassroots. Yet, in educational research, we tend to elide the language of oppression and colonialism, treating such conceptual frames as metaphorical and/or outdated. Hopefully, emergent educational research is wrestling with the function of schools amid an ongoing structure of settler colonialism and the afterlife of chattel slavery (Burruel Stone, 2017; Sanchez Loza, 2017), and uplifting the perspectives of racialized educational actors in their efforts to thwart neoliberal experimentation (Ramos, 2017). As educational researchers, we occupy a privileged, albeit differentially tenuous, position in the social order. What we do, or do not do, carries consequence (Tuck, 2009).