Assembling the opposition: Organizing struggles against neoliberalism and educational insecurity

Abstract

This article explores the realm of educational politics and the organization of opposition to neoliberal school reform in the United States of America. A distinguishing feature of the current reform movement—which blends free-market rhetoric with austere governance and undemocratic corporate control—is the callous normalization of educational insecurity. In this way, the author argues, contemporary trends in US school reform mirror, but also contribute to, the broader exacerbation of social insecurity under neoliberal governance. Though neoliberal reform strategies primarily target vulnerable groups with the aim of forcing them to acquiesce to market-driven reforms under duress, their blatant hostility often provokes dissent and resistance. Drawing on Judith Butler’s recent writing on the “performative politics of assembly,” the author examines two protests against neoliberal reform in an effort to think more deeply about the state of radical educational thought and the future of oppositional struggles seeking to transform the conditions of education in order to move beyond neoliberalism.

Their actions certainly do declare their right to assemble—their right to the streets, the squares, and the city as a whole—but they fill these rights with new social content … Now is the time to find each other and assemble.

Hardt and Negri (2017)

Introduction

Education has been targeted for decades by an aggressive and increasingly global reform agenda that aims not only at institutional privatization, but at ideological enclosure and the containment of radical dissent as well. Those committed to the struggle for critical education and an egalitarian society face an extractive project that aims to profit from students and schools, and to achieve a greater measure of social control by reframing educational purpose with a strict market-based economic rationality. Though this particular reform movement signals the troubling confluence of a number of historical strains of domination, it has been organized and unduly influenced by neoliberalism—a political economic rationality that prioritizes and aims to protect the authority of market forces over social production, culture, and governance. “Under the reign of neoliberalism,” according to Henry Giroux, “capital and wealth have been largely distributed upward while civic virtue has been undermined by a slavish celebration of the free market as the model for organizing all facets of everyday life” (Giroux, 2004, p. xv). The educational incarnation of neoliberalism is equally pernicious. Though advocates of neoliberal approaches to school reform rely on narratives of freedom and choice, they have presided over a repressive regime of educational restructuring (see De Lissovoy, 2015; Saltman, 2016). In particular, hostile reform strategies such as school closure, teacher union busting, and stifling austerity policies regularly exploit and exacerbate legacies of precariousness in targeted communities (Lipman, 2015; Means, 2013; Stovall, 2013b). Yet in spite of the fact that these assaults violate existential vulnerabilities and material insecurities, neoliberal school reforms are often met, not with acquiescence, but with spirited resistance. Understanding the mechanics of this tension is crucial if radical struggles to create a social future after neoliberalism are ultimately to be successful. Indeed, such struggles may prove decisive if we are to make it out of this century intact.

Achieving such a goal is likely to prove no mean feat. After all, there exists a fine line between deciphering the mechanics of systemic domination and portraying entire communities as depleted, their lives bereft of any significant political agency. In “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities,” Eve Tuck warns against damage-centered research, an approach in which marginalized groups are overwhelmingly depicted in scholarship “as sites of disinvestment and dispossession” (Tuck, 2009, p. 412). The danger, she explains, is that those who are regularly exposed to the most destructive forces of exploitation, exclusion, and violation are too often represented one-dimensionally, defined solely in terms of their alterity, an objectifying scholarly gaze fixed upon their supposedly overwhelming abjection. At the same time, however, we cannot ignore the degree to which contemporary strategies of school reform do inflict flagrant social injuries on communities whose struggles for educational justice have long been obstructed. That neoliberal educational reformers so brazenly rely on insecurity and vulnerability in order to push through predatory policies under conditions of duress seems to demand a critique that emphasizes the register of social adversity and human suffering. Such a critique is not consigned to cynicism, or to portraying in deficit terms complex communities who have displayed unflagging perseverance in the face of decades—centuries in some cases—of violence. But for the critique to sufficiently capture the political intricacy of the market reform movement, it must also take into account the many compelling instances through which subaltern groups affirm their dignity and fight for liberation through myriad forms of resistance, dissent, and protest. We must focus on the moments in which “the persistent agency of people in the face of – and against – even the most intimate and enfolding operations of power” is revealed as a social force that cannot be contained (De Lissovoy, 2012, p. 464).

In this article, I pursue a deeper political understanding of how communities facing the most grievous aspects of market reform respond to the educational exploitation of their social insecurity. Studying two recent cases of public dissent and radical protest in cities that lie at the heart of the market movement in education, I challenge the notion that neoliberal reforms simply bludgeon targeted communities into submission. The frequent occurrence of powerful opposition to harmful educational policies is an inescapable fact. Yet I also suggest that further discussion of opposition to market-driven school reforms should resist the impulse to follow the well-worn pathways of mainstream political thought. These trails lead to dim alleys where the only apparent exits lead back to the repetition of an all too familiar liberal democratic critique. Increasingly, as callous austerity policies and state-sanctioned violence against people of color, immigrants, and LGBTQ+ groups erode any remaining semblance of a serious commitment to ensuring collective welfare, powerful social movements have emerged that are abandoning traditional demands for political rights and recognition, stressing instead the basic problem of survival, the uncertainty of which exposes a fundamental contradiction between the avowed political idealism of the few and the precarious social realities of the many in a purportedly democratic yet starkly unequal society. A key task if we are to develop educational alternatives to neoliberalism is to pay close attention to the forms of opposition that materialize in the communities most egregiously violated by market reforms, for it is in these spaces where we often find the most astute tactics and radical rejections of failed policies.

In an attempt to make sense of the organizational forms taken by recent protests and oppositional movements against the targeted imposition of precarity and educational insecurity advanced by neoliberalism, I reflect on a recent contribution to political philosophy made by Judith Butler. In this work, Butler sketches an outline of “the assembly,” which she considers to be an evolving form of collective public protest which, unlike models of dissent that seek rights or recognition within the established order, is galvanized by an even more basic problem—the assault on the conditions of livability. Faced with untenable institutional circumstances and degrading social relations, the diverse constituents who make up contemporary assemblies are modeling new tactics, and airing their grievances against the entrenchment of the hard-bitten rationality of neoliberalism in new ways. In doing so, assemblies provide yet another insistent reminder that the politics of liberation are resolutely radical politics—a politics that demands more than the rearrangement of existing relations of production and governance. If the discussion at hand is one dedicated to a social future beyond neoliberalism, we must engage in this debate with language and vision that supersede liberal reformism, for that program has proven inadequate to the task of dismantling the brutal machinery of neoliberal expropriation and ideological control. Viewing two struggles for educational justice in the United States—the Dyett High School Hunger Strike and the Detroit Teacher Sickout—through the conceptual lens of assembly politics, I suggest that there are significant lessons to be learned about radical educational politics more broadly. But there are notable limitations to this theoretical intervention as well. In particular, I consider the potential for the assembly, as a mode of organizing struggles against neoliberalism, to operate in the interest of educational and social transformation.

Conditions of exposure and persistence: On the politics of assembly

In Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, Judith Butler (2015) develops a novel conceptualization of the organizational form that public opposition to precarity has increasingly taken in recent years: the assembly. The assembly, as a conceptual figure of collective mobilization, is more than a basic amalgamation of bodies: it can be thought of as evincing an oppositional political sentiment that has become ever more common in the face of an entrenched austerity regime and pernicious practices of social violation. An unmistakably determined form of dissent, the assembly appears in Butler’s writing as a dynamic form of organization as well—one that is contextually specific, open to affirmative and negative politics, and responsive to constituent influence. In this sense, constituents of assemblies can ascribe to different worldviews, and can air different grievances from within the same congregation. The form of mobilization itself does not necessarily preordain the content and character of any assembly’s politics. And thus, the assembly, as a figure of oppositional organization, might simultaneously harbor transformative egalitarian impulses and reactionary populist resentment. In either case, and perhaps for this very reason, the assembly merits careful consideration in discussions of political and educational struggles against the precariousness of social life under the rule of neoliberalism.

As regressive neoliberal policies are increasingly formulated behind closed doors and in the dark corridors of power where corporate moguls direct the action of their elected surrogates, public dissent forces its way into the street where it stands unflinching in the face of state-led negligence and repression. “Time and again,” Butler writes, “mass demonstrations take place on the street, in the square, and though these are very often motivated by different political purposes… bodies congregate, they move and speak together, and they lay claim to a certain space as public space” (Butler, 2015, p. 70). Whether they appear in the form of the spontaneous convergence of what seem to be tenuously associated bodies or the planned mobilization of organized collectives, assemblies constitute a prevalent mode by which political sentiments from rage and resistance to fear and anxiety are expressed, often by society’s most vulnerable people. By “[a]sserting that a group of people is still existing, taking up space and obdurately living,” the assembly provides a model of dissent and oppositional struggle that places the imperative of a “liveable life at the forefront of politics” (Butler, 2015, p. 18). There is a unique symmetry and dynamism to the organizational form and conceptual structure of the assembly. Assemblies are capable of embracing, indicting, and rejecting the precarious conditions of their constituents, often all at once. “Sometimes overcoming unwilled conditions of bodily exposure is precisely the aim of a political struggle. And sometimes deliberately exposing the body to possible harm is part of the very meaning of political resistance” (Butler, 2015, p. 85). Without question, the contest over public space—indeed the struggle to defend the very notion of the public—is a principal matter in global struggles against neoliberalism. However, there is more at stake in the wave of assemblies in recent years than public space. There is a much larger matrix of questions to face that concerns organization and tactics, difference and collectivity, horizontality and hierarchy, along with as the visions and dreams, the aims and goals, of existing movements engaged in real struggles.

By turning more squarely toward the question of organization within radical forms of dissent, Butler extends her longstanding theoretical investigation of performativity further into the realm of political philosophy. Performativity, for Butler, is a salient aspect of radical political life as precariousness entrenches inequality and social immiseration, exacerbating the shared vulnerability of many, challenging the norms of previous modes of politics that seek institutional recognition and the formalization of rights—forms of political activity that, to a certain degree, are ratified within the present social order of domination (see Butler and Athanasiou, 2013). From this perspective, assemblies become performative politics when the conspicuous fact of their occurrence alone constitutes a claim or declaration of existence against forms of governance that seek to obscure or eradicate the life of certain groups. That is to say, an assembly itself, both preceding and exceeding its visual or verbal communication, constitutes an unshakable declaration of survival and a damning social critique, though it is not always the case that performative assemblies have a direct or calculable influence on social norms or policy formation. In this sense, it is not an assembly’s explicit articulations that are necessarily its most profound aspect, though they are certainly important. Rather, it is the public exposure of the particular bodies that make up any given assembly that harbors the potential to exert a potent, potentially transformative social influence, the meaning of which exceeds deliberate signification or specific demand. In this way, assemblies can become a collective means of airing social grievances that transcends traditional liberal political action in which the ideal expressions of dissent are premised on intelligibility, changing policy and securing rights, or the quest for recognition. ¹ At the same time, the proliferation of assemblies that erupt in synchronous disharmony with each wave of austerity, each act of state-sponsored violence and repression, indicates the widespread radical refusal to acquiesce to the violation of collective insecurity. In their performative declaration of collectivity and survival in the face of systematic assault, are assemblies not, Butler asks, “a form of deliberate exposure and persistence, the embodied demand for a livable life that shows us the simultaneity of being precarious and acting?” (Butler, 2015, p. 153).

Perhaps an example of Butler’s vision of the performative politics of assembly is in order. Consider the Black Lives Matter movement, which has arisen largely in opposition to police brutality and the nearly unchecked extrajudicial killing of Black Americans. The claim “Black Lives Matter” bears powerful rhetorical force. As André Carrington explains, “perlocutionary utterances like ‘Black Lives Matter’ not only do what they say… but they also aim to persuade” (Carrington, 2015, p. 4). Black Lives Matter is a phrase bursting at the seams with radical social meaning—it is an existential claim that seeks “to uphold the value of Black life in the face of its apparent devaluation” (Carrington, 2015, p. 1). Yet, when that collective claim, the tenacious assertion that Black Lives Matter, rushes forth in moments of public protest, it takes on a performative character that transcends its explicit rhetorical content or discursive power. It is a radical declaration of survival in the face of violence and dehumanizing oppression, a damning indictment of a system of white supremacy that has actively sought to contain, control, and eradicate Black life for centuries (see for example Davis, 1981; Kelley, 2002; Patterson, 1982; Taylor, 2016). Viewed through the prism of Butler’s theory, the rallying of Black Lives Matter activists in public protest is a performative mode of political assembly because the collective presence of Black people, the exposure of their bodies in spaces saturated with the threat of state violence physically actualizes the rhetorical claim. It does, not just says, what matters. When the bodies of Black Lives Matter activists persist and endure in public spaces despite the ever-present threat of violence, “that fact alone,” Butler insists, “threatens the state with delegitimation” (Butler, 2015, p. 83).

The example of radical Black Lives Matter activism illustrates how bodies and their immanent vulnerability are crucial to a performative political theory of assembly. As Butler explains:

there is an indexical force of the body that arrives with other bodies in a zone visible to media coverage: it is this body, and these bodies, that require employment, shelter, health care, and food, as well as a sense of a future that is not the future of unpayable debt; it is this body, or these bodies, or bodies like this body or these bodies, that live the condition of an imperiled livelihood, decimated infrastructure, accelerating precarity.

Butler (2015, pp. 9–10)

In this light, the performative assembly of struggles for racial justice under the neoliberal intensification of white supremacy and capitalist violence suggests a shift in the nature of oppositional politics in this moment—a shift that seems to harbor rich resources for transformative rather than reformist politics. According to Russell Rickford, “Black Lives Matter activists have used a host of disruptive techniques to advance their cause. Their mainstay has been occupation—of highways, intersections, sporting events, retail stores, malls, campaign events, police stations, and municipal buildings. They have organized ‘die-ins,’ marches, and rallies in multiple cities, viewing creative disturbance as a means of dramatizing routine attacks on black life” (Rickford, 2016, p. 36). These forms of protest amount to a type of “confrontation politics” of assembly that expresses a more radical impulse than comparatively civil modes of politics, such as those based upon legitimacy, respectability, inclusion, or recognition, all of which have arguably occupied too much space on the social stage in recent decades.

Ultimately, Butler’s performative theory of assembly provides a useful language for thinking about new modes of dissent and radical oppositional politics. The assembly, in performative iterations, tenders a sketch of the swelling compositional form of contemporary movements struggling against the neoliberal enforcement of precarity. Enlivened by a radical openness to confrontation and oppositional expression, unburdened of the demand of explicit intelligibility by power, the assembly presents a framework for collective mobilization and coalitional politics that can cross, and perhaps even bind together in useful ways, radical traditions and diverse social identities. Yet it also appears to foster exciting possibilities for the manner in which grievances are articulated and molded into transformative action. In Butler’s conceptualization of performative politics of assembly, we find a hopeful expansion of resistance and oppositional struggle:

the concerted action that characterizes resistance is sometimes found in the verbal speech act or the heroic fight, but it is also found in those bodily gestures of refusal, silence, movement, and refusal to move that characterize those movements that enact democratic principles of equality and economic principles of interdependency in the very action by which they call for a new way of life that is more radically democratic and more substantially interdependent.

Butler (2015, p. 218).

In the following section, I examine two recent movements against neoliberal school reforms that have enacted tactics that mirror several aspects of Butler’s articulation of the assembly. In these movements, I argue, we find valuable lessons—some of which fortify Butler’s theory of assembly, while others push the debate in exciting new directions.

The politics of assembly and the organization of educational struggle

As a theory of collective dissent and oppositional organization that centers on the problem of vulnerability, insecurity, and their exploitation, Butler’s performative conceptualization of assembly is relevant to discussions about educational politics. Specifically, it provides critical educators with a new way to think about contemporary movements against neoliberal approaches to educational reform, of which there are a growing number as market-driven policies exacerbate inequality and produce new insecurities in communities long denied democratic control over the schooling of their youth. Many of these movements can be seen as extending a legacy of radical struggles for educational justice that have stood in opposition to systemic inequalities, hostile policies, hidden curricula, and degrading pedagogical practices. However, thinking of the assembly form, and the movements that appear to fit this particular theoretical billing, as having unique characteristics might also provide valuable lessons for critical discussions of radical educational politics under the onslaught of neoliberalism. In this sense, Butler’s view of the politics of assembly merits serious consideration, for it may harbor insights crucial to the success of struggles for an education not reduced to pallid economic imperatives and undemocratic corporate governance.

In the educational realm, evanescent protests and longstanding movements alike have sought to undermine and dismantle the market-based policies that reformers have sought for decades to inflict on public schooling, often at its most vulnerable points. In this section, I examine two specific movements: the Dyett High School Hunger Strike and the Detroit Teacher Sickout. Both serve as compelling examples of performative assemblies that have surfaced in response to the degrading effects of neoliberal approaches to school reform and, when taken together, provide solid ground upon which to imagine a more complex vision of the assembly and its transformative political potential. My point here is not to enclose either of these movements within the analysis of assembly—a sort of conceptual branding that tends to reproduce neoliberal logics and foreclose the political and theoretical imagination. To be sure, there are many ways theorists and activists could characterize each movement. Instead, my goal is to think, on the one hand, about what the conceptual apparatus of performative assembly might tell us about each movement, and, on the other, to understand what they illuminate about the performative theory of assembly as well. I also aim to think more deeply about the lessons that the assembly form, and both cases of organized dissent, might have to tell us about the tensions between the tendency to emphasize strategies of reform (which could generally be associated with liberal and progressive politics) or more transformative strategies (which are more often attributed to liberatory traditions, including many strands of feminism, Black Radicalism, and Marxism) in educational scholarship.

In particular, the two cases of oppositional struggle studied here bring to the fore interesting questions about tactics and strategies, about appearance and endurance, as well as absence and refusal. These movements, considered in the light of assembly theory, challenge traditional notions of “the public” in educational struggles. Though they emerge from the same racialized political economic legacies of educational disenfranchisement, they are also contextually specific in important ways, embodying distinct tactics that are attuned to the unique problems they face as well as the particular goals they seek to achieve. Ultimately, though Butler’s position is valuable on its own terms, I argue that her conceptualization of assembly is primarily dependent on the act of appearance. The Dyett Hunger Strike exemplified such an assembly. By gathering publicly and refusing to eat, a dozen (mostly older) community members in the Bronzeville neighborhood reflected Chicago Public Schools’ starving of a neighborhood school, serving mostly youth of color, back at the neoliberal city in an act of resistance and refusal that, like many hunger strikes, constituted a defiant “shaming of power” (Means, 2011, p. 1094). This is a powerful example in its own right. However, Butler’s positive formulation of the performative politics of assembly could also elicit a tandem question framed in the negative: What happens when bodies do not congregate, when they refuse to assemble when and where they are expected? In contrast to the Dyett Hunger Strike, I contend that the teachers in the Detroit Sickout embodied a distinct form of assembly that Butler’s formulation does not fully account for, a sort of “subtractive” politics of assembly. By refusing to appear in a public space—especially one that conservatives have long argued should be held “above” the fray of politics—hundreds of Detroit teachers ruptured the established norms of public life and challenged conventional modes of protest. This subversive tactic complements more traditional strategies of assembly, revealing the absolute necessity of the labor power and subjective investment upon which institutions such as schools rely, and how quickly those institutions grind to a halt when those forces are withheld.

The Dyett High School Hunger Strike: Appearance and the politics of endurance

On 19 September 2015, a group of community members comprised of parents, teachers, and local education activists ended a 34-day hunger strike protesting the closure of Dyett High School, the only remaining open-enrollment high school in the Bronzeville neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side. After more than a month refusing solid food in an act of public opposition to the Chicago Board of Education’s decision to close Dyett High, the group, which had come to be known as the “Dyett 12,” emerged victorious. Chicago Public Schools announced that the school would reopen as an arts-focused high school at the beginning of the 2016–2017 school year (see Perez, 2015). The Kenwood Oakland Community Organization (KOCO) and The Coalition to Revitalize Dyett High School played an integral role in the school’s defense. Though they were unable to thwart the Board of Education’s initial decision in 2012 to close the school, KOCO “did wrest one concession from the board: the community group was given the chance to draw up a counter-proposal for Dyett” to remain open as an academy focused on “global leadership and green technology” (Becerril, 2015). However, in August of 2015, the Board of Education suddenly reneged on its promise to vote on the three proposals to keep Dyett open, postponing its decision to assess the submissions until the following month. Fed up with the delays and evasive maneuvers, the dozen stalwart Dyett High advocates began their hunger strike. According to Jitu Brown, one of the hunger strikers and national director of the Journey for Justice Alliance, the group’s decision to risk their health came as an act of desperation after more than 3 years of fighting the district’s protracted “phase out” plan to close Dyett High (The Chicago Reporter, 2016). At the commencement of the strike, Brown declared publicly, in front of the community and the media, “We’ve been pushed to the point of putting our bodies on the line… We are tired of the destabilizing of our schools… schools that have been sabotaged from the very beginning, that are labeled as failing… We are tired of our voices not being heard. There has to be accountability to the public for the destabilizing of schools in our community and the sabotage of our children’s education.” ²

The Board of Education’s decision to close Dyett High was not an insolated event. Chicago, like most major urban cities undergoing market-driven educational restructuring, has been the site of a widespread and devastating school closure movement. Since 2001, well over 150 public schools in neighborhoods populated primarily by working-class communities of color, have been forced to close or undergo “turnaround,” their administration, staff, and student body so radically altered that the school that emerges from the process cannot legitimately be considered the same institution. As the Journey for Justice Alliance’s stunning 2014 report, Death By a Thousand Cuts: Racism, School, Closures, and Public School Sabotage, reveals, the systematic closure of public schools in Black and Latino communities across the USA can only be described as an “epidemic,” an emblematic illustration of how the high-stakes accountability arm of the market reform movement destabilizes communities and unequally targets working-class youth of color with the basic yet profound uncertainty that they will be able to attend a high-quality school in their neighborhood (Journey for Justice Alliance, 2014). Eve Ewing explains the deeply intimate effects structural policies like school closure have in targeted communities. “Regular school closings…are hard,” she writes. “What’s happened at Dyett is arguably even harder. Since CPS opted for a slow ‘phase out’ over several years, students and teachers had to watch as the world around them was slowly dismantled, piece by piece” (Ewing, 2015). The decision to close Dyett High over the course of 3 years, rather than immediately, allowed students attending the school at the time of the Board’s decision to complete their degrees, with the school finally closing for good after the final class—which consisted of only 13 students—graduated in 2015. Yet rather than viewing the gradual closure of Dyett as a humane concession, we might instead regard it as an act that forced a community to bear witness to the destruction of a venerable institution they view as crucial to their social survival. ³

Cast in this light, the hunger strike to save Dyett High expresses an even deeper political meaning. Hunger strikes have a history of effectiveness in struggles for educational justice in Chicago. In 2001, members of the Little Village community refused food for 19 days, demanding that the city make good on its unfulfilled promise to build a new high school in the primarily Mexican-American neighborhood, which had fewer than half of the necessary seats in their only local school (Stovall, 2013a). The Dyett Hunger Strike provides an opportunity to think more deeply about the theoretical nature of political opposition to market reform in the most aggrieved communities. As Alex Means suggests, there is indeed good reason to think of hunger strikes in Chicago as performative “displays of sacrifice, creativity, and political theatre [that have often] represented conscious strategic decisions on the part of the community to maximize their message, voice, and political visibility” (Means, 2011, p. 1094). Whereas Butler (2015) emphasizes the importance of hunger strikes in prison, the tactical use of a hunger strike by community elders on behalf of their youth is a provocative tactic that challenged the supposed civil legitimacy of educational policymakers in Chicago, placing them in a position where a response was necessary, and could not be made on their terms alone. Destabilizing tactics such as these, which seek to raise awareness and build solidarity, while also aiming to put power on the back foot, are necessary in a climate of insecurity and social fracture.

The Dyett High School Hunger Strike relied on two closely related tactics in their efforts to force the central office to reopen the neighborhood school: appearance and endurance. These two tactics map quite neatly onto the portrait of assembly that Butler paints in her book. Their conspicuous appearance and determined endurance, not unlike many Black Lives Matter protests, came to constitute a complex message. Denying themselves food, the strikers forefronted how the neoliberal policies enacted by CPS have the effect of starving communities of institutions that sustain them. But it was their constant presence that garnered media attention, exposing how crucial the school is to the community’s survival and well-being. An even deeper meaning, however, might be found in the way that the strikers challenged prevailing racist notions of depleted communities of color who are ultimately at fault for the degraded conditions of the public institutions that should ostensibly serve them. In this way, the strike exposes the crucial social fact that “forms of persistence and resistance still take place within the shadow-life of the public, occasionally breaking out and contesting those schemes by which they are devalued by asserting their collective value” (Butler, 2015, p. 197).

The Detroit Teacher Sickout: Absence and the politics of refusal

On 11 January 2016, hundreds of teachers in Detroit called in sick, forcing two-thirds of the district’s public school to close for the day. Later that semester, on 2 May, Detroit’s teachers were once again absent en masse, this time closing 94 of the city’s 97 public schools for 2 consecutive days after learning that their summer salaries were under threat of not being paid as the state-controlled emergency funding allotted to the district was quickly running out (Higgins and Matheny, 2016). Though teachers had tested the Sickout strategy in November 2015, closing dozens of schools, the results of the early trial paled in comparison to the surprisingly successful near total shutdown brought about by the full-fledged action taken in the spring. The refusal to show up for work in a district run for years by state emergency management, and in schools riddled with “water-damaged ceilings, mold, standing water inside buildings, and rodent infestations,” where teachers are regularly forced to teach “in rooms without heat in the winter or air-conditioning in warmer weather,” was organized by members of the Detroit Federation of Teachers (DFT) to protest the authoritarian control of the district’s finances and the appalling physical conditions in schools throughout the city (Carter Andrews et al., 2016, p. 170). The startling absence of thousands of teachers called attention to the untenable conditions in Detroit’s disinvested and decaying public schools and amounted to a radical indictment of the district’s emergency management plan mandated by former Governor Jennifer Granholm and her successor Rick Snyder.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the responses of the state and city school district were disparaging and punitive. The Detroit Public Schools (DPS) denounced the sickouts, suggesting that they constituted illegal labor activity under the Michigan Public Employment Relations Act of 1947, which allowed public employees to organize and collectively bargain, but which also exclusively prohibits certain public employees—particularly public school teachers—from going on strike. ⁴ An injunction was filed against the former president of the DFT, Steve Conn, and Nicole Conaway, both of whom played an important role in organizing the protests. In the injunction, DPS argued that Conn, Conaway, and the Sickout teachers “had deprived students of access to education” (Bosman, 2016). Even a New York Times article suggested that the coordinated action had the effect of “inconveniencing many families and reducing classroom instruction time for many students who could ill afford it” (Bosman, 2016).

The political import of the action was captured, however, in other quarters, as evidenced by the incisive political analysis provided by Imani Harris, a student at Renaissance High School, who garnered widespread media attention when she wrote an open letter expressing solidarity with the teachers who took part in the Sickout. “As this year has gone by,” she wrote, “I have noticed many of the teacher sickouts, and protests… I agree with everything these teachers stand for and I stand with them. Class sizes are too large, teaching conditions are horrible in some schools, and we barely have any resources. Things need to change, and we won’t stop until they do” (Huffington Post, 2016). Not content with an isolated condemnation of the unpardonable conditions many DPS students and teachers face, Harris extended her critique to explicitly address the systemic racism and deficit stereotypes underpinning the stark inequalities that characterize public schooling in the hyper-segregated greater Detroit metropolitan area:

This would NEVER happen at a school in Bloomfield Hills. Is it because we’re black? Or maybe because you think we’re poor? Oh no, I’ve got it – it’s because we’re just poor black kids from Detroit who don’t have a future anyways. Why promise us anything when we probably won’t live past 18, right? Let’s give them some sick bill that we know they won’t read, so they’ll stop fussing and go back to school right? WRONG! I know my rights, and I know that the color of my skin does NOT give anyone the right to give me any different of an education than a white girl would get.

Huffington Post (2016)

To be unsettled by the loss of 4 instructional days, as DPS and many commentators and critics of the Sickout were, displayed, according to Harris, a profound misplacement of concern. Where is the concern, she wondered, when students are sometimes forced to go weeks without teachers as a result of the district’s inability to keep qualified and motivated professionals in classrooms? However sharp her perspective, Harris’s keen insights should not be mistaken as an exceptional moment of wisdom by a precocious intellect. The neglected state of Detroit’s public schools is far from lost on the youth. How could it be? This astute critique and collective resistance found formal expression on 13 September 2016, when a group of students filed a lawsuit accusing the state of “disinvestment and deliberate indifference” to the state of education in the city (Germanos, 2016).

The Detroit Teacher Sickout employed a tactic that challenges Butler’s emphasis on public appearance. Whereas much of Butler’s focus in theorizing performative politics of assembly is based on a concern with the right to appear, the Sickout teachers engaged in a subversive act of refusal that was predicated upon their collective absence. According to Butler, “when people amass on the street, one implication seems clear: they are still here and still there; they persist; they assemble, and so manifest the understanding that their situation is shared, or the beginning of such an understanding” (Butler, 2015, p. 25). In this instance of the Dyett High School Hunger Strike, this perspective is relevant and powerful. Yet what Butler does not seem as attuned to in her theorization of the politics of assembly is the possibility of a more diverse array of radical tactics that are concerned with collective organization and performative expression. While the Detroit Teacher Sickout did not resort to time-honored forms of protest and public congregation, the collective absence of teachers was no less performative, no less of an assembly. It constituted a declaration of the power of living labor, and the absolute dependence of public institutions on that collective force. In this regard, it did not matter where the individual teachers who comprised the Sickout were; they were assembled collectively in their absence, posing just as powerful of an oppositional message to the administrators of the educational establishment as any public protest.

Though it might appear as such at first glance, the Sickout amounts to something more than a corollary to a traditional strike. If we think of the Sickout as an assembly—an assembly constituted primarily through absence—we can more easily discern what should be an obvious fact that public institutions such as schools not only rely upon the labor power, but the subjective investment of teachers as well. However, we might also begin to see glimpses of a heightened radicalism in the more progressive sectors of the teaching force that poses a serious threat to the proclaimed sanctity of schools. What I mean is this: the Sickout teachers were derided for “threatening” the education of their students. Yet what their performative assembly through absence and refusal did was begin to expose the farcical contradiction of mandating teaching under deplorable labor and physical conditions that characterize criminally neglected schools. Perhaps just as powerfully, subversive refusal to reproduce the system through a guerilla-styled tactical absence turns the table of insecurity back on the reformers. While the imposition of insecurity is an integral component of neoliberal restructuring, such violations always threaten to awaken radical consciousness and spark resistance and tactical invention. This, I suggest, is the case in the Detroit Teacher Sickout, indicating that what is needed is to push harder on the system’s weakest point, its dependence upon human labor and psychic legitimation of the institution, rather than engaging in reformist negotiations that stabilize the established order, even in those moments when progressive concessions are granted.

Assembling at the brink of transformation

Critical scholar and educational activist David Stovall (2013b) has charged advocates of market-based school reform with attempting to foster a “politics of desperation” in working-class communities of color in Chicago. “This strategy,” he explains, “targets racially and economically marginalized groups facing uncertainty in education and housing, and who therefore attempt to navigate a set of [educational] choices that they have had little say in defining” (Stovall, 2013b, p. 34). As the conditions in many public schools continue to deteriorate due to calculated disinvestment and outright abandonment, targeted communities are presented with educational options that are designed to expand and entrench a market-based system. Though in some cases these options appear superior to the neglected public offerings, rarely do they present equitable or liberatory educational alternatives. However, as the cases above reveal, where reformers might have anticipated desperation to foster resignation and acquiescence, they have instead encountered intense resistance. What remains to be ascertained fully is the degree to which a performative politics of assembly in education harbors an explicitly transformative impulse.

If the goal is to radically transform institutions and to develop egalitarian social relations, a strictly performative approach to politics faces real limitations. Thus, critical educators would be wise to avoid an unguarded valorization of performative politics, or to mistake the assembly for a panacea—a model to be mimicked without attention to context or strategy. “[I]n its most reductive moments,” warns Henry Giroux, “performativity as a pedagogical practice often falls prey to a one-sided focus on politics as rhetoric” (Giroux, 2001, p. 10). That is to say, the performative approach to political thought is vulnerable to celebrating the expression of political sentiment in a manner that delinks the articulation, behavior, or performance from its material effects and social consequences. Nevertheless, this pitfall does not preclude the value of performative politics of dissent or protest, nor is it to suggest that forms of direct action cannot also be thought of as performative. Ultimately, “[t]he political and ethical character of the performative,” Giroux explains, “are enhanced when politics is not seen as merely symbolic but is inserted into societal contexts and linked to collective struggles over knowledge, resources, and power” (Giroux, 2001, p. 10). That is to say, performative politics must be grounded in—perhaps we could go so far as to say that they must emerge from—real struggles, and they must be aimed at producing systemic effects. In this sense, the Dyett High Hunger Strike and the Detroit Teacher Sickout provide constructive lessons for ongoing struggles for educational justice in the face of invasive neoliberal reforms.

In The End of Public Schools, David Hursh (2016) suggests that in order to stop the corporate takeover of public education and to staunch the spread of neoliberalism, we need a revitalized social democratic imaginary. Hursh is right to highlight the importance of the imagination to contemporary political struggles against what is essentially the death of political imagination: “there is no alternative.” And indeed, there is much to suggest that social democracy is on the minds of many in the United States of America and across the world. However, if we are to overcome the repressive neoliberal enclosure of schooling, public policy, and social imagination, we might do well to leave the terms of imagination somewhat more open than well-worn visions of social democracy. This may be due less to the actual content of social democratic thought and more to the recuperative power of neoliberalism. In the assembly, we find an opportunity to think deeply about tactics and organization, but also to consider the viability of spontaneous and innovative efforts to subvert neoliberal domination—movements that may not be as directly wedded to existing political theories and programs, and which coalesce and emerge from the increasingly precarious conditions facing so many today. As a compositional form of struggle, the assembly can, in one moment, execute the coordinated tactics of an organized collective, while, in another, it can express the impromptu coalescence of a plurality of adversaries to domination. However, we should also be cautious not to overestimate the transformative potential of the assembly, and instead consider its meaning within a broader context of struggle and political vision.

Both of the oppositional movements examined in this paper contain valuable tactical lessons for future movements. The Dyett High School Hunger Strike successfully forced the Chicago Public Schools to retreat from their decision to close the Bronzeville neighborhood school—a victory with immediate practical consequences for the community. The Detroit Teacher Sickout brought national attention to the repressive austerity policy regime in that city’s school system and asserted the teaching force’s subversive power despite an inhibiting anti-labor law that prohibits public employees from going on strike. In Chicago, the alliance of community organizations and activist groups insist that their victory is merely one step in the long struggle toward more just and autonomous forms of community control in education, while the Detroit teachers remain embroiled in a legal battle against a repressive state legal apparatus that has sought to criminalize their struggles for progressive change in educational funding and to improve conditions in their schools. However, there remains more at stake than expanding the playbook of tactical possibilities for radicals opposing the neoliberal demolition of education. These movements should be applauded, but for those committed to attaining truly liberatory forms of education that guide us toward a future beyond the neoliberal austerity regime, the problematic of social transformation remains ineluctable.

We must embrace the fact that critical education in the neoliberal context is not solely a question of pedagogical practice. If we are to transform education, we are faced with the necessity of embracing radical political struggles for the democratic control of institutions, and for new forms of educational autonomy. This is not to deny the crucial importance of achieving reforms that make education less violent and repressive, or for social life to be more immediately livable for all people. As Keenga-Yamahtta Taylor puts it in From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, “The struggle to reform various aspects of our existing society makes people’s lives better in the here and now; it also teaches how to struggle and organize. Those are the building blocks that can lead to larger and more transformative struggles” (Taylor, 2016, pp. 181–182). Similarly, social movement scholars James Rowe and Myles Carroll challenge the idea that reform and radicalism are necessarily incommensurable, suggesting we seek a more “effective dynamism between radical and reformers” in struggles for social transformation (Rowe and Carroll, 2014, p. 149). “[T]he distinction between systemic transformation (radicalism) and systemic repair (reform),” they argue, “softens in the heat of political struggle even as important political differences remain” (Rowe and Carroll, 2014, p. 154).

This may be the case, but the threat that reformism prevails over radicalism remains. This is often the case in educational scholarship. In this sense, reforms should perhaps be thought of as a valuable aspect of broader struggles for social transformation, but not as a commitment that forestalls radical change. Reform is too often viewed as the only permissible form of change, and when this acquiescence occurs, we cede legitimacy to the terms of power and the status quo. To limit the scope of visions of educational change is to abandon the realm of liberatory possibility—the possibility of a life after neoliberalism. On this point, we find ourselves faced once more with the classic neoliberal thesis, “there is no alternative.” Even the most progressive formulations of change that ultimately deny the imperative of transformation reinforce neoliberal power. The intensity of exclusion and dispossession brought to bear on the poor and working-classes by neoliberal policies seems to indicate with little degree of uncertainty that tepid appeals for moderate counter-reforms are ill-equipped to provide the immediate relief students, teachers, and marginalized communities demand. If we are to overcome the neoliberal domination of educational possibility and social imagination, it will require a commitment to radical struggles and the cultivation of already-existing campaigns for justice and educational liberation into a broader tapestry of transformative movements.

Although the conceptual figure of the assembly might help us to understand one way that collective grievances are mobilized under precarious social conditions, it should not be viewed as immune to political recuperation. While the assembly is a uniquely embodied form of collective political articulation, we should be careful not to mistake it for the apotheosis of radical politics, nor should we fail to identify the ways assemblies may also be vulnerable to subversion, repression, or infiltration by power. In the face of a startlingly durable neoliberalism, a political formation that refuses to crawl away to die, despite the seemingly fatal crises it all-too-frequently incurs (Crouch, 2011), the political questions of tactics and organization are crucial. This is far more than a mere discussion of efficacy. Instead, the forms that dissent and opposition take—and indeed, the ways we talk about and make sense of them—are increasingly important because “capitalism now voraciously feeds on and learns from resistance and critique” (Haiven, 2014, p. 9). This power of recuperation, what Stevphen Shukaitis describes as the “inevitable drive to integrate the power of social insurgency back into the workings of capital and the state” (Shukaitis, 2009, p. 10), is one of the more insidious aspects of domination, for it indicates the degree to which dissent and protest are tolerable, provided they do not amount to a significant threat of transformation. This is why those committed to liberatory struggle must be cautious of uncritically valorizing movements, and must, for this reason, think deliberately about tactics, strategy, and the ultimate goals of movements.

Along these lines, Robin D. G. Kelley challenges the notion that struggles against the twisted force of class domination and racial injustice underpinning neoliberalism can be won through moral appeal alone. “You’ve got to disrupt,” he exhorts, “and make sure that things don’t work in order to make the demand for change” (Kelley, 2015, p. 18–19). Appeals to the better nature of reform advocates underestimate the structural inertia driving neoliberalism and threaten to siphon transformative potential away from a real engagement with political struggle. The importance of disruption highlights one of the more powerful and exciting aspects of the Detroit Teacher Sickout. Whereas the Dyett High Hunger Strike achieved a modicum of success through a more traditional mode of symbolic, yet no less radical, protest, the Detroit Teacher Sickout had an immediate impact on the ability of the already largely dysfunctional Detroit public school system to function at all. The teachers’ refusal to appear was a surprise tactic that caught the system off-guard, throwing it into a brief moment of crisis. Yet one would be hard-pressed to say that the Dyett Hunger Strike was not disruptive in its own right. Here we return to the strength of the performative dimension of assemblies. The persistent presence of people of color in public space, critiquing power, rejecting its legitimacy, and demanding something better, is an affront to the constituted order. In this sense, too, the strike was disruptive and achieved a real victory in re-opening Dyett High. Ultimately, the radical openness of the assembly as a constituent form of organization and collective tactical mode for struggle point again toward the necessity of organizing struggles from a position committed explicitly to transformation. Only transformative praxis is capable of defeating the invasive policies and twisted rationality of neoliberalism.

Conclusion

In neoliberalism, educators and activists, students and teachers, as well as members of targeted communities, who are committed to liberation from oppression and the promise of an egalitarian society, face a dogged opponent. This is the case for numerous reasons, including the sedimentation of hyper-individualist ideology in public consciousness, the relative success of the notion that capitalist markets provide a rational model for organizing public policy and social life, and the pessimistic idea that even in the instances in which the two former notions begin to break down, there is no alternative to neoliberalism. Though such a view of neoliberal hegemony is pessimistic, it would be a mistake to underestimate the degree of its truth. Yet at the same time, and despite its ideological bluster and near stranglehold on approaches to governance and policy in many nations, neoliberalism is riddled with weaknesses. In the educational realm, there is mounting opposition to market-based educational reform, the advocates of which rely on a noxious admixture of idealistic and pragmatic rhetoric to secure their desired brand of change, but who ultimately impose myriad forms of insecurity on communities who have long been subjected to the injurious pairing of structural inequality and the duplicitous rhetoric of educational opportunity.

Viewed from this perspective, one in which neoliberalism appears to reside in “a liminal status between that of inordinate durability and immanent vulnerability,” it should be clear that an education beyond neoliberalism must be forged in the crucible of radical political struggle (Bourassa, 2011, p. 6). On the one hand, educational scholars are faced with a relatively intransigent problem: the problem of systemic transformation. As I have suggested in this article, it seems unlikely that either liberal or progressive reformism, which rely on an ameliorative approach to change, are up to the task of dismantling the apparatuses of neoliberal governance. And certainly, they are ill-equipped to overcome the ideological entrenchment of neoliberal rationality. Fortunately, active movements in the United States of America and across the globe are rejecting the imposition of neoliberal rationality onto education. In these movements, we find resources for both critique and tactics. But struggles against neoliberal reform, by rejecting the hegemony of neoliberalism, by refusing to cede to its legitimacy, also harbor visions of a future “after neoliberalism.” Such visions are not always fully formed, but as Robin D. G. Kelley has suggested, we catch glimpses of visions of a new society in the struggles of those most intensely violated by the established order. “Social movements,” he writes, “generate new knowledge, new theories, new questions. The most radical ideas often grow out of a concrete intellectual engagement with the problems of aggrieved populations confronting systems of oppression” (Kelley, 2002, p. 8).

Movements such as the Dyett High School Hunger Strike and the Detroit Teacher Sickout not only level their critique and transformative energy at the most grievous problems facing students, teachers, and communities, but they also express desires of future forms of education, and thus of society as well. As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri put it, “assemblies should be understood as symptoms of a growing political desire for new democratic modes of participation and decision-making” (Hardt and Negri, 2017, p. 293). We would do well to learn from these movements—from the organization of their dissent and opposition, from their demands and political tactics. The outcome of the struggle is far from assured, but in many recent radical movements we find an unwavering commitment to educational liberation and a social future beyond neoliberalism. Faced with spreading dissent and the proliferation of organized protests, the henchmen of austerity, those advocates of regressive policies and reactionary politics, must by now be aware that the future of their precarious project is under threat. The neoliberal reign over education and society cannot hold. The opposition is assembling.