‘We don’t care who you are’: Race,space,and dispossession in New York’s charter school co-location reform

Abstract

In the United States, charter school proliferation remains a top priority for neoliberal education reformers and their private sector allies. Such schools are owned and run by private operators yet receive public funding, resulting in large transfers of public assets into private hands. Co-location facilitates this process by providing charters rent-free space within existing public school buildings. The author argues that New York’s 2014 co-location reform, which guarantees co-location or rental assistance for the city’s charter schools, produces school space in ways that create new circuits for the accumulation of capital by the private sector, while at the same time putting into circulation hegemonic imaginations of the relationship of race to school space. Co-location reform enlists school space within neoliberalism’s color-blind and meritocratic racial ideology: reformers like New York Governor Andrew Cuomo “don’t care who you are” because achievement is seen as the result of hard work and good choices made in free markets, and co-location will extend educational markets to families of color who have heretofore been excluded. Using the co-location of Success Academy Charter Schools as a case, the author argues that co-location reform, animated by a “white spatial imaginary,” both obscures and exploits the racialized process of organized abandonment that underwrites neoliberal capitalism.

Keywords

Educational policy New York race organized abandonment neoliberalism charter schools critical analysis

Introduction

In the United States, charter school proliferation remains a top priority for neoliberal education reformers seeking to privatize social goods and services, promote educational markets, and weaken the power of teacher unions (Buras, 2011; Hursh, 2007; Lipman, 2006, 2011). Charter school chains like Success Academy and KIPP Schools are owned and run by private operators yet receive public funding from school districts. New York City spends almost $2 billion dollars each year on charter schools, and this amount is slated to increase by another $150 million by 2023 (Hearing on the Executive Budget and Financial Plan, 2019). As a result of charter school growth in New York and other US cities like Philadelphia and Chicago, vast sums of much-needed public funds leave the municipal coffers—and therefore the cities’ public school systems—and flow instead into an expanding educational private sector. Charter school co-location is the spatial corollary to the charter boom in New York City: it occurs when the city houses a charter school within an already-existing public school building. While small public schools make up many of the co-located schools in the city, charter school co-location restructures education along particularly neoliberal lines, enabling further charter proliferation and providing large swaths of built space, infrastructure, and millions of dollars in public subsidies to private sector investment, development, and expansion (henceforth, the term co-location refers specifically to that of charter schools). The stakes are severe, as the costs of co-location threaten to overwhelm New York City’s already fiscally strained public school system, while the rationalizing discourses that underwrite such spatial restructuring cloak and thereby reinforce the structural roots of educational inequality. Because “global cities” like New York are laboratories for neoliberal experiments, serve as hubs for the circulation of global capital, and operate as core circuits in the development and global dissemination of neoliberal policy discourses and practices, this article points to potential areas and angles for critical inquiry into neoliberal education reforms that threaten to impoverish public school systems in cities outside the United States (Ball, 2012; Harvey, 2005; Sassen, 2001).

In order to unpack the neoliberal dynamics of co-location, this article critically analyzes educational reform in New York that requires the city to find and pay for space for new and expanding charter schools. According to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s 2014 budget legislation, the city cannot make charters pay rent, and if it is unable to co-locate them within publicly owned structures, it will have to rent them space from private landlords (Hernández, 2014). Privately owned charter school chains are now guaranteed massive public subsidies in the form of free public space and rental assistance. The New York City Independent Budget Office (2011, 2015) reports that more than two-thirds of charter schools in New York City reside rent free in public school buildings, amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars in public subsidies. In addition, charters housed by the city in spaces rented from private landlords—often at above market rates—receive an additional $2,805 per pupil for rent. If, as charter advocates claim, the number of students attending charters will swell from 95,000 in 2016 to 122,250 students by 2019 (New York City Charter School Center, 2016), how many of these additional 27,250 students will attend co-located schools and at what cost? How many will attend schools located in buildings rented by the city? If even a third of these new students are housed in rented buildings, the cost of rent alone could amount to over $25 million for a single academic year. In the years following the 2014 legislation, charter school co-location and rental assistance have already increased sharply in New York City, costing the city thousands of dollars more in per-pupil expenses each year than it spends on its public school students (New York City Independent Budget Office, 2017; Shapiro, 2016). At the same time, while charter advocates have claimed for some time that expansion is imperative to social justice, as with other neoliberal reforms rolled out in the name of what is right and fair, “we are yet to see the systematic impact on inequities in the education system” (Tesar, 2019: 302). Rather, as charter schools proliferate and expand each year, co-location reform funnels even more public money and resources into the expanding educational private sector and its beneficiaries, portending the deeper impoverishment of the city and its public schools.

The analysis of co-location that follows builds on the work of critical scholars who have been analyzing the ways charter schools advance neoliberal agendas in the United States (Aggarwal and Mayorga, 2015; Allen and Johnson, 2011; Au and Ferrare, 2015; Buras, 2011, 2014; Dumas, 2013; Fabricant and Fine, 2012, 2015; Henry and Dixson, 2016; Hursh, 2007; Hursh and Martina, 2003; Lipman, 2006, 2011; Pedroni, 2007; Saltman, 2010; Stovall, 2015; White, 2015). This article will extend the critical literature on charter schools by situating co-location within a context of racialized organized abandonment—a disintegrative force underwriting neoliberal urbanization that has deepened poverty and precarity in Black and Brown neighborhoods while creating exploitative openings for the extraction of value for developers, investors, real estate firms, and corporations (Harvey, 2005, 2006, 2009; Lipman, 2006, 2011). Drawing on public texts, events, reports, and other documents, I will argue that co-location reform produces space in ways that cloak the racial inequities wrought by organized abandonment while at the same time creating new circuits for the profitable circulation of capital.

With a particular focus on the case of Success Academy Charter Network, its allies, and beneficiaries, I will (a) examine the racial ideology that animates and undergirds co-location reform and (b) use a granular level analysis to trace the capital flows that charter school co-location and rental assistance allow. Success Academy will be used as a case because it is the city’s largest charter chain, and a critical read of the dynamics around the co-location of Success Academy schools illustrates the “gritty materialities” (Apple, 2006) such neoliberal reform enters into and takes up. At the same time, Success Academy CEO Eva Moskowitz has been instrumental in advancing co-location reform and is a pivotal player in the ideological legitimation of charter expansion. As such, while there are many co-located charter schools and chains that can be examined, the co-location of Success Academy schools exemplifies how this reform funnels public goods into private hands while cloaking educational inequality as an issue of making good choices in expanding markets. With neoliberalism on the forward march bringing ever more disastrous consequences to urban schools and communities of color, it remains urgent that critical analyses of policy situate “education reform within the context of social structure and examine its implications for social inequality” (Hursh and Martina, 2003: 2).

To those ends, in what follows I will explore the relationships among co-location reform, race, neoliberalism, and the conceptual and material production of urban school space. Following Marek Tesar (2016), it is crucial to consider the contexts, linkages, and ideologies by and through which educational reform produces certain material and discursive conditions. First, I will situate co-location reform within the context of racialized organized abandonment in New York City in order to locate charter proliferation in relation to the crises wrought by political economic restructuring in communities of color. I will provide an overview of organized abandonment as it relates to the systematic impoverishment of Black and Brown neighborhoods and families, and the public schools that serve them. Next, synthesizing the critical geography of David Harvey (2003, 2005, 2006, 2009) and the racial analysis of George Lipsitz (2011), I will explore how co-location reform links the white spatial imaginary to market ideology, thereby transforming the meaning of space in ways that obscure the racial inequality wrought by organized abandonment. Co-location reform, I will argue, camouflages the structuring role of racialized organized abandonment while cloaking racial inequality as an issue of limited choice within an unjustly constrained educational market. Finally, having analyzed the ways co-location reform deracializes and dematerializes educational inequality (Melamed, 2011), I will unpack the ways it is then able to operate—with ideological legitimacy—as a technique for accumulation by dispossession (Harvey, 2003). Co-location reform sheds light on particularly neoliberal “techniques and instruments”—such as accumulation by dispossession, color-blind racial ideology, and the production of school space economies—that are “indispensable to the way government agencies conduct themselves in policy developments” (Tesar, 2016: 141). Through analyzing co-location reform, I will illuminate how urban political economy “conducts itself” along neoliberal lines to create an urban school space economy that allows for profitable investment and extraction by an expanding educational private sector and its beneficiaries.

Racialized organized abandonment

Urban public school systems embody the broader systematic “pauperization” and vulnerabilization of urban neighborhoods and families (Anyon, 1997, 2014). And yet, while the inequalities that beset New York City’s school system have been wrought by decades of racialized organized abandonment, charter school co-location has gained traction among education reformers as a color-blind and market-oriented policy solution to educational injustice. Organized abandonment refers to the purposeful “shredding of social welfare” that places the burdens of the “costs of downturns and surges in economic activity” onto the backs of working class and poor people of color (Gilmore, 2015). “Characteristic of contemporary capitalist and neoliberal state reorganization” (31), organized abandonment in New York City is also a racialized process, as social policies—braced up by discourses around Black and Brown pathology, criminality, deficiency, and disposability—systematically impoverish the working class and poor communities of color in particular (Anyon, 1997, 2014; Gilmore, 2015; Lipsitz, 2006, 2011, 2014). Engendered by “redlining, urban renewal, and deindustrialization” and “a wave of disinvestment,” racialized organized abandonment has been accompanied by decreases in tax revenue, less federal funding for municipal projects, an expanding carceral apparatus, environmental racism, and an intensification of austerity politics that disproportionately harm Black and Brown neighborhoods and families (Lipsitz, 2011, 2014; Stein and Mironova, 2018: 5).

Racialized organized abandonment—already underway for some time in New York City’s communities of color—was adrenalized by the New York City Loan Act of 1978, which reestablished the Federal Reserve’s line of credit to the bankrupt city on terms that involved a severe rolling back of social goods and support for poor and working class people of color. Mayor Ed Koch complied with massive budget cuts, layoffs, and reductions in wages across municipal employment sectors . Budget cuts reallocated municipal tax flows away from Black and Brown families and individuals, dispossessing them of much needed social supports, infrastructure, employment opportunities, and wages. Organized abandonment has also entailed disinvestment in public housing, social services, transportation, and infrastructure in the urban core, alongside tens of thousands of municipal layoffs—steady jobs relied upon by many working and middle class families of color (Harvey, 2005, 2006). Urban communities have been further impoverished by increased private sector unemployment and wage freezes, with Black and Brown workers in particular facing lower wages and limited occupational mobility while being disproportionately let go compared to their white peers (Faber, 2018). These disappearing jobs reduced reliable working and middle class employment opportunities for people of color while severe reductions were made to social supports and public programs that could have mitigated the material tolls of such political economic restructuring.

Alongside a rolling back of the above social goods, organized abandonment has involved targeted disinvestment in educational infrastructure and jobs in communities of color. That is, neighborhood and family impoverishment have been accompanied by the manufactured decline of urban schools themselves. Beginning in the mid-1970s, there were massive school closures throughout Harlem, the Bronx, and Brooklyn, which left behind deteriorating, overcrowded, and underfunded public schools. Many of the city’s municipal layoffs were in the education system itself, and classroom sizes soared, curricular and extra-curricular offerings narrowed, and services provided by social workers and counselors diminished (Harvey, 2005). These massive cuts to the educational workforce and infrastructure have exacerbated already existing racial inequalities, further constraining the educational opportunities and trajectories of students of color (Aggarwal, 2018, Anyon, 2014). Thus at the same time that the public school system itself was being abandoned, Black and Brown children and their families experienced intensified poverty and precarity, housing instability, homelessness, vulnerability to environmental toxins and public health threats, and the myriad negative impacts of aggressive policing and mass incarceration (Gilmore, 2007, 2015; Harvey, 2006; Wacquant, 2010). This constellation of material forces devastated neighborhoods and schools throughout the city, limiting the life chances of poor and working class students of color.

Thus, the conditions of educational inequality that co-location reform purports to address through expanded school choice are in fact the products of waves of organized abandonment that have systematically created crises in urban communities of color (Gilmore, 2015). In spite of the mass proliferation of charter schools over the last 30 years, New York City and its schools remain among the most unequal in the United States, and this dynamic is articulated along racial lines with disproportionate numbers of Black and Brown families living in poverty and attending underfunded and deteriorating schools (Anyon, 2014; Sommeiller and Price, 2014; Stilwell and Lu, 2015). Part and parcel of the impoverishment of Black and Brown neighborhoods and schools through organized abandonment has been the ideological recasting of social goods like education within color-blind neoliberal frames, with schooling emerging as an item for individual choice, competition, consumption, and gain (Gilmore, 2015; Lipman, 2006, 2011). As the next sections of the article will show, animated by what George Lipsitz (2011) terms the white spatial imaginary, co-location reform elevates the development of educational markets as the primary mechanism for overcoming the diminished opportunity structures faced by Black and Brown youth. Such reform is a “mystifying veil” (Robinson, 1983: 98) that conceals the structuring role of organized abandonment in the production of inequality. Instead, charter advocates recast educational injustice as rooted in a student’s lack of choices in a constrained educational marketplace: “To me,” Success Academy CEO Eva Moskowitz explained in an interview with New York Magazine, “that is really fundamental to social justice: to have choices in life” (Coplon, n.d.). Further, by transforming the meaning of school space, co-location reform makes possible and permissible new modes of accumulation that underpin the neoliberal political economy.

Hard work and good choices: co-location and the meaning of school space

Co-location reform enlists school space in the ideological erasure of racialized organized abandonment, elevating instead the spatial expansion of charters and educational markets as socially just policy solutions. Critical policy research can “sensitize us to the ideological uses of language in current policy debates”—in particular the ways “words with previously understood and commonly accepted meanings” like social justice and fairness “take on new and significant meanings” within the context of neoliberal encroachment (Bialostok, 2015: 572). This section will draw on the critical geography of David Harvey and the racial analysis of George Lipsitz to explore some ways co-location advocates rework the meaning of school space. In Social Justice and the City (2009), David Harvey urges social scientists to consider how the “shaping of space” is “symbolic of our culture, symbolic of the existing social order, symbolic of our aspirations, our needs, and our fears” (Harvey, 2009: 31). Space, he argues, is produced materially, but also through representational practices by which certain meanings get attached to it. These meanings are expressive of the dominant priorities, functions, and purposes of spaces under capitalism, and shape the ways space is understood and used in educational policy and practice (Lefebvre, 1991; Strandler, 2015: 896; Zieleniec, 2016). George Lipsitz reminds us, however, that “Seemingly race neutral sites contain deeply embedded racial assumptions and imperatives” (Lipsitz, 2011: 13). The white spatial imaginary, as Lipsitz (2011) terms it, is foundational to the “cultural” and “symbolic” dimensions of the “shaping of space” as described by Harvey—race is part of the ideological architecture by which the spatial dimensions of the US social order are structured. For Lipsitz and Harvey, space is never neutral, but where Harvey centers the structuring role of capital in organized abandonment, Lipsitz focuses on how space is imbued with and expressive of racial understandings and forces. Racial imaginaries speak to and through spatial discourses about the meaning of places, who and what belong there, and under what circumstances, as well as what kinds of legitimate activities can take place therein. How does co-location reform then, as a spatial intervention at the level of meaning, knot together school space, the white spatial imaginary, and neoliberal market ideology in the discursive erasure of racialized organized abandonment? How does co-location reform emerge as an imperative move toward educational equality? In what follows, I will examine the ways co-location reform links school space to racial ideology along three key strands: school space and meritocracy, family mis/fortune, and public school overcrowding.

Making room for meritocracy

In a speech at a co-location rally in Albany organized by Eva Moskowitz, Governor Cuomo (2014) asserted the necessity of co-location to the maintenance of a color-blind, meritocratic social order:

I am committed to ensuring charter schools have the financial capacity, the physical space, and the government support to thrive and to grow… Education is what makes the American dream a reality. Education system says you can come here from anywhere on the globe, and we don’t care who you are, we don’t care the color of your skin, we don’t care how much money you have in your pocket—through a public education system you can become anything you want. And that’s why we will make that dream a reality

In spite of the fact that “the color of your skin” and the “money you have in your pocket” shape young people’s educational opportunities and trajectories (Anyon, 1997, 2014; Lipsitz, 2011), co-location reform erases race and class from educational discourse, thereby obscuring the structuring conditions wrought by racialized organized abandonment.

Instead, animated by the white spatial imaginary, co-location reform produces space in ways that reinforce meritocratic ideology: powerful charter advocates like Cuomo “don’t care who you are” because achievement is seen as the result of hard work and good choices made in color-blind free markets (Cuomo, 2014). Because the free market is imagined as color-blind and meritocratic, co-location reform rests on the notion that expanding educational markets is essential to expanding educational opportunities for Black and Brown youth. By linking the production of school space to the growth and health of these markets, and by erasing the accreted effects of organized abandonment, co-location reform can be represented as essential to educational equality. While Governor Cuomo (2014) claims “we don’t care the color of your skin, we don’t care how much money you have in your pocket,” such frames in fact remove from educational policy discourse a recognition of the “cumulative disadvantages” faced by people of color living and learning in the disinvested urban core (Lipsitz, 2011). For Cuomo, “ensuring charter schools have the … physical space … to thrive and grow” is essential to making “the American Dream a reality”, precisely because co-location reform asserts that co-located school space itself is a social force capable of creating educational equality. Constructing such meanings around co-located school space advances charter proliferation in particular while reinforcing broader race- and class-blind neoliberal frames of a United States where “you can become anything you want” by making good choices in expanded markets (Cuomo, 2014).

Family mis/fortune

Further, co-location reform animates racial representations that operate as “ligature” establishing strategic links and relationships between representations of school space and working class and poor families of color (Leonardo, 2013: 133). In her Open Letter to Mayor De Blasio, Eva Moskowitz (2015a) argued “on behalf of Success Academy’s 19,000 wait-listed families”:

Your promise to find space for Success Academy was a promise not just to us,but to the families of these children stuck on waiting lists, many of whom aretrapped in failing district schools. Families in the South Bronx and East NewYork deserve the same educational opportunities as those who are fortunateenough to live in Park Slope or on the Upper East Side.

Again, spatial meanings are produced in ways that delink race from the materiality of organized abandonment, as poor families of color are represented simply as less “fortunate” consumers “trapped” within neighborhood markets constrained by “loud voices and special interests that are just wrong” (Moskowitz, 2015a). Meanings around school space are mobilized to reframe families as more or less “fortunate,” elevating luck as a root cause of inequality that can be remedied by the ostensibly equalizing tendencies of educational markets. At the same time, co-located school space is linked to the neoliberal project of expanding school choice as a way to extend the “educational opportunities” that exist in wealthier neighborhoods where more “fortunate” families live. The children themselves are “stuck” on waiting lists, not in the material constraints wrought by racialized organized abandonment. For neoliberal reformers like Moskowitz, equal opportunity does not hinge on redressing the ways organized abandonment deepens poverty and precarity in Black and Brown neighborhoods and schools. Instead, it requires drawing poor and working class families of color into expanding color-blind educational markets that require co-location to physically accommodate them. Within the white spatial imaginary, school location displaces social location, and the spatial accommodation of a deregulated educational marketplace is advanced as the imperative educational reform Black and Brown families in poor neighborhoods “deserve” (Moskowitz, 2015a).

Co-location advocates recast neoliberal market ideologies as justice desires for families, and project them onto the spatial configurations promised by co-location reform: “Withholding seats and robbing kids of classroom space supports neither equity nor excellence” (Moskowitz, 2016). Moskowitz redirects core features of organized abandonment—“withholding” and “robbing”—away from the destructive tendencies of neoliberal political economy and uses them to defame opposition: those who oppose charter school co-location are the real ones “robbing kids.” As such, animated by the white spatial imaginary, co-location reform asserts that equity and excellence can be achieved without attending to structural processes that deepen poverty and precarity in Black and Brown neighborhoods.

In sum, co-location reform produces a “conceived” school space that is expressive, not only of the dynamics of capital circulation as theorists like Harvey (2003, 2006, 2009) and Lefebvre (1991) illuminate, but also of a white spatial imaginary that reframes the relationships between educational opportunity, school space, poverty, and race. Co-located school space is a conceived space that represents market expansion as essential to the liberation of students and families from constraints imposed not by racialized organized abandonment, but rather by spatial barriers to market participation within “neighborhoods with failing district schools” (“Straight Facts About Success Academy and NYC Charter Schools,” 2016). Barriers to educational opportunity are displaced off the interlocking dynamics of race and political economy and onto decontextualized frames of failing urban public schools and neighborhoods that impede academic achievement.

School overcrowding

In addition to advancing color-blind and meritocratic frames of schooling, families, and space, co-location reform deracializes neoliberalization, expunging its racial record by elevating school utilization levels as justification for market expansion (Melamed, 2011). For charter advocates, co-location is permissible because public school space is already over-crowded and dysfunctional. With their free access to school space ideologically underwritten by the demonization of congested public schools, charter school chains like Success Academy are more legitimately positioned to exploit the disintegrative force of racialized organized abandonment and gain competitive edge in the burgeoning educational marketplace. Drawing deracializing links between overcrowding and co-location, charter advocates “lubricate the charter school pipeline” (Henry and Dixson, 2016) by erasing race, reframing neoliberal market expansion as simply a matter capitalizing on “the potential to open new schools in current buildings” (New York City Department of Education, 2014).

Advancing a spatial frame that condemns the overcrowded public schools that organized abandonment leaves in its wake, charter advocates justify co-location by pointing to utilization data indicating that buildings with co-located charters are actually less crowded than the city’s congested single-school buildings (Duncan, 2016; New York City Charter School Center, 2011). Public school overcrowding, however, is an outgrowth of mass school closings. As Pauline Lipman (2015) notes, school closing policies exist in the “nexus of capitalist and racist logics”: the deepening impoverishment of Black and Brown neighborhoods through organized abandonment and neoliberalization has “provided the material conditions and justification” for shuttering underperforming schools (Lipman, 2015: 60–61). Many dislocated students of color move on to disinvested single-school buildings with already swelling enrollments and strained infrastructure, with utilization rates at an average of 103.7 percent (New York City Independent Budget Office, 2011). Influential charter advocates like former US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan label these overcrowded schools as “dropout factories”—irrevocably dysfunctional and inefficient public schools that squander their space and resources in the production of “dropouts” (Duncan, 2016).

And yet, while former Mayor Bloomberg’s administration closed 150 “dropout factories” between 2001 and 2014, the co-located charter schools that have been rolled out as replacements in fact maintain the same conditions of public school overcrowding condemned by powerful neoliberal reformers like Duncan, Cuomo, Bloomberg, and Moskowitz (Harris, 2015). The co-located schools enroll a fraction of a closed public school’s students due to charters’ lower enrollment caps, lotteries for admission, and push-out policies for “undesirable” youth like those labeled by one Success Academy principal as “got to go” students. Such practices allow co-located charters to boast of smaller class sizes and superior standardized test scores (Scott, 2009). Meanwhile, many poor and working class students of color displaced from shuttered schools are shuffled about, creating situations of chronic instability for students and exacerbating conditions at other already crowded public schools (Lipman, 2015).

Nonetheless, charter co-location is proffered as an imagined policy solution to school overcrowding: stop the dropout factories and ease infrastructural strain by expanding the educational marketplace. Crowded urban school space is produced within a truncated and deracializing discourse that misattributes the effects of organized abandonment to the hoarding of school spaces by the city, obstinate teachers unions, and other political obstacles to releasing them—a bloc described by US Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos (2017) as an “entrenched status quo” who prevent the physical expansion of charters and stand in the way of educational equality. Accompanying this fundamental misattribution is a neoliberal vision of educational justice animated by the white spatial imaginary: the successes of white people are maintained as the result of good choices made in a deregulated and color-blind free market (Lipsitz, 2011). It follows then that the policy solution to the “under-achievement” of Black and Brown youth demands the private seizure of school space through co-location in order to extend the equalizing educational market to those who haven’t had the chance to “get good choices”:

Most politicians understand this because many of them have children themselves and they want good choices for their own kids. And so, they kind of get that it’s not fair for other people’s kids not to be able to get good choices. So I think the tide is turning in a positive direction (Moskowitz, in Feldman, 2017).

Such neoliberal ideology around choice and the equalizing tendencies of markets conceals the racist roots of racial disparities in education, and in doing so works to diminish the likelihood of antiracist change in urban schools and neighborhoods. By elevating the need for good choices in the educational marketplace as what’s “fair for other people’s kids,” co-location reform erases racialized organized abandonment as a structuring dynamic behind school overcrowding in particular and educational inequality more broadly. Erased from educational discourse, organized abandonment looms as an invisible yet powerful disintegrative force systematically deepening poverty and precarity in urban schools and neighborhoods. With urban injustice ideologically managed in these ways, co-location reform can hold out the massive public subsidization of spatially expanding educational markets as a socially just policy agenda and a common sense alternative to deeper investment in the same urban public school system it demonizes. In doing so, it primes publicly held spaces and amenities for private capture and exploitation. The final section of this article will drill down to examine the ways in which the seizure of public school space through co-location creates an urban school space economy for the profitable circulation of capital for private sector entities.

The urban school-space economy: co-location and accumulation by dispossession

The previous sections explored co-location reform as an ensemble of spatial meanings that obscure the racial nature of educational inequality by erasing its rootedness in organized abandonment. Undergirded by the interplay of material scarcity and the white spatial imaginary, co-location reform creates an urban school-space economy: a way of producing and organizing school space as a “surplus-creating, -extracting, and -concentrating device” (Harvey, 2009: 238). This section will provide a granular level analysis of Success Academy as a case that illustrates how co-location enables a growing educational private sector to exploit organized abandonment in the name of “break[ing] through racial barriers” (Moskowitz, 2015c). I will examine the ways accumulation by dispossession works through five core circuits: increased salaries and fringe benefits, funneling money to PR and marketing firms for competitive edge and damage control, lucrative contracts for capital projects, debt financing, and rental assistance.

For David Harvey (2003), accumulation by dispossession is symptomatic of capitalism’s inherently expansionary nature and capitalists’ need to overcome barriers to growth. Public ownership of and control over school space is one such obstacle to expanded accumulation. Co-location reform then does not break through the racial barriers to educational equity that Eva Moskowitz (2015c) claims, but rather diminishes those spatial barriers in Black and Brown neighborhoods that limit the growth of the educational private sector. Once these barriers are overcome, a new urban school-space economy can be established.

The 2014 co-location reform mandates the dispossession of a largely Black and Brown public of school space, and for charter chains like Success Academy, the money freed up by co-location allows for higher rates of profit and a wider range of strategic activities to gain competitive edge in the market. Co-locating charter schools seize already existing use-values—those physical qualities of a space by which certain needs are met (Harvey, 2006, 2009). At the same time, co-locating a charter requires the introduction of new use-values. These expensive renovations create opportunities for profitable contracts for goods and services alongside the investment of otherwise idle finance capital, providing what Harvey (2003) refers to as “spatial fixes” for problems of over-accumulation.

First, dispossession enables charter corporations like Success Academy to free up fixed capital that would otherwise be locked into rental payments. Though charter management organizations (CMOs) like Success Academy are private nonprofit corporations, they still bring in more money than they spend, allowing them to make substantial profits. The tax-exempt status of 501(c)(3)s like Success Academy require, however, that they use profits in ways that are consistent with their missions. Profits, therefore, cannot be redistributed to shareholders or owners. They can, however, be used for fringe benefits such as renting luxurious office space for corporate headquarters in one of the most expensive parts of the city—120 Wall Street in New York’s financial district, where the median rent is $1350 per square foot (Tumola, 2016). Success Academy’s new 58,000 square foot office will cost the corporation $31 million to be paid over 15 years, quadrupling the rent they paid in their prior Harlem location (Gonzalez, 2014). In addition, more funds can be allocated to salary and benefit packages for the nonprofit’s executives and staffers. For instance, between 2013–2014, the same school year that Cuomo’s co-location reform was passed, Success Academy CEO Eva Moskowitz received a raise of $92,000, bumping her salary up to $567,000, making her the highest paid charter school CEO in the city (Chapman, 2014; Gonzalez, 2014). By comparison, New York City School Chancellor Richard Carranza, who supervises the city’s approximately 1800 public schools, earns $345,000 (Chapman, 2014).

Next, dispossession through co-location allows charter chains to funnel more money to publicity and marketing firms. These lucrative campaigns facilitate charter proliferation in particular and the neoliberalization of education more broadly. Success Academy, like other capitalist formations, must engage in costly struggles for ideological legitimacy (Gramsci, 1971) and competitive edge in the educational marketplace. For CEO Moskowitz, this can involve dealing with negative publicity ranging from a leaked video of a white “model teacher” verbally abusing a young girl of color who has made a mistake in math class (Taylor, 2016) to an exposé on the charter’s list of “got to go” students it is seeking to eject (Scott, 2009). In 2014 alone, Success Academy teamed up with the hedge fund-backed Families for Excellent Schools spending close to $5 million on a massive PR campaign in defense of charter school expansion (Hernández and Craig, 2014). Alongside this campaign, another $1.3 million was spent on networking and outreach to public relations, marketing, and consulting firms like SKD Knickerbocker, Axelrod Consulting, and Bikdata LLC (Gonzalez, 2012, 2014). Each year, Success Academy spends millions on flyers, bus stop ads, Internet ads, branding, and “an army of paid recruiters who go door-to-door soliciting student applications” (Gonzalez, 2012, 2014). Vast sums of public money and subsidies syphoned to charter chains for the ostensible purpose of supporting teaching and learning are redirected into these firms. As a result of these deepened investments in publicity and marketing, 5000 people showed up for a Success Charter Network lottery in 2008, where 3000 students applied for 600 seats (Fabricant and Fine, 2012). It’s possible to theorize such an event as a “political spectacle” (Smith and Miller-Kahn, 2004) seeking to legitimize the charter chain and exert pressure on the city to support its expansion. But, importantly, the lottery example also points to the ways in which the funds freed up by co-location can be used by Success Academy to finance marketing strategies and elaborate spectacles that manipulatively showcase Black educational suffering (Dumas, 2014) and exploit family agency in the wake of organized abandonment.

Further, accumulation by dispossession involves the physical restructuring of co-located buildings—a capital-intensive process that integrates school space “into broader economic flows” (Gilmore, 2007: 64). Hundreds of millions of public dollars move into the private sector as the city absorbs the cost of the infrastructural overhauls required by co-location (Gonzalez, 2010; New York City Department of Education, 2013, 2016). In addition to $435 million set aside for renovations for FY2015–2019, the New York City Department of Education’s Capital Plan (2013, 2016) allocates hundreds of millions more for “facility enhancements” to accommodate co-locating charters, including room conversions, “technology enhancements,” and boiler conversions. These capital projects, contracted to private sector vendors through the New York School Construction Authority, move millions of dollars of public money into private for-profit architecture, construction, consulting, and technology firms, many of whom, like 9ciphers LLC of Reston, VA, have contracts for over a million dollars, are not located in New York, and take their profits out of the city to be reinvested elsewhere (School Construction Authority Vendor List, 2017).

At the same time, co-location reform, animated by the white spatial imaginary, reworks school space into “a locus for the generation of exchange value” (Lipsitz, 2011: 30). The physical production of this locus is partially debt financed through General Obligation Bonds (GOB). GOBs require the long-term redirection of money away from goods and services for impoverished Black and Brown neighborhoods and toward elite lenders to whom the city pays debt servicing fees and interest (Hearing on the Executive Budget and Financial Plan, 2019). As of 2014, the city had $40.8 billion in outstanding GOBs (Moody’s Investors Service, 2014). Debt servicing, portions of which cover the large capital expenses wrought by charter school co-location, accounted for 18 percent of the city’s budget in 2019, and is projected to climb to 22 percent by 2023 (Hearing on the Executive Budget and Financial Plan, 2019). The NYC Education Construction Fund (ECF) also issues tax-exempt bonds, backed by the city tax base, with terms of up to 40 years (New York City Department of Education Construction Fund, 2017). A 2016 audit of the ECF indicated $252 million in debt, with $31 million earmarked for debt service alone (Israeloff, Trattner & Co. P.C., 2015). Furthermore, the city’s reliance on debt financing for co-location makes the “neoliberal city” increasingly susceptible to the influence of bond rating agencies like Standard and Poor’s and Moody’s that elevate profitable investment over human well-being (Hackworth, 2007; Lipman, 2011, Lipsitz, 2011; Sassen, 2001). These agencies exert pressure to make cities investment-friendly and influence “where, when, and how capital gets invested” (Hackworth, 2007: 19). Moody’s, for instance, has criticized the city for its pension and retiree health care expenses, and suggested billions in budget cuts alongside increases in debt payments (Moody’s Investors Service, 2014, 2016). Such imperatives for structural adjustment are driving forces behind racialized organized abandonment, as the “neoliberal city” increases its creditworthiness by making cuts to municipal employment, education, job programs, welfare, and other social goods relied on by working class and poor Black and Brown communities and families (Hackworth, 2007; Lipman, 2011; Lipsitz, 2006, Sassen, 2001).

While co-location advocates assert the benefits of such extensive borrowing (Moskowitz, 2015b), Lipsitz reminds us that “compared to white Americans, people of color—more likely to be poor or working class—suffer disproportionately from these changes” (Lipsitz, 2006:17). As the city responds to bond ratings with cuts to public sector jobs, Black men and women suffer higher rates of firing and unemployment than their White peers. In addition, because the median income for Black households is 60 percent that of White families, such cuts exacerbate already existing obstacles to Black homeownership and retirement savings—the two chief ways White families accumulate wealth (Cohen, 2015). While for Eva Moskowitz (2015b), private investors are “people who are generous and feel that education should be a human right and a civil right,” it remains that debt financing empowers elites to reshape cities in ways that advance their accumulation desires, resulting in a profoundly racialized uneven development (Dumas, 2015; Hackworth, 2007; Lipsitz, 2011; Sassen, 2001; Smith, 2010). Co-location expands debt financing of education, further consolidating the power of elites over urban school governance while funneling millions of dollars into financial corporations and their beneficiaries. At the same time, as the previous sections have shown, such new circuits that are allowed by co-location are represented as imperative moves toward educational justice for students of color, thereby cloaking accumulation by dispossession as an equitable reallocation of space and money.

Finally, co-location reform acts as a “circuit of dispossession” (Fine and Ruglis, 2009) as it mandates the city rent charters space if it cannot place them within its own buildings. In doing so, this reform moves huge sums of public money into the hands of the real estate sector in the form of rent, often at above market rates (Brody, 2014; hooks, 2012; Lipsitz, 2011). The city also spends hundreds of millions in improvements to privately owned buildings it rents for charters, with $718.56 million in proposed improvements to leased buildings between 2015 and 2019 (New York City Department of Education, 2016). In 2014 alone, the city spent $10 million in rent for charters, with $22 million budgeted for the 2015–2016 school year (Fertig, 2015). Furthermore, the new land uses introduced by charter schools allow landlords to use accelerated depreciation formulas based on wear and tear to the building and its amenities to claim higher deductions and minimize their taxable income (Internal Revenue Service, 2016). Yearly deductions of this sort can drop tax rates by up to 15 percent, whereas typical deductions for buildings hover around 4 percent (Gravelle, 2011). Rental assistance amounts to something of a triple dispossession: private charter corporations like Success Academy receive massive subsidies, landlords receive rent payments and value-enhancing improvements, and the new uses of the space allow landlords to take advantage of a regressive taxation formula that further depletes the public coffers.

Conclusion: the case of chronic refusal

In this article, I have argued that co-location reform produces school space in ways that braid together the racial ideology, marketization, and techniques of accumulation by dispossession characteristic of neoliberal-style capitalism. I have highlighted the ways co-location reform is imbued with a White spatial imaginary that erases race and obscures the disintegrative force of organized abandonment, allowing charter chains like Success Academy and their varied beneficiaries new circuits by which to dispossess the public of space, infrastructure, and funds. Deploying a neoliberalism that is at once economic and racial, co-location advocates argue that the spatial expansion of a color-blind educational marketplace is an imperative move toward educational justice that will improve educational opportunities and trajectories for poor and working class youth of color.

It remains urgent that critical analyses of neoliberal education reform follow the money, unpack the discursive terrain, map the networks, and detail the race effects of inequitable policy, and it is also crucial to attend to the ways in which neoliberal reform braids together the dynamics of capitalism, the terms of racial ideology, and the racial ordering of schools, cities, and society. In that vein, I have argued that while co-location reform is indeed a technology for accumulation by dispossession, it cannot be reduced to this alone: there is a racial imaginary interwoven with this mode of neoliberal restructuring. For David Harvey (2003), it is the crisis-prone nature of capitalism and the state’s role in stabilizing it that drive accumulation by dispossession and therefore spatial transformations like co-location reform. But capitalism, as Cedric Robinson reminds us, is always already about race too (Robinson, 1983). Co-location reform, then, is animated by what George Lipsitz (2011) refers to as the white spatial imaginary: a vision of and approach to arranging the production of urban school space that profitably links racial subjugation to the dispossession that underwrites expanding educational markets under neoliberalism. It is vital that critical analyses attend to the ways in which neoliberalism enlists educational reform in its “chronic refusal to dismantle the structure of white supremacy” (Harris, 1992: 1750). Indeed, we must unpack educational reform’s complicity and entanglement with those very structures and refusals that maintain racial oppression and poverty in Black and Brown families and neighborhoods (Dumas, 2013, 2014, 2015; Gillborn, 2005; Leonardo, 2013).

Neoliberalism’s “chronic refusal” requires that socio-spatial relations be flattened, deracialized, and dematerialized, rendering them one-dimensional and reducible to market relations alone, and co-location reform is but one such technique (Lipsitz, 2014; Marcuse, 1968; Melamed, 2011). Critical analysis, however, can uncover how these deep structures and refusals drive educational reform and shape its relationship to the broader aims and processes of neoliberalism. As neoliberalism remains “the dominant paradigm of public policy” with its “master narrative” creating a “ruling ideological consensus” (Peters, 2012: 135–136), critical analysis must lay bare the ways in which educational reform naturalizes, erases, and exploits organized abandonment and other forms of structural racism that make neoliberal hegemony possible and permissible. Perhaps most importantly for my purposes here, critical analysis can expose how neoliberal reform’s “chronic refusal” is articulated instead as an imperative quest for choice and inclusion, transmuting accumulation desires into justice desires in which dispossession is recast as a necessary force for educational equality and social justice.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Jeremy Benson is an Assistant Professor of Educational Studies and English at Rhode Island College, in Providence, Rhode Island, USA. He is co-director of the Secondary English Education Program and teaches courses in foundations, methods, critical theory, and first year writing/composition. A New Jersey native and former high school English teacher, he earned his doctorate at the CUNY Graduate Center under the mentorship of Ira Shor and the late Jean Anyon. His research interests include urban education, youth activism, and political economic and racial analyses of educational and social policy.

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