Who controls the infrastructure of social reproduction? Finance,reproduction,and resistance in educational landscapes

Abstract

This commentary explores the dynamics of financialization in relation to educational infrastructures of social reproduction, an area McFadden identifies as a ‘generative avenue’ for future research. This exploration is accomplished through a discussion of how financialization is currently reshaping schooling in the US context in two ways: (a) through troubling the longstanding reproduction/resistance dialectic in education; and (b) through reorienting the built infrastructures of schooling into private revenue streams for investors. In doing so I argue that studying new modes of financial accumulation which directly touch upon the practices and infrastructures of schooling is critical to understanding the contemporary infrastructures of urban social reproduction that McFadden identifies.

Compared to other infrastructures of social reproduction such as housing, how ‘educational landscapes’ shape urban space is underappreciated in geographic scholarship. Yet, there is little doubt that schools (and schooling) are integral to both the profit-making imperatives that drive the production of space and to projects of community building that seek to create alternatives (Nguyen et al., 2017). By placing social reproduction theory, particularly with respect to education, in conversation with geography's ‘infrastructural turn’, McFadden (2025) draws our attention to how the ‘critical tension between the role of schools in reproducing inequality and as sites of resistance’ is not solely struggled over within the school but in a manner that is inextricably linked to the built environment. This is an important insight, especially since, as she points out, school facilities are the second largest expenditure on public infrastructure in the United States. Clearly, there is much value in the conversation that McFadden begins with her intervention.

In this commentary, I place the insights of McFadden's paper in conversation with work on financialization. I do so to tease out how the logics of finance are reshaping schooling's ‘critical tension’ and to highlight ways that schooling and schools are being reshaped to produce revenue streams for financial investors. I argue studying processes of financialization is crucial to understanding the current conjuncture of the reproduction/resistance dialectic within education and its connections to the built environment. Indeed, while McFadden highlights how schooling has become directly profitable for capital, she (understandably, given her focus) limits the frame to urban spaces and actors. Yet, the wider operations of finance are important to understanding changes to educational landscapes and the infrastructures of social reproduction more broadly. As McFadden herself highlights, the dynamics of financialization present a ‘generative avenue’ for further scholarship working at the intersections of social reproduction and infrastructure.

My goal is therefore to use this commentary as a space to point toward some generative avenues in understanding the relationship between finance and educational landscapes. I do so informed by existing discussions of finance within geography's infrastructural turn. Notably, the literature on urban infrastructure has drawn our attention to the techniques used by both financial actors and municipalities to structure urban infrastructure in ways that suit the needs of financial capital (Farmer and Poulos, 2015; Pike et al., 2019; Weber et al., 2020). In the rest of this commentary, I explore two dynamics in American education to make this point: (a) how financial investment troubles schooling's longstanding reproduction/resistance dialectic; and (b) the impacts of reorienting school buildings into private revenue streams for investors.

Reproduction, resistance, and financialization in educational landscapes

As McFadden notes, the specificity of the tensions inherent to schooling's role in capitalist social reproduction has long been of interest to education scholars. Indeed, the tension between schools as both sites where the logics of the workforce and capital are instilled and where resistance to those logics are forged is a thread carried through decades of scholarship on schools; a dynamic which Giroux (1983) refers to as the dialectic of reproduction and resistance.

Within geography, Katz (2018) has argued that as schooling has become more marketized its internal contradictions have taken on new, stratified forms which have allowed for the increased segregation of students into functionally separate school systems (like the system McFadden identifies in Chicago). While extreme stratification through markets has been read through the dialectic of reproduction and resistance, less attention has been paid to how it positions schools as sites of direct profit-making opportunities (Backer and Cohen, 2022). Yet, under financialization, schools and other educational institutions have taken on the task of reproducing labor power and providing income flows for investors. From almost birth, middle-class children around the world are enrolled in private tutoring programs owned by private equity firms (Holloway and Kirby, 2020) only to later take on impossibly high, and often predatory, debt-burdens from financial actors to fund their post-secondary education (Cottom, 2017; Goerisch, 2021; Rosenman et al., 2022). As Christophers (2023) has recently argued in the case of asset manager Innisfree's ownership of the Ebbsfleet Academy in the UK, this follows a larger trend of turning the infrastructure of everyday life into revenue streams for investment funds.

Indeed, for the past several decades K-12 schooling has been an area of interest for investors who view it as a virtually untapped market to be exploited (Saltman, 2016). This search for investment opportunities in education is a global phenomenon, with, for example, philanthrocapitalists seeking to create networks of cheap, private schools in India and sub-Saharan Africa as a profit-making venture (Ball, 2012). Taking McFadden's opening description of remote learning as another example, the pivot to online learning at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in record-breaking amounts of capital flowing into the EdTech industry and the creation of two new exchange-traded funds focused on EdTech. In this way, the pandemic-driven shift to remote learning was both a dynamic internal to schooling and a profit-making opportunity for investors whose capital shaped which firms received the funding needed to scale up at that moment (Backer and Cohen, 2022; Cohen, 2022).

This growing influence of finance within schooling fits with wider trends seen across systems of social reproduction and resulting in what Bakker and Gill (2019) refer to as the destruction of the social commons. In many ways, what is occurring in schooling mirrors the description of reforms across the social commons such as health care where the quality of medical treatment declined following increased private financial ownership of hospitals in the United States Henry (2015); or in long-term care facilities where private equity and financialized ownership resulted in catastrophically poor levels of services during the COVID-19 pandemic (August, 2022; Horton, 2022).

The decline in service and care as a result of financialization signals that the growing power of finance in schooling is therefore not just an interesting footnote but a shift with important implications for the reproduction/resistance dialectic of schooling. Indeed, the type of for-profit schooling that is ready-made to plug into financial networks has been described as narrowing schooling practices to approaches that ‘standardize, homogenize, and automate knowledge, curriculum, and pedagogy’ in search of economies of scale (Saltman, 2016: 106). Early signs indicate that this may add a third dynamic to the critical tension of schooling, as the demands of generating revenues for investors both narrow the window within which resistance is possible and disrupt the production of a well-trained labor force. Here the needs of local industry for trained workers clashes with the type of bare-bones education system that can best generate profit. As Katz (2018) identifies then, financial and market forces may further accelerate stratification between schools as marginalized children are positioned as sites of financial accumulation and further pushed out of the formal economy.

Financialization, urban infrastructure, and social reproduction

McFadden's intervention also asks us to consider schools as an element of the urban built environment. Here too, the dynamics of financialization are critical in understanding the production of educational landscapes. Like other urban infrastructure, over the past several decades school buildings have increasingly become sites of financial speculation, often through the issuance of municipal bonds to fund capital expenditures, or through specialized funds which purchase or build school buildings (Cohen and Rosenman, 2020; Farmer and Poulos, 2015; Weber et al., 2020).

This type of speculation in school buildings has been enabled by both shifts in urban infrastructure writ large and by dynamics specific to education. At the broadest scale, urban infrastructure from highways to schools has been shifted through state policy to produce privatized streams of revenue available for sale to financial investors (Pike et al., 2019). Here, the iconic case is also from Chicago, where the city bundled its parking meter revenues for sale to an investment consortium and thereby turned over control of its parking infrastructure (Farmer, 2014).

Fitting this trend, the neoliberalizing dynamics in schooling have also produced school buildings as assets for interested investors. The charter schools identified by McFadden do not just shift the practices of schooling into private hands, but often the ownership of school buildings as well. This transfer allows for the generation of revenues for investors, as the rent that schools pay to access school buildings become a stream of capital to repay private loans taken out by charter schools. Indeed, because many small charter schools cannot afford to own their own buildings, a new industry has arisen where firms will buy (or even build) school buildings and then lease these buildings out to such schools, with rents becoming revenues returned to investors (Cohen and Rosenman, 2020). Such trends increase the precarity of tenure for schools, undermining their role as community hubs and as sites of social reproduction. A telling example of this process which I have outlined elsewhere (Cohen and Rosenman, 2020) is the case of the Southwest Detroit Community School, which was evicted from its building by the Turner-Agassi Charter School Facilities Fund for not meeting its obligations. This allowed the fund to keep the property and find a new tenant without disrupting its profits while, conversely, the lives of students and teachers were profoundly disrupted by the school's closure in order to protect the fund's revenues.

Through cases such as the Southwest Detroit Community School, we see the results of financialization on infrastructures of social reproduction as school buildings become entangled in financial networks and reliant upon financial actors. As McFadden highlights well, changes to the management of the built fabric within which social reproduction occurs are inseparable from the dynamics of care that occur within these buildings. The changing of educational landscapes in order to enable accumulation that McFadden highlights is therefore not limited to the processes of real estate-based accumulation that schools enable through promoting neighborhood change but also to how school buildings themselves become sites of accumulation through financial engineering.

Conclusion

Through connecting the infrastructures of urban social reproduction to geography's ‘infrastructural turn’, McFadden's (2025) intervention opens space for further scholarship on how we can understand urban life through the dynamic articulation of social reproduction and the built environment. As I have demonstrated through this commentary, one such avenue for considering this dynamic is through studying the role of financialization in shaping the infrastructures of social reproduction.