A Political Education by Todd-Breland Elizabeth;

Author:Todd-Breland, Elizabeth;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2018-12-07T16:00:00+00:00

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CORPORATE SCHOOL REFORM

Magnets, Charters, and the Neoliberal Educational Order

As one of its first actions in the fall of 1989, the newly elected Local School Council at William H. Ray Elementary School unhappily put out an advertisement to replace its principal, Sara Spurlark. The child of educators, Spurlark (née Liston) was born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in 1923. After earning her undergraduate degree at the Hampton Institute and a master’s degree at the University of Connecticut, she moved to Chicago in 1947 to start a Ph.D. program in biochemistry at the University of Chicago—an impressive feat given the significant racial and gender barriers. After getting married and having three children, Spurlark was hired to teach chemistry at the almost exclusively White Kelly High School in 1955. Years before government mandates for faculty desegregation, Spurlark became one of the first Black teachers integrating the school. Eleven years later, Spurlark transferred to the new Kenwood High School in the Hyde Park–Kenwood community. She was an assistant principal at Kenwood in 1968 when Black students at the school participated in citywide boycotts demanding more Black administrators, among other things. She served as principal at nearby Ray Elementary from 1979 to 1990 before retiring from CPS, though her retirement was in name alone.1

For the next fifteen years Spurlark worked in the educational research and advocacy field that had developed rapidly alongside Chicago’s rise to national prominence as a model for educational decentralization, for local control, and, soon enough, for corporate reform and privatization. During this time, Spurlark cofounded the University of Chicago’s Center for School Improvement, helped to open two charter schools, and served on the Chicago School Finance Authority. Into the 2000s, these types of institutions became symbols of a new era of corporate school reform nationally. Spurlark’s entry into these spaces emanated from frustrations with the status quo and the public school system’s limited ability to address the challenges facing Black and economically disadvantaged students. However, as a leader at the highest levels in these institutions, Spurlark was an anomaly. She was a veteran Black public school teacher and administrator in an urban education landscape increasingly shaped by White corporate, philanthropic, and foundation leaders.

Local control and decentralization of power in CPS during the late 1980s gave way to corporate-style recentralization in the 1990s, as business and government elites pursued dramatic restructuring schemes involving deregulation, privatization, and devastating reductions in social spending. In Chicago and nationally, a bipartisan group of corporate and political elites embraced the logics of neoliberalism and corporatism in projecting and exploiting perpetual crises in public education—of funding, achievement, and pedagogy—to transfer public funds to private institutions, attack teachers and their unions, and promulgate “school choice” programs.2

Though hastened by the financial crises of the 1970s and increased corporate involvement in schools in the 1980s, Chicago elites’ embrace of corporatist education policies did not firmly take hold until the Daley administration in the 1990s. Democratic mayor Richard M. Daley’s administration diminished the power of LSCs, opened the city’s first charter schools, and implemented corporate-style school leadership models.

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