Coercion and consent for the U.S. education market: community engagement policy under racialized fiscal surveillance

ABSTRACT

In response to growing pushback to decades of privatization and disinvestment in high-poverty communities of color, elected officials and business leaders in the United States have turned to ‘community-engaged strategies’ to advance education reform. This qualitative case study of a California school district, the Oakland Unified School District, from 1989 to 2019 uses a Gramscian analysis of hegemony to illuminate the shift from coercive practices of financial audits to building consent through the district’s formal engagement strategies as tools to manage public dissent around divisive decisions. Findings reveal that a manufacturedscrisis facilitated the 2003 state takeover of OUSD to further advancesausterity measures and audit processes that served as racialized formssof fiscal surveillance. When local resistance to these measures intensified, district actors shifted tactics to ‘engage’ community members through a portfolio strategy to manage school choice options and other public-private partnerships. Oakland public schools are a prime case of how democratic mechanisms serve as the vehicle to manufacture public consent for district redesign by way of marketization. This paper contributes new insights into local and global debates on educational privatization by critically examining the role of parastatal audit agencies in shaping community support for public-privateeducation governance along with tracing the shifting tactics of elite policy actors.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical analysis
• urban crisis
• portfolio strategy
• state receivership
• school-community engagement
• district privatization

Acknowledgement

I thank Deborah Lustig, Rebecca Tarlau, Frankie Ramos, Elise Castillo, Michael V. Singh, and Elizabeth Zumpe for their invaluable feedback on earlier drafts. I also thank the editors and anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of the manuscript and their many insightful comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. All quotes are from first-hand data collected through interviews and fieldnotes, unless indicated otherwise through second-hand sources.

2. Gramsci (1971) originally called this the ‘historic bloc.’

3. Ten of these interviews came from a five-year oral history project of OUSD with Dr. Tina Trujillo, of which I was a graduate researcher, and were re-analyzed for the purpose of my study.

4. Randy Ward (2003–06), Kimberly Statham (2006–07), Vincent Matthews (2007–09), and Antwan Wilson (2014–17).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

René Espinoza Kissell

René Espinoza Kissell is an Assistant Professor of Educational Policy Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research and teaching focus on the political economy of urban education, the racial politics of privatization, and school district policymaking.