Navigating neoliberal traps in the pursuit of radical change: Promises and tensions in teacher and community organizing against privatization and school closures in Oakland

Students, teachers, and communities who suffer the consequences of market based reforms have organized to put an end to neoliberal policies that exacerbate educational inequities, displace Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities, and pave the way for increasing privatization in public education (Buras, 2015; Ferman, 2017; Journey for Justice, 2014; Lipman, 2015, 2017; Rooks, 2017; Scott & Holme, 2016; Syeed, 2019). The growing strength of this movement was evident in the wave of teacher strikes that took place across the U.S. since 2012 that connected neoliberal austerity, privatization, and school closures (Blanc, 2019; Brogan, 2014). Oakland teachers joined this movement when they went on strike in February 2019, demanding higher wages, better working conditions, and increased funding for public schools, but also a halt to the expansion of the charter school sector and an end to school closures. Most often, scholarship on resistance to neoliberal reforms consider teacher activism independently of community organizing (Blanc, 2019; Brogan, 2014; Brown & Stern, 2018; Maton, 2018; Pham & Phillip, 2020; Quinn & Mittenfelner Carl, 2015; Stern & Brown, 2016). While there is wide recognition in the literature on organizing for educational justice of the importance of teacher and community solidarity, few studies examine how this solidarity is nurtured or undermined in the neoliberal context. Teachers and the communities they serve have not always been on the same side education reforms (Perlstein, 2004; Perrillo, 2012; Weiner, 2012), yet neoliberalism thrives by exploiting tensions between the two, particularly in urban areas where most students are Black or Brown yet the teaching force remains disproportionately white (Perrillo, 2012; Weiner, 2012). This dissertation fills this gap in the literature and offers insights to grassroots teacher and community organizers by examining teacher and community activism against market reforms as part of a broader social movement for educational justice and equity. My theoretical framework attends to how neoliberal multiculturalism shapes the racial politics of advocacy in the new political grid (Henig, 2011; Melamed, 2006; Scott, 2011, 2013) and draws from social movement theories and concepts to analyze how teacher and community activists in Oakland navigated the neoliberal context in their organizing. Through a case study of grassroots organizing in Oakland against privatization and school closures since the 2011 Occupy Movement galvanized a mass movement against neoliberal capitalism, I answer these research questions:/n1) How did activist groups reflect on their organizing to stop privatization and school closures in Oakland?2) How did activists shift their framings in response to the political context? How did their framings inform their strategies for organizing? 3) What factors and circumstances facilitated or limited collaboration between teacher and community activists? Each research question is addressed in a stand-alone journal article. In the first article, Teacher activists’ praxis in the movement against privatization and school closures in Oakland, I demonstrate how strategic decisions to focus on gaining power within the union and to center the leadership of progressive teachers of color helped activist teachers build support for both the strike and the broader movement against privatization, yet also led them to focus on an inside strategy that may undermine their more transformative goals. The second article, Framing the unframeable: How activists articulate the need to stop privatization and school closures, argues that activist groups responded to the complex and evolving political context with more nuanced framings to counter the rhetoric of pro-market reformers and to resonate with broader sectors of city residents. Activists shifted the way they framed their critiques of charter schools, acknowledged the need to transform public schools, and articulated with more specificity the racialized impact of market reforms on Black students and families, yet they continued to struggle with framing in clear and concise messages how race, space, and profit motive drive privatization and school closures. In the third article, Politics, tensions, and possibilities in teacher and community movements to stop privatization and school closures, I argue that though there are persisting challenges to building alliances across teacher and community activist groups, including limited capacity, fragmentation, and racial politics, the experience of trying in vain to stop the school closures can be channeled into a shared sense of outrage and common struggle that can be a unifying force (Ferman, 2017; Mayorga et al., 2020; Warren, 2010). Teacher and community activists have taken advantage of the opportunities created by the expansion of precarity and disposability that are the direct result of neoliberalism. They have channeled a growing sense of urgency and outrage into building solidarity between teachers and the communities they serve and forming ad hoc coalitions in a fragmented political landscape, allowing them to mount a powerful counterattack to the onslaught of neoliberal austerity policies. At the same time, these activists struggle to navigate the shifted racial politics and power dynamics in a reconfigured political terrain where racial representation within their own movements might work against the pursuit of radical demands for educational and social transformation. Moreover, as activist teachers gain power within their unions and move them toward social justice unionism, they run the risk of losing the capacity to organize from independent spaces outside of the union that afford activists the opportunity to develop a transformative and intersectional praxis for building a mass movement for educational and social justice. Avoiding the traps of neoliberal racial politics present the biggest challenge to building a broad based educational justice movement that is part of a global movement against neoliberal capitalism.

Advisor: Perlstein, Daniel