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Category: #SchoolClosures

11.29.18: School Closures and the Black Community: Panel & Eve Ewing Book Talk @ Uncle Bobbie’s

Free & Open to Public!

Thursday, November 29, 2018, starting at 5pm at The People’s Sanctuary (Uncle Bobbie’s Coffee & Books).

 

In 1978 education specialist Richard L. Andrews was quoted as saying “(O)nce a school is closed, the environmental forces of out-migration, population decline and neighborhood deterioration is set in motion. It is difficult, if not impossible, to reverse these forces.” Thirty years later, we continue to see this trend manifesting to the detriment of communities that fall victim to this policy.

In the past several years, Philadelphia, Chicago and many of the nation’s urban centers, have been impacted by school closings. Many of these neighborhoods are historically majority Black/Brown, have high poverty and violence rates, lower home values, lower college completion rates, and experienced disinvestment for decades before. Ongoing disinvestments in these communities translated into disinvestment in the schools within them. Ultimately, many of these schools became slated for closure, eliminating what traditionally had been the life-blood of communities, and making way for demographic changes that barely represent that of previous residents.

These destructive conditions demand that we be engaged in ongoing conversation, research, teaching and organizing in order to disrupt these processes. The Philadelphia Black History Collaborative, in collaboration with #BarrioEdProject and Swarthmore College, have organized a powerful two part event to be held on Thursday November 29, 2018 at The People’s Sanctuary (Uncle Bobbie’s Coffee & Books)

5pm – SCHOOL CLOSINGS: PRESUMPTIONS, POLICY AND PRACTICE

We begin at 5pm with a panel discussion titled School Closings: Presumptions, Policy and Practice, with Dr. Camika Royal (Loyola University, Maryland), Zakiya Sankara-Jabar (Racial Justice Now! and Dignity in Schools Campaign), Koby Murphy (Philadelphia Student Union), and Akil Parker (educator).

The panel will be moderated by Akanke Washington.

This is a two part event, and is being hosted by Uncle Bobbie’s Coffee & Books!

Panel Discussion Flyer


6pm – EVE EWING PRESENTS: GHOSTS IN THE SCHOOLYARD

At 6p sociologist of education Eve L. Ewing will presents her latest book, Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side (University of Chicago Press). Dr. Ewing will talk about the story of Chicago’s 2013 mass public school closures– the largest wave of such closures in the nation’s history. The event will include a reading of excerpts from the books, behind-the-scenes context and the deeper story of the research project, and a discussion of the lessons the book presents about history, segregation, racism, and the future of America’s public schools, followed by a question and answer session, and a book signing.

Ewing Book Talk Flyer

 


EVE L. EWING’S BIO

Dr. Eve Louise Ewing​​ is a sociologist of education whose research is focused on racism, social inequality, and urban policy, and the impact of these forces on American public schools and the lives of young people. She is an Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration. Her book Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side (University of Chicago Press, October 2018) explores the relationship between the closing of public schools and the structural history of race and racism in Chicago’s Bronzeville community. Her work has been published in many venues, including The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Eve L. Ewing.

Organizers

Host

The People’s Sanctuary – Uncle Bobbie’s Coffee & Books
5445 Germantown Ave
Philadelphia, PA 19144

Map to Uncle Bobbie’s 

Supporter

New pub on #SchoolClosures #Neoliberalism out in BCRWs The Scholar & Feminist Online

It took almost five years, but the work is finally live!! Some other time I’ll write about the long and winding road, but I’m delighted to share that my and Ujju Aggarwal’s co-authored piece, From Forgotten to Fought Over: Neoliberal Restructuring, Public Schools, and Urban Space,
is part of the latest issue of The Scholar & Feminist Online.  This is really an amazing collection of work.

Special thanks to Barnard Center for Research on Women (BCRW) and the folks and The Scholar & Feminist Online for being supportive hosts, and a huge, huge thanks to our rad editors Soniya Munshi and Craig Wilse.

So without further ado:

 

Navigating Neoliberalism in the Academy, Nonprofits, and Beyond

Issue 13.2 | Spring 2015

The Octopus, drawing by Nicci Yin Created as part of the presentation “The Octopus: Cognitive Capitalism and the University” with Natalia Cecire and Miriam Neptune at The Scholar & Feminist 2015: Action on Educaiton. - See more at: http://sfonline.barnard.edu/navigating-neoliberalism-in-the-academy-nonprofits-and-beyond/about-this-issue/#imageclose-2467

The Octopus, drawing by Nicci Yin
Created as part of the presentation “The Octopus: Cognitive Capitalism and the University” with Natalia Cecire and Miriam Neptune at The Scholar & Feminist 2015: Action on Educaiton. – See more at: http://sfonline.barnard.edu/navigating-neoliberalism-in-the-academy-nonprofits-and-beyond/about-this-issue/#imageclose-2467

 

About this Issue

This issue of The Scholar & Feminist Online, edited by scholar-activists Soniya Munshi and Craig Willse, explores the nonprofit and the university as two key sites in which neoliberalism’s gendered and racialized social and economic formations are constituted and contested, opening new possibilities in the critical work of resisting and imagining beyond the nonprofit industrial complex (NPIC) and the academic industrial complex (AIC). Emerging out of a 2009 meeting at the American Studies Association convened by Munshi and Willse and drawing on the theoretical and historical models articulated by INCITE! Women, Gender Non-conforming, and Trans People of Color Against Violence, this issue foregrounds inquiries into how neoliberalism has reconstituted education, service provision, and social justice organizing in ways that serve and further the harms caused by capitalism, gendered hierarchies of heteropatriarchy, racism, and white supremacy. Contributors also consider the ways that people working inside nonprofits and schools mobilize resistance to neoliberalism and develop alternatives within and outside their current institutional formations.

 

From Forgotten to Fought Over: Neoliberal Restructuring, Public Schools, and Urban Space

Introduction

Brandeis High School was located on 84th Street in an area of Manhattan known as the Upper West Side. However, 84th Street was not always the Upper West Side. Historically, 84th Street and the area surrounding it were primarily comprised of low-income African American, Haitian, Latino, and White residents. Like so many other neighborhoods of New York City, as a result of multiple waves of gentrification, the area is now comprised of a percentage of affluent residents, the majority of whom are White. Amidst these neighborhood shifts, however, Brandeis continued to serve low-income students and students of color until 2009, when the New York City Department of Education (NYCDOE) decided that it was a failing school and slated it to be phased out, or closed.[1]

Brandeis was one of several large, comprehensive high schools in New York City. It was also the case study for Michelle Fine’s seminal Framing Dropouts.[2] To a large extent, the conditions that Fine documented over twenty years ago have not considerably changed over time: Brandeis continued both to be under-resourced and to serve a student body that was predominantly low-income and Black and Latino.[3] The school also served a large number of English language learners as well as students with special needs. Brandeis was among over 100 schools that were closed during Michael Bloomberg’s tenure as Mayor.[4] In many ways, Brandeis is representative of a forgotten or abandoned place, which Ruth Wilson Gilmore describes as “planned concentrations or sinks—of hazardous materials and destructive practices that are in turn sources of group-differentiated vulnerabilities to premature death ….”[5]

During the phase out of Brandeis, as the students slowly disappeared, the question arose as to what should be built in the space. And it was during this time that Brandeis—or more precisely, the building that once housed Brandeis—transformed from being a place that was once forgotten and never sought after, to one that became fought over.

Several scholars have drawn upon David Harvey’s articulation of accumulation by dispossession to highlight the relationships between restructuring in education, the increasingly explicit role of market forces that permeate state-driven education reforms, and the gentrification of urban neighborhoods.[6] Building upon the work of these scholars, we use historical and ethnographic methods to examine what the case of Brandeis might tell us about how the continued production of what Gilmore terms “group differentiated vulnerability to premature death”[7] occurs in tandem through urban renewal and education reform.[8]

In the sections that follow, we trace state-driven education reforms and urban renewal programs that moved through Brandeis and through the Upper West Side over the course of several decades. We begin with an examination of how the education reforms that claimed to fix Brandeis only allowed for a continued dispossession. While these reforms ensured that the world inside Brandeis remained consistent over time, the world outside the building was changing rapidly. We chart how urban renewal programs for the Upper West Side facilitated a gradually increasing disjuncture between the school and its surrounding community. Finally, we interrogate the cultural logic that undergirded the negotiation of this disjuncture during what we term the postmortem period of Brandeis phase out.[9]

– See more at: http://sfonline.barnard.edu/navigating-neoliberalism-in-the-academy-nonprofits-and-beyond/ujju-aggarwal-edwin-mayorga-from-forgotten-to-fought-over-neoliberal-restructuring-public-schools-and-urban-space/#sthash.v1sp2ukc.dpuf

 

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