Reclaiming racial justice and building solidarity in Oakland's educational justice movement

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines the ways in which teachers and community-based activists collaborated to advance an anti-privatisation agenda within an urban school district. The article emerges from our respective studies of privatisation in Oakland, one a historical study of the advance of neoliberalism and the other a case study (Merriam 2007, Qualitative Research and Case Study Applications in Education: Revised and Expanded from Case Study Research in Education, 2nd ed. Jossey-Bass) of teacher and community organising against privatisation and school closures. Utilising interviews with key activists and organisers as well as observation and participation in the education justice movement, we describe a set of collaborative political education projects through which activists reclaimed racial justice as the framework to strengthen the movement against privatisation. In these projects, activists called attention to the centrality of antiblackness in advancing privatisation and to the shared disposability and precarity of students of color and the teachers and schools that served them. By shifting from a ‘defend’ public schools to a ‘transform public schools’ framework, they also increased solidarity between teachers, the teachers’ union, and the local community. In the context of the school reform's industry's appropriation of racial-justice language, these political education projects were both a counter-hegemonic and power-building strategy.