Shareholder Schools: Racial Capitalism, Policy Borrowing, and Marketized Education Reform in Cape Town, South Africa

Abstract

Marketization of education in South Africa accelerated at the crossroads of the postapartheid democratic transition and global neoliberal turn, reflecting both educational policy impacts of the country’s protracted negotiated settlement and transnational trends. A controversial 2018 provincial amendment further entrenched marketization in the Western Cape by introducing “collaboration schools,” public-private partnerships modeled on charter schools from the United States and academy schools from the United Kingdom. This article employs critical policy ethnography to argue that racial capitalism shapes transnational policy borrowing and to illustrate that a perceived portability of marketized reforms rests on racialized notions of the function of schooling for marginalized youth across contexts. I draw on Cedric Robinson’s analysis of capitalism as a ubiquitously racialized, interconnected global order and Neville Alexander’s insistence that antiracism must be anticapitalist, particularly in education, a site and strategy of struggle with dual potential to perpetuate or undermine racial capitalism.