The Political Economy of Subprime Educational Policy: A Critical Analysis of Charter Schools in Black Communities

In July 2016, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) unanimously adopted a resolution calling for a moratorium on charter schools at the 107th National Convention (NAACP Task Force for Quality Education, 2017). In the moratorium resolution, the NAACP raised concerns about the negative impact of concentrated charter school growth in Black communities in light of evidence of selective enrollment practices, punitive and exclusive discipline practices, increased segregation, and fiscal mismanagement (NAACP Resolution, 2016). At its core, the moratorium was a call for more local and state-level oversight and accountability of charter schools rooted in an organizational commitment to civil rights for Black students and their communities. To illuminate the risks associated with insufficient government oversight of market actors to Black communities, the resolution text referred to a study by Green et al. (2015) that drew parallels between the subprime mortgage crisis and charter school expansion. The authors argued that school districts were best positioned to be charter authorizers because of their responsibility to educate students should charters close due to poor quality. However, multiple authorizers in a state or district without this responsibility to local communities could result in the proliferation of low-quality schools or subprime education (Green et al., 2015).

National debate ensued in the months after the NAACP convention as the moratorium awaited final ratification by the Board of Directors in an October 2016 meeting. A coalition of 160 Black education leaders, organized by the now defunct Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO) and the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (NAPCS), prepared a letter advising the NAACP to reconsider the resolution and argued that charters offer low income and working-class Black families access to high quality education and opportunities to escape failing public schools. Critical to their argument was a position of governance agnosticism based on the fact that “charters work” and the fact that some Black parents articulate a desire for quality education for their children regardless of governance.

The authors of the coalition's open letter included statistics from a widely cited effectiveness study from the Center for Research on Educational Outcomes (CREDO) charter study, which found that Black students in charter schools gained an equivalent of 14 extra days of learning in reading and math per year compared to Black students in traditional public schools, as evidence that “charters work.” An online social media hashtag campaign and online petition website titled “Charters Work” was concurrently launched by the coalition to provide charter parents and parents waitlisted an opportunity to voice positive experiences and support of charters. The writers of the petition letter asserted that their support of charter schools is not abstract but based on personal experiences of Black parents with children enrolled in charters.

The diverging perspectives of the two Black-led organizations provides an opportunity to explore the affordances of a Black-centered approach to understanding how charter schools work in ways beyond individual level outcomes. Historical and ongoing realities of public education make schools a complicated site of suffering, disinvestment of critical resources, and churn of reform for Black students (Dumas, 2014; Ladson Billings, 2006). Given these realities, Black parents seeking educational alternatives that promise outcomes related to social mobility such as improved testing outcomes and college admission are legitimate concerns with material outcomes for their children. However, I reframe the impact of charter schools from the individual level by using a structural analysis that situates the historical role of schools in broader political and economic processes, which has the potential to show the impact of charter growth on Black communities beyond the scope of individual Black parents and students.

In this article, I demonstrate how contemporary cases in housing and school policy – the subprime mortgage crisis and charter schools – illuminate broader patterns of racial capitalism in the early twenty-first century iteration of neoliberalism, while continuing to operate in mutually constitutive ways in contemporary metropolitan landscapes. Whereas schools played an active role in the construction of racial residential segregation during the Jim Crow era as defining features of racially homogeneous neighborhoods (Erickson, 2016), this paper illuminates how contemporary relationships between housing and education continue to (re) shape racialized space in new ways. I draw historical connections between education policy, housing policy, and metropolitan stratification to illuminate the contemporary ways that racial inequality is reproduced in the metropolitan area at the nexus of these policy areas.

I illuminate the risks of governance agnosticism towards charter schools supported by organizations by situating charter school expansion in a political economic framework that makes visible how charters operate in relationship to Black communities without attention to issues of equity beyond test score outcomes. This relational analysis will demonstrate how the concept of subprime – access on the basis of lower quality, subpar, and exploitative terms – operates in education policy. In addition to subprime loans that enable “predatory inclusion” (Taylor, 2019) into the housing market and ostensibly increase Black homeownership, Black students’ access to educational opportunity may be expanded on lower quality terms vis-à-vis charter school expansion depending on the policies that guide charter growth. I demonstrate how the federal government and private sector operate within a deregulatory policy framework that makes this possible.

In what follows, I briefly review the literature in relationship to charter schools, political power, and economic opportunities. Then, I leverage the concepts of roll-back and roll out to frame neoliberalism as historical processes where state power is mobilized to a) reduce the state role through a deregulatory trajectory (roll-back process) and then restructured to b) discipline and regulate citizen-subjects into market participants through social policy (roll-out process) (Peck & Tickell, 2002). The strength in these concepts is the capacity to frame neoliberalism broadly as processes as opposed to an end state, while leaving room for historically and geographically contingent realities that shape how those overarching processes are enacted locally.

Through analysis of the roll-back process, I draw parallels between the subprime mortgage crisis and charter expansion to illuminate the federal role in advancing a deregulatory trajectory that made Black communities a site for subprime opportunities and profit in both housing and education. Through discussion of the roll out process, I illuminate how the federal government disciplines school districts and states serving Black students, who are blamed for racial disparities in educational outcomes, building on a historical trajectory where educational reform is concentrated in racially minoritized districts. I end this section by showing how market-based education reforms converge with the disciplinary state and the impact on Black mothers, Black teachers, and Black students. Lastly, I conclude with insights on how this conceptualization sheds light on alternative possibilities for educational policy and Black education that exceed a focus on whether or not we should support charter schools.

Relevant Literature

Housing and Schools: Historical Analyses and Contemporary Implications

Education historians intervene in the grand narrative of post-World War II metropolitan stratification and demonstrate how schools were active and mutually constitutive in constructing segregation between cities and suburbs, rather than passive recipients of conditions created by housing policy (Benjamin, 2012; Dougherty, 2012; Erickson, 2016; Lassiter, 2012). Guided by the influential city planning concept of the racially homogeneous “neighborhood unit” and fortified by the boundaries of restrictive covenants, the placement of schools actively cemented racial segregation (Benjamin, 2012; Erickson, 2016). Additionally, the role of schools in the assessment of property values and perceived school quality in the marketing of homes are critical examples of how schools helped attract movement to certain suburbs in concert with federal housing policies that advantaged white families (Dougherty, 2012). The post-World War II era linkage between schools and segregated metropolitan landscapes provides an important historical starting place to examine the connections between charter schools and Black communities.

As charter schools typically provide educational access and opportunities beyond traditional neighborhood boundaries, researchers examine the implications for decoupling the conventional relationship between school and neighborhood. Although there is an established relationship between school quality and housing prices, the literature on how charter school growth shapes these dynamics is mixed as some studies find no relationship between charters and housing prices (Horowitz et al., 2009; Iberman et al., 2015), while others show that when charter quality exceeds traditional public school offerings, charter availability translates into a housing price premium (Beracha & Hardin, 2019). Additionally, scholars argue that unless charter policy is designed to facilitate racial and socioeconomic diversity (Mead & Green, 2012; Orfield & Frankenberg, 2013; Scott & Wells, 2013), charters often contribute to increases in racial isolation within school districts (Baker, 2016; Frankenberg et al., 2010; Miron et al., 2010).

The decoupling of neighborhood and school assignment also raises critical questions on how charter growth shapes processes of gentrification and displacement in urban landscapes. Utilizing varying methods and attending to different scopes, studies show charters can be a powerful vehicle in parallel processes of urban gentrification, displacement, and racial and socioeconomic isolation. Charters and other school choice policies such as magnets, vouchers, and open enrollment are associated with increased in-migration of high socioeconomic white families in predominantly Black and historically disinvested neighborhoods, providing evidence of the relationship between robust school choice offerings and gentrification (Pearman & Swain, 2017). Charters are a malleable policy tool that has been utilized as a mechanism to attract white families and students to public education (Hankins, 2007; Lipman, 2013; Davis & Oakley, 2013; Mann et al., 2020), as well as targeting charter growth in Latino and Black communities as a strategy for school reform (Buras, 2014; Green et al., 2019). This literature shows how charters as a policy mechanism is a vehicle with strategies that are racially contingent and reinforces segregated schools by collaborating with twenty-first century migration and housing patterns often sutured to white migration to urban areas and the displacement of Black families, reinforcing existing racial hierarchies through new modes of segregation. As has been the case in Jim Crow segregation (Erickson, 2016), schools continue to figure prominently in web of policies that construct segregated spaces, but the private management of charter schools reshapes pathways to public accountability.

Charters and Black Political Power

Studies demonstrate that charter school growth has been disproportionately driven by elite political and economic networks undergirded by venture philanthropy (Au & Ferrare, 2014; Kretchmar et al., 2014; Reckhow & Snyder, 2014; Scott, 2009; Scott & Jabbar, 2014). Central to this disproportionate political influence is the concentration of funding by the top venture philanthropists towards charter advocacy organizations, research organizations, and charter school operators, which cohere around a charter school agenda and assert influence over the direction of national educational policy (Reckhow & Snyder, 2014; Scott, 2009). This raises critical questions about the extent to which school choice policy is enacted upon historically underserved local communities, particularly Black communities in urban cores for whom school choice is politically constructed as a civil right and as a form of empowerment (Scott, 2011). Civil rights discourse deployed by charter advocates obscures relations of power central to elite networks undergirded by venture philanthropy (Scott, 2013a), while eliding the actual experiences of Black parents who navigate school choice systems in ways that are not characterized by empowerment and described as limited choices between suboptimal options and selective enrollment processes endemic to schools choosing students (Pattillo, 2015).

The role of venture philanthropy on school choice in Black communities reflects a longstanding history of white philanthropists shaping the direction of Black education in the United States (Anderson, 1988; Rooks, 2017; Scott, 2009; Watkins, 2001). This historical trajectory of racialized power asymmetries shows a through line of continuity between limited political power and the erosion of democratic control of education by Black communities. This demonstrates a twofold challenge – the question of power with respect to which actors control the direction of education policy, while private governance of public education reconfigures the political mechanisms by which education policy can be contested.

Additionally, emerging evidence from New Orleans demonstrates how authorizers operate as gatekeepers to decide, “who governs?” resulting in the reproduction of white political power over Black education (Henry, 2019; Henry & Dixson, 2016). Through a review of charter application discourse using critical race theory, these studies demonstrate how charter approvals, educational models, and the undergirding logics framing the need for alternative educational options converge in ways that make Black and locally led charter applicants less legible and acceptable for approval. Racial and geographic disparities in who can be a charter operator vis-à-vis the charter authorization process in New Orleans –primarily white and nationally affiliated charter operators – illuminates how racial inequality may be embedded in the governance of charter schools in ways that limits the possibility of Black communities leveraging charter schools as a mechanism for power over local schools.

Research also illuminates how charter expansion is typically tied to new governance arrangements that constrain local democratic governance and accountability such as state takeover agencies, mayoral control, appointed boards, and portfolio management models, further circumscribing notions of empowerment (Bulkley et al., 2010; Buras, 2014; Glazer & Egan, 2018; Lipman, 2013; Scott, 2013a). In a particularly compelling study, national evidence demonstrates that state takeovers, oftentimes preceding and facilitating charter expansion, are more likely to be advanced in districts with Black and Latino political representation on local school boards and city councils, despite similar low performance in white districts (Morel, 2018). In Black school districts the most punitive form of state takeover – complete eradication of the local school board – is more likely to take place. This body of evidence suggests that claims linking school choice and empowerment do not bear out in practice for Black political leadership or Black parents.

Gaps in Charter Policy: Limited Oversight and Profit Opportunities

As charter schools are publicly funded and privately managed, the quasi-public nature of charter schools presents challenges in ensuring that students and employers have the same constitutional protections with regards to discipline and labor concerns (Baker, 2016). Case law suggests that some charters operators leverage their “hybrid characteristics” though opportunistic legal strategies in response to opposition cases in various states: public characteristics are leveraged to access funding, while private characteristics are emphasized to avoid state and federal protections required of traditional public-school students and employes (Green et al., 2013). State court cases have resulted in mixed decisions evidencing a lack of consensus: charter schools are considered state actors (thereby public entities) for some purposes (e.g., compliance with IDEA, FOIA disclosure), but not for others such as employment (thereby private entities). Inconsistency in employee treatment and protection impacts issues such as exemption from collective bargaining agreements, rights of teachers and staff to unionize in charters, and employee termination protections. Scholars argue these precedents suggest a potential pathway for legal strategies that limit student protections if charter schools argued that they are not state actors in the case of student discipline and are exempt from student due process challenges (Green et al., 2013).

The deregulated nature of charter policies does not fully account for the ways that limited oversight coupled with increased budgetary autonomy places public funds at risk for abuse due to loopholes embedded in current charter laws such as third-party related transactions and real estate dealings, which creates profit opportunities for operators and their affiliated auxiliary organizations (Baker & Miron, 2015; Green et al., 2019). Limited transparency in private contracting also creates opportunities for public dollars to flow into private companies without a robust infrastructure for transparency and political accountability (Burch & Smith, 2016). These loopholes and profit opportunities have been tied to the racial isolation of Black schools through concepts such as “segronomics,” which illuminates how educational policy strategies that exclude integration as a meaningful policy option operate within the context of unregulated market-based reforms to create a perverse incentive structure: profit opportunities drive the expansion of market-based education policies irrespective of failure to produce better academic outcomes, while leaving intact segregated schools that also maintain disparities in educational outcomes (Rooks, 2017).

Given the “educational debt” that has accumulated through racially exclusive policies and led to disparities in educational outcomes across race and socioeconomic status (Ladson-Billings, 2006), charters have become central in discussions on Black education. Charter growth is concentrated in large city contexts where the public-school system predominantly serves Black and Latino students eligible for free-and-reduced priced lunch (Baker, 2016). The body of evidence previously discussed illuminates that charters can collaborate with urban transformations that reinforce racial segregation and Black displacement; limit the political power Black parents, educators, and leaders to shape the terms of charter expansion; and lack a sufficient regulatory framework to address the profit opportunities in market-based education reforms. This indicates that our conceptual understandings must analyze the role of charters in relationship to questions of race and the broader political economy.

In what follows, I leverage a conceptual framework for a racial relational analysis between the subprime mortgage crisis and charter schools. This framework utilizes the concepts of roll-back and roll out to illuminate how neoliberal capitalism functions within contemporary housing and education policy in ways that are structured by racial capitalism. In what follows, I use the concepts of roll-back and rollout (Peck & Tickell, 2002) in order to illuminate the mechanisms and processes specific to this iteration of capitalism, while situating these transformations and particularities of neoliberalism in the long-duree of racial capitalism (Dawson & Francis, 2016; Issar, 2020).

Conceptual Framework

Roll-Back Process: The Racial Politics of Deregulation

The roll-back process captures how deregulatory policies are the mechanism that restructures the relationship between the state and market, such that the state is reduced through deregulation to allow market entry into new domains conventionally considered public (Peck & Tickell, 2002). The roll-back process captures the mobilization of state power to dismantle the regulatory function of the state in relationship to the private sector, a function that was an outgrowth of New Deal policies designed to protect (white) workers from the whims of the market in the aftermath of the Great Depression (Harvey, 2007). Though the New Deal policies advanced the most expansive welfare state in the history of the United States, it was constitutive of the exclusion of Black Americans and the feminization of poverty, which must be understood as integral to its expansion.

The critical role of Black exclusion from New Deal era reforms allowed for their sustained economic exploitation for the economic benefit of white southerners, both elite and laborers (Perea, 2011). Black exploitation was integral—economically beneficial and necessary— in the context of the most progressive and expansive conception of state protection of citizens and regulation of market vis-à-vis federal intervention. I utilize the roll-back concept to trace the deregulatory mechanisms that mark the economic restructuring of the 1970s in the context of the cases of housing and schools. Though Black people's precarious and unprotected positions in relationship to the state precede neoliberalism, the processes that maintain this position are on evolving terms.

The roll-back process advanced deregulation and marketization by political and economic elite operating as a class but occurred alongside the simultaneous mobilization of Christian and racial conservatives advancing movements rooted in anti-Black racial politics to retract the role of the federal government in protecting of Civil Rights mandates (Crenshaw, 1988; Harvey, 2007). The transformations of the roll-back process were underwritten by the rise of neo-conservatism and the strategic deployment of colorblind discourse post-Civil Rights, which recast federal intervention for the redress of racial inequality of opportunity as racial discrimination against white Americans (Bostdorff & Goldzwig, 2005; Crenshaw, 1988). These racial politics were integral to the transformation of the latest iteration of the political economy. They illuminate the specific processes by which differentiations on the basis of race work to structure capitalism and naturalize the social order (Melamed, 2015; Pulido, 2017; Robinson, 1983). I think with scholars who draw upon Robinson's (1983) heuristic of racial capitalism, which formed out of his intervention in the history of capitalist development, arguing that already existing social differentiation in Western society shaped (and continues to shape) capitalist development, including recent scholarship updating and refining the analytic for a contemporary context (e.g., Wang, 2018; Leroy & Jenkins, 2021), I trace the roll back process with attention to the ways that “key dynamics of capitalism”— in these cases accumulation/dispossession (education) and credit/debt (housing)—"become articulated through race “(Leroy & Jenkins, 2020, p. 3). ¹ Understanding the neoliberal turn requires the long view of capitalist development that attends to “the symbiotic processes of institutional racism and capital accumulation” (Marable, 1983, p. 228). I weave these analytic insights into my use of the rollback and roll out concepts as a way to trace the way “slavery epitomized a racialized system of valuation and extraction that continues to this day (Leroy & Jenkins, 2021, p. 11)”, with a focus on Black communities in my cases.

In light of neoconservative deployment of colorblind adaptations of “equality of opportunity” to reduce civil rights protections, Crenshaw (1988) warns that antidiscrimination discourse is subject to ideological contestation. Therefore, an analysis of what ends discourse is advancing must “maintain a contextualized, specified world view that reflects the experience of Blacks (Crenshaw, 1988, p. 1349).” In what follows, I apply the historical shifts of the state roll-back process to the expansion of subprime mortgages and charter schools in Black communities. I do so by illuminating how deregulatory policies facilitated increased privatization in housing and education, which resulted in a collaboration between state and market to construct Black communities as a site for subprime opportunities in both housing and education. In light of misguided strategies to deploy civil rights discourse to justify the advancement of charters, I build on previous work that illuminates how the political and economic dimensions of charter schools betray claims of alignment with the civil rights movement when analyzed from the perspective of Black communities within a political economic framework (Scott, 2013a).

Roll Out Process: Disciplining Black Communities

The roll out process captures the enactment of a deeply interventionist agenda in social policy that mobilizes state power toward disciplining people who have been abandoned and dispossessed by the economic policies that privilege the market's capacity for profit (Peck & Tickell, 2002). The negative impact of political economic restructuring coincided with the delegitimization of the welfare state, which produced surplus labor that the state has resolved through growth of prisons (Gilmore, 2007) and the punitive and privatization turn in the welfare system (Soss et al., 2011). I explore how the roll-out process is enacted in education policy through a disciplinary turn, which shapes the policy climate and underlying logics that charter growth operates within. Educational policy shifts, like prison growth and welfare reform, are also partly shaped by political economic shifts driven by racial politics, and evidence a disciplinary turn that will be explored in the indirect and underexplored relationship between charter schools, subprime mortgage crisis, and school funding.

In the midst of Civil Rights policy advances, the increased access to social safety net programs to Black Americans coupled with anti-Black discourse directly contributed to hostility towards both federal assistance and Black people, inciting calls for welfare reform rooted in work requirements and disciplinary programmatic turns (Soss et al., 2011). Though the minority of the nation's poor, Black communities became the primary focus of public discourse about poverty, which fostered public anxieties about the “pathologies of the underclass” post-Civil Rights advancements. As state responsibility for those dispossessed by the retreat of the federal social safety net, white activist voters advanced efforts to restrict redistributive policies (Gilmore, 2007). Additionally, through “law and order” politics that equated anti-racist and anti-capitalist political protest with street crime, Republican politicians capitalized on white racial resentments to advance criminal justice reforms rooted in a disciplinary turn despite declining crime rates (Gilmore, 2007; Soss et al., 2011). This provided a means to mobilize an electorate around critical disciplinary policies that mobilized state power toward regulating Black communities, such as Nixon's war on crime and Reagan's war on drugs. Civil rights backlash – in the struggle for and in the aftermath of civil rights gains – and the racial politics of “law and order” worked to align anti-Black attitudes with support for key punitive reforms in the 1990s that characterize the roll-out process: Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 and the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996 (Soss et al., 2011). Chaney's (2019) study reinterprets federal education policy shifts through the lens “disciplining politics of opportunity” and illuminates how the broader racialized disciplinary turn that shaped welfare reform and prison growth has also shaped the trajectory of education policy.

In my discussion of the roll-out process in relation to the subprime mortgage crisis and charter schools, I bring to bear how states negatively impacted by the Great Recession were effectively disciplined into market reforms after the housing market bubble burst due to the condition that competitive federal recovery funding for education was linked to state commitments to market reform growth, including charter schools. I expand the discussion of punishment by exploring the impact of concentrations of subprime mortgage crisis and charter expansion in Black communities. I argue that the casualties of these exploitative education and housing policies are made visible by focusing on Black women as teachers and mothers and Black student experiences.

Federal Roll-Back, the Subprime Mortgage Crisis, and the Implications for Charter Schools

Federal Roll-Back in the Subprime Mortgage Crisis

I build upon Green et al.'s (2015) parallels between the subprime mortgage crisis and charter schools, which argue that the authorization or approval of new charter schools by a third party (or multiple parties) other than local school districts creates negative incentives for unregulated charter growth with potentially negative outcomes in school quality. As local education agencies are the entities required to contend with the aftermath of school closures should charters underperform, the authors argue that fewer and higher quality charters would be approved as LEAs have a legal responsibility to educate all students and assume the risk if a charter fails and must be closed. By comparing third-party mortgage servicers to non-LEA charter authorizers, the authors illuminate that the deregulated policy conditions that created incentives for subprime mortgage growth and foreclosure serve as lessons for the necessity of increased regulatory safeguards that strengthen the quality and standards of authorizing. For example, mortgage sells could be increased by engaging in less rigorous screening practices and on lower quality terms. Additionally, third party mortgage servicers, who were responsible for the administration of loans on behalf of a financial institution but not directly impacted by default, were incentivized to advance foreclosures (based on collection of service fees) when families could not afford adjustable or balloon interest rate payments, rather than restructure loans to help keep families in homes. The authors make the case that if states only allowed a single authorizer in an area, such as the commonplace approach of district LEAs serving as authorizers, issues with the principal-agent problem that characterized subprime lending could be mitigated (Green et al., 2015).

Though I build on the parallels between the subprime mortgages and charter schools, I focus on different aspects of the crisis. Through a relational analysis between the subprime mortgage crisis and charter expansion, I focus on the racial dimensions of the federal government's role in creating the conditions that constructed Black communities as a site for subprime opportunities in housing and education. During the Reagan Administration, the federal government advanced the roll-back process vis-a-vis the establishment of deregulatory policies that reshaped the terms of mortgage lending within the financial industry (Dymski, 2009). In the 1980s, the ostensible purpose of the deregulation of the financial industry was to increase homeownership to historically marginalized communities, however the policies transformed mortgage lending by rolling back protective policies that prohibited balloon or adjustable interest rates at the federal level and preempted states from establishing protective policies that exceeded the terms of the federal government (Mendenhall, 2010; Wyly et al., 2012). Additionally, the private sector was permitted to engage in mortgage securitization by declaring private mortgage-backed securities as equivalent to government backed guarantees from federal agencies.

Whereas mortgage securitization had been deployed by federal government sponsored enterprises (GSEs) to encourage private sector lending to previously excluded communities of color by guaranteeing the amount of the loan in the case of default throughout the 1970s, the expansion of securitization in the private sector created new, flexible financial instruments in the form of bundled mortgages that could be sold to investors without oversight (Green et al., 2015). Although FHA mortgage-backed securities were a government initiative to expand homeownership opportunities to Black families, historians argue that limited oversight and enforcement of anti-discrimination policy created conditions where private sector actors had the power to engage in predatory and exploitative practices even before the deregulation of the private sector (Taylor, 2019). The deregulatory trajectory greatly expanded the landscape and tools available to the private sector by making mortgage securitization available to the private sector. Predatory practices that had been incubated in the context of federal programs with public oversight and administration were now permitted to proliferate as newly unregulated lenders, and financial instruments operated in the context of diminished consumer protections and increased technological advancements that automated underwriting (Dymski, 2009; Mendenhall, 2010; Price, 2010).

This policy context made the proliferation of high-cost, high-interest loans more profitable than prime loans. While the federal government did not directly prescribe a focus on Black communities for subprime loans to the financial industry, it established the conditions that made targeting Black communities extremely lucrative through a historical trajectory of Black exclusion from homeownership advanced by the federal government throughout the twentieth century: racial covenants, city planning ordinances, white violence, and redlining by the Federal Housing Authority created a frontier of an untapped mortgage market within Black communities (Dymski, 2009; Price, 2010; Mendenhall, 2010; Wyly et al., 2012). Studies demonstrate that racial residential segregation is associated with the proportion of subprime lending, even after controlling for a range of factors conventionally associated with the prevalence of high-cost loans (Rugh et al., 2015; Squires et al., 2009). After controlling for all information used by mortgage brokers and bank officers to estimate discrimination, scholars find that Black borrowers and borrowers within majority Black neighborhoods, are more likely to receive subprime loans and receive riskier lending products, which places them at a higher risk for foreclosure and repossession (Rugh et al., 2015). Furthermore, socioeconomic status did not protect Black families from this trend: subprime mortgages are positively associated with income for Black borrowers (Faber, 2013; Phillips, 2010; Rugh et al., 2015). These disparities translate into material costs:

The average black borrower in Baltimore paid an estimated $1,739 in excess mortgage payments from the time of loan origination and the average black borrower living in a black neighborhood expended $1,861 in excess mortgage payments. Over the life of a 30 year loan, these racial disparities would total $14,904 and $15,948, respectively, forcefully illustrating how prior disadvantage and systemic discrimination in mortgage lending produces an ever-growing cumulative disadvantage for African Americans over time, income that might otherwise have been put into savings, invested in children's education, allocated to promote health, or improve living standards (Rugh et al., 2015, p. 12).

These contemporary wealth transfers from Black communities that facilitated capital accumulation of the finance industry can be situated in a historical trajectory of extraction of capital in Black communities —or “serial displacement” – that has its foundations in Black people as propertied and evolved into the ongoing undermining of Black ownership of property (Saegert et al., 2011). Additionally, not only were foreclosures more likely for Black borrowers during the height of subprime mortgage lending, but they reshaped neighborhood racial composition and retrenched small advances in residential integration (Hall et al., 2015). These losses are indeed a function of race, space, and “cumulative disadvantage” that can be estimated in terms of dollars and cents and with respect to the loss of intergenerational wealth (Rugh et al., 2015). However, the losses also manifest in Black communities in other ways such health disparities, stress on social networks, neighborhood losses, and decreases in collective capacity (Saegert et al., 2011).

This new market of “innovative” financial instruments proved lucrative and created a multi-year housing boom for investors and financial institutions, until drops in home values were triggered as homeowners struggled to pay mortgages with adjustable or balloon interest rates (Dymski, 2009). As more American families struggled with mortgage payments and third-party mortgage servicers exploited the profitability of foreclosure as opposed to restructuring loans, the housing market bubble burst, and sharp increases in mortgage delinquencies and defaults followed. In 2007, the United States was met with the potential of a global economic crisis as several major financial institutions faced insolvency due to liabilities related to risky investments in the housing market. The financial institutions received a “bailout” vis-à-vis the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, totaling $700 Billion –this was later reduced to $475 billion in 2010 (Propublica). Additionally, major banks paid multi-million-dollar settlements based on evidence that Black and Latino borrowers received more costly subprime mortgages than white borrowers with similar credit histories ($335 million, Bank of America; $184.3 million, Wells Fargo; and $21 million, Suntrust) (Department of Justice, 2011, 2012a, 2012b). The impact to Black communities was devastating and federal support was not meaningfully distributed at the same level as financial industry bail out (Price, 2010).

Federal Roll-Back in Charter Schools

In the case of public education, the federal government was instrumental in creating the conditions for charter schools to proliferate in Black communities on the basis of a historical trajectory of housing and school policy that advanced racial segregation (Scott & Holme, 2016). Historians demonstrate the mutually constitutive relationship between housing and school policies in constructing racially segregated metropolitan areas that worked in coordination with post-World War II federal housing and transportation policies that structured white out-migration, suggesting that contemporary analyses of educational policy should be examined in relationship to their effect on metropolitan development (Lassiter, 2012). The grand narrative of metropolitan stratification is that housing policy constrained school integration efforts through Federal Housing Authority redlining practices and transportation policy that constructed interstates to facilitate commutes from the suburbs and lowered gas prices. However, studies illuminate the primacy and causal interplay of school policies on residential segregation through location and placement of schools (Benjamin, 2012; Erickson, 2016); differentiated curriculum designed to attract white middle-class families to suburbs (Dougherty, 2012; Erickson, 2016); and schools as a determining factor in property values (Dougherty, 2012). These studies illuminate how residential segregation was made through the interaction between school and housing policy, which federal policy structured on racially exclusive terms. With white out-migration structured by public policy and with capital flight from cities in the 1970s and 1980s (Mendenhall, 2010), the economic disinvestment from the federal government during the Reagan administration established the conditions for inequitable inputs in public education in the urban cores (Scott & Holme, 2016). This set the pathway for the educational “crisis” that would be resolved through privatization and marketization of public education.

Additionally, broader social forces reshaped the ideological consensus about the normative role of the federal government in social provision towards a reliance on education as one of the primary mechanism for economic security in post-Civil Rights (Kantor & Lowe, 2016). Though education became a primary form of legitimate government social provision, the sector to facilitate this provision shifted towards a market-based approach. However, first there was a turn away from a more expansive role for the federal government to redress racial inequality in education through desegregation efforts. The federal government led by the Nixon and Reagan administrations and the conservative judicial system retracted policy options to facilitate desegregation efforts in critical ways, implicating the role of racial politics in the turn towards market-based reforms. First, Congress limited the ties of the Great Society education legislation to the enforcement of desegregation efforts, which provided federal funding to schools serving students from low income backgrounds through Title I of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). Though Title I funding deferrals could have been leveraged to enforce desegregation efforts through Title IV of the Civil Rights Act, the Congressional backlash against this potential arrangement threatened the existence of Title I and established the program as a compensatory policy that left segregated institutions undisturbed. Second, Richard Nixon leveraged the 1974 reauthorization of ESEA to advance legal restrictions on school bussing resulting in limitations on the federal government's ability to enforce Title IV and prohibiting the use of federal funds for bussing (Kantor & Lowe, 2016).

These federal policy efforts coupled with the erosion of a legal basis to facilitate intra-district integration efforts due to Milliken v. Bradley (1974) resulted in strategies to improve education that protected demarcations between the suburbs and the city such as equitable and adequate finance reform and school choice (Ryan, 2010). In the context of juridical limitations and inadequate federal support for desegregation efforts, school choice has been leveraged in ways that both disrupt and perpetuate the overlapping relationship between residential segregation and segregated schools. First, white families deployed school choice policy during this period to escape desegregation efforts through freedom of choice plans, which allowed public dollars to fund private all-white academies (Orfield & Frankenberg, 2013; Rooks, 2017). Magnet schools developed to facilitate voluntary integration within the juridical constraints of Milliken v. Bradley e.g., (1974). Initially, the provisions around magnet schools helped facilitate integrated schools, however as federal administrations eschewed Civil Rights commitments during the Reagan and Bush presidencies, magnet schools resegregated as more advantaged parents dominated access (Siegel Hawley & Frankenberg, 2013). The removal of court ordered desegregation plans by granting unitary status during the 1990s coincided with the growth of contemporary school choice policies such as charter schools and voucher programs.

The Reagan Administration's 1983 Nation at Risk Report also promoted the turn towards standards and high stakes accountability, which created a punitive policy context for schools and established the path towards the passage of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in 2001. With the expansion of federally mandated standardized testing from NCLB, documented disparities in educational outcomes have been deployed to question the efficacy of public education and legitimize the growth of market-based education policies (Au, 2016; Lipman, 2013; Scott & Holme, 2016). Since the Reagan Administration, this growth in market-based reforms has been facilitated by elite economic and political policy networks, that have constructed a “common sense” about the legitimacy of market-oriented educational reforms to address educational inequality including charter schools (Scott, 2016). It is in this landscape of high stakes accountability and market proliferation that charter schools have emerged, which has been undergirded by bipartisan support across Presidential Administrations since George H.W. Bush. Though researchers argue that the history of school choice suggests that the provisions such as diversity-minded admissions, transportation, and parent information can be leveraged to facilitate choice in service of integration, the actors driving educational policy default to a theory of choice where the unregulated market is uniquely positioned to meet the challenges of racial disparities in education (Orfield & Frankenberg, 2013). This cements racial boundaries between school districts with stark inequities, while publicly unaccountable networks continue to build a “common sense” about the legitimacy of educational policies resigned to segregation and based on market-logics (Scott, 2016). The proliferation of charter schools is a critical part of that policy agenda.

Subprime Education: Charter Schools & Evidence of Injustice. A growing body of evidence indicates that the autonomy of charter schools may be leveraged in ways that compromise educational quality and access for students belonging to groups protected by the significant civil rights gains in education from the latter half of the twentieth century including the landmark court case of Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka and legislation such as the Bilingual Education Act (BEA) and Individuals with Disabilities Act (IDEA) (Eastman et al., 2017). As subprime mortgages are defined by higher interest rates applied to a loan when the borrower is qualified for more favorable terms, I argue that educational opportunities that increase access on the basis of lower quality, subpar, and exploitative terms are “subprime”.

National studies on education management organizations and charter schools find patterns of underrepresentation of special education students and English language learners as well as increased racial segregation (Baker, 2016; Frankenberg et al., 2010; Miron et al., 2010). Evidence also suggests that a market orientation of charter operators contributes to patterns of underserving special education students and English language learners (Lacireno-Paquet et al., 2002). Given performance-based competition, charter schools may be incentivized to choose students more favorable for test-based performance outcomes by counseling out students, marketing strategies, and exclusive responses to application inquiries, suggesting selective enrollment processes (Bergman & McFarlin, 2018; Jabbar, 2016; Welner & Howe, 2005). Though exclusionary discipline practices are more heavily utilized across traditional public and charter schools with predominantly Black student enrollment, charters tend to suspend Black students at a higher rate which suggests discipline policies should be monitored despite autonomy on this feature (Losen et al., 2016). Additionally, the charter school models evidenced as most effective, No Excuses schools (Cheng et al., 2017), are also scrutinized for highly prescriptive, highly regulated, and punitive school disciplinary practices that negatively impact nonacademic outcomes (Bergman & McFarlin, 2018; Golann, 2015; Golann & Torres, 2018; Goodman, 2013). Findings in studies focused on one of the largest national charter management organization networks evidence selective entry and exit practices, which impacted the attrition of Black boys (Miron et al., 2011; Vasquez et al., 2011).

Budgetary autonomy coupled with unaddressed loopholes in current charter laws such as inflated rental agreements for facilities, inflated salaries for charter administrators, and misappropriation of funds creates opportunities for fraud and fiscal mismanagement, which can contribute to questionable use of public funds (Baker & Miron, 2015; Green et al., 2019; Rooks, 2017). This body of evidence suggests that the reproduction of inequality in some charter schools, which could be characterized as subprime, are constitutive of the deregulated nature of their policy design. Without considerations for a regulatory framework for charters, the autonomy afforded to charter schools may result in the proliferation of subprime educational offerings, which may be experienced as school closures due to poor quality just as devastating as the impacts of concentrated foreclosures in Black neighborhoods post-housing bubble burst. Those most vulnerable to these realities are Black children and their communities, leaving them vulnerable to the structural violence of school closures and left to navigate through “institutional mourning” that characterizes the experiences of Black communities affected by school closures (Ewing, 2018).

Charter Schools as Roll-out: Disciplining Black Communities

Race to the Top: The Nexus of Charters, School Funding, and the Subprime Mortgage Crisis

Despite neoliberal theory that argues against state intervention in the market, neoliberalism in practice allows for the state to be the lender of last resort, in service of the protection of capital interests with diminished protections for public institutions and the people they serve (Harvey, 2007). President George W. Bush, constrained by the possibility of a global financial crisis due to the subprime mortgage crisis, passed the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, totaling $700 Billion with direct support to financial institutions that were considered “too big to fail” (Propublica). However, thousands of foreclosures concentrated at various scales — Black borrowers, Black neighborhoods, Black cities —would be left with “unpayable debts” and the loss of homes, while the blame focused on the persons and places that were discriminatorily targeted by the financial industry. Additionally, financially struggling states and school districts due to reduced property tax revenue would have to compete for support during the Great Recession in exchange for compliance to the expansion of market-oriented reforms, which included charter schools.

As of 2014, 31 states still reported ongoing budget cuts to K-12 education since 2007 and have not managed to return to pre-Recession per student spending (Leachman et al., 2016). In response to local level funding gaps precipitated by the Great Recession, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was developed in 2009. This legislation included the Obama Administration's discretionary, competitive grant program, Race to the Top, which prioritized applications with state policy environments favorable to particular reform efforts: state opt-in to Common Core Standards; no state cap on charter schools; use of test scores in teacher evaluations; and improvement of statewide data systems. As the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was passed in response to the Great Recession, states were arguably more inclined to participate in the Race to the Top competitive grant program due to constrained budgets (Boser, 2012), despite the lack of consensus on the administration's prioritized reforms. Evidence suggests that states enacted legislation in alignment with the policy priorities of the grant to create more competitive applications, which illuminates the influence of Race to the Top beyond states receiving awards (McGuinn, 2012).

That competitive funding was viewed as an appropriate policy response to a crisis constructed by the elimination of federal protections for homeowners, especially when funding was contingent upon the expansion of market-based reforms is revealing. The federal government was instrumental in creating the conditions that resulted in the Great Recession by rolling back protections in housing policy and allowing private industry actors more autonomy, which resulted in discriminatory and exploitative lending practices. High-poverty school districts were disproportionately impacted by state budget cuts in the wake of the Great Recession, while low poverty school districts deployed strategies to mitigate shortfalls (Baker, 2014; Knight, 2017).

Given the subprime mortgage crisis disproportionately impacted Black communities, it could be suggested that the districts least positioned to recover from the school funding constraints were disciplined into the consideration of the market-based reforms prioritized by the Obama Administration for the Race to the Top Program, which included charter expansion. The Race to the Top Program illuminates the contemporary relationship between housing and school policy, where housing exploitation based on new modes of extraction work to facilitate increased private actors in the provision of public education. That these changes take place in Black communities is no accident; rather, they illuminate how new modes of capital accumulation operate within the historical grooves of anti-Black racism.

Rolling Out Discipline: Causalities of Subprime Education Policy

As the state ensures that market actors benefit from a favorable policy climate through deregulation and autonomy (rollback), the roll out phase makes visible how communities dispossessed and abandoned by the shrinking state experience the greatest losses and are subjected to disciplining social policy that places the blame on the behavioral and cultural failings of those left behind economic restructuring (Peck & Tickell, 2002). The subprime mortgage crisis resulted in foreclosures concentrated in Black communities and irretrievable losses of Black wealth. The effects of the subprime mortgage crisis within Black communities occurred at the intersections of race, class, gender, and age, making Black women more likely to receive subprime mortgages, particularly single and elderly Black women (Dymski et al., 2013; Mendenhall, 2010; Phillips, 2012; Wyly & Ponder, 2011). Chakravartty and Da Silva (2012) write, “Less attention, however, has been given to the temporal discursive continuities — between the ‘welfare queen’ and the prototypical subprime mortgage borrower as the ‘single African American woman’ — or to the accumulation of the effects of the corresponding policy changes (p. 372).”

I consider the casualties of charter growth in Black communities by showing how the logics of discipline show up in the cases of Black teachers, Black mothers, and Black children. I illuminate how the rollout process reflects a through line of how “negative controlling images,” and biased ideologies and representations work to pathologize Black women and children and justify policies that enact state discipline and regulation (Collins, 2002; Wilson & McCoy, 2009). In the case of subprime mortgages, this is reflected in the fact that the imagined subprime borrower, a Black and unmarried woman, is viewed as undeserving of the same recovery funding available to financial institutions vis-a-vis bailout. I show how charters is imbued with disciplining logics that exclude and displace Black teachers, limit the school choices of Black mothers, and regulate the behavior of Black children.

Disciplining Teachers: Black Teacher Displacement. Network analyses show linkages between venture philanthropy, alternative teacher certification programs, and charter management organizations founders, creating a teacher workforce pipeline between programs such as Teach For America (TFA) and large, well-resourced charter networks (Kretchmar et al., 2014). Despite TFA's commitments to diversify their corps since the mid-2000s, scholars argue that increased multicultural representation does not address the organization's impact as a policy actor and network that advances market-based reforms that displace Black teachers (White, 2016). TFA's growth has oftentimes intersected with socio-politically constructed definitions of teacher quality in ways that result in preferences for white, alternatively trained early career teachers (Buras, 2015; Tompkins, 2015). One of the most egregious examples of this convergence between charter growth, alternative teacher certification programs, and displacement of Black teachers, is the mass firing of the predominantly Black teacher workforce in New Orleans, post-Hurricane Katrina, followed by contracts with TFA to address a manufactured teacher shortage (Buras, 2015). However, scholars map the displacement of Black teachers in locations such as Washington, D.C., Chicago, and Philadelphia (White, 2016). Charter growth, which often precludes teacher unionization, often disrupts hard-fought teacher protections, including racial pay discrimination, and political agendas that improve the broader Black community (Buras, 2015). Given the higher proportion of Black women serving as teachers, this decline in predominantly Black urban districts illuminates how the casualties of charter growth fall along racial and gendered lines, where Black women teachers are unjustly and singularly blamed for student achievement outcomes, resulting in a devaluation of their expertise.

This body of scholarship often focuses on the onset of charter growth in a district. However, as charter schools and alternative teacher certification programs respond to critiques on racial representation, changes have occurred in the demographic of teacher workforce. For example, according to National Education Statistics (2021), Black teachers work in charter schools at higher proportions than traditional public schools with 9% of charter teachers identifying as Black in comparison to 7% in traditional public schools. However, scholarship on teachers of color in charter schools require us to attend to the questions of retention and issues of racial and cultural mismatch in pedagogy and disciplinary approaches (White, 2018), particularly in charter management organizations, necessitating an understanding of the extent to which Black teachers' pedagogical and political visions are constrained in these contexts (Tompkins, 2015).

Disciplining Mothers: Black Mothers & “Poor Choices”. Although deregulated public policy provides charters with school-level autonomy and increased “freedom” from state intervention, Black families, most often Black mothers, navigating this deregulated educational context are not free from state intervention (Rooks, 2017). Charters often open enrollment beyond traditional neighborhood boundaries, however school choice often still “respects district lines and leaves the stratification they reflect unchallenged (Erickson, 2011, p. 44).” White, advantaged communities have begun to protect “legitimate access” more forcefully to the “assets” of high performing schools in two ways. First, advantaged communities are deploying strategies such as “county secession” to reorganize district boundaries through district fragmentation (Siegel-Hawley et al., 2018; Taylor et al., 2019). National comparisons between newly reconfigured districts post-county secession evidence how redrawn district boundaries result in lower financial capacity and less racial diversity in the “left behind” districts, suggesting that the ability to form new districts via secession allows more advantaged communities to isolate and hoard resources for a smaller group of students, oftentimes white wealthier communities (Houck & Murray, 2019). Secondly, district boundaries are reinforced by more advantaged white communities through community and school district surveillance, criminalization, and punishment of those who seek enrollment in schools outside of their prescribed district boundaries (Faw & Jabbar, 2016; Rooks, 2017). In the context of limited opportunities for choices outside their district boundaries, charter schools become one of the limited alternatives from which Black parents can choose that are considered appropriate.

Although cases of district hopping are rare, they illuminate how Black mothers school choice making is legitimate as long as it does not upend the cumulative advantages for affluent white families, demarcated by racialized district boundaries. Black mothers are responsible for making the “right choices” when exercising their “freedom to choose,” however choosing outside the boundaries of their designated choice set – the district – can be a grave misstep with harsh, punitive consequences. These boundaries are maintained through the regulation of Black parents through the threat of surveillance, prosecution, and incarceration (Faw & Jabbar, 2016; Rooks, 2017). The scrutiny of these exercises of choice and the high stakes of making “poor choices” (Faw & Jabbar, 2016) demonstrates the limits of school choice as path to Black empowerment in education policy. Charter schools create more educational options; however, they expand only as far as district boundaries that reflect and protect racial and socioeconomic hierarchies. Additionally, school choice and parental involvement is often gendered labor done by women, and Black mothers’ choice making takes place in the distinctive context of a resistance tradition, animated by the necessity of raising children to negotiate and survive oppression in social, political, and economic systems (Cooper, 2007). Keeping the scope of Black women's choices to charters effectively ensures that the only viable alternatives to historically disinvested public education are a market system that upholds and exacerbates racial and socioeconomic segregation. That the threat of punitive consequences “holds the district line” illuminates the significance of these boundaries and that viable educational policies can only exist within them.

Disciplining Black children: No Excuses. Although charter operators utilize a variety of school models, the now stigmatized No Excuses label, was an elevated philosophy of schooling within the charter landscape for many years. There were multiple components of the model, but a critical aspect was highly regulated and disciplinary policies and character behavior programs. Many No Excuses charter schools framed their work with Civil Rights rhetoric and viewed their mission as closing the racial and socioeconomic achievement gap by providing high quality educational opportunities to students of color from low income communities. As a result of their mission and some evidence of positive achievement outcomes (e.g., Cheng et al., 2017), No Excuses charters had been elevated as proof points and uplifted as a promising model that was particularly effective for Black and Latino children (Thernstrom & Thernstrom 2003; Whitman 2008). However, scholars argue that No Excuses disciplinary approach is not a contributing factor to its outcomes (Dobbie & Fryer, 2011; Golann & Torres, 2018).

However, public scrutiny of the disciplinary approach increased as public awareness of this model has been shaped by investigative journalism. The New York Times has documented evidence that one of the largest charter management organizations (CMOs), Success Academy, creates “go-to-go” lists that guide efforts to counsel or push out potentially low performing students prior to testing, suggesting selective practices that limit access to public schools for the most high-need students under the auspices of discipline practices (Taylor, 2016). A controversial video covertly captured by a concerned teacher's aide in the same CMO documented a teacher verbally berating a young Black girlchild (Taylor, 2016). High school students attending No Excuses CMOs in New Haven, Connecticut and New Orleans, Louisiana have protested discipline practices and the lack of teacher diversity (Fisher, 2016; Simmons, 2014). Scholars have also documented the local resistance to charter expansion, including No Excuses schools, in New Orleans, Louisiana (Dixson et al., 2015). This evidence, from both journalists and scholars, illuminates concerns about the extent to which racial underpinnings of practices rooted in negative, controlling images of Black and Latino communities are the foundations of a model undergirded by anti-blackness (Sondel et al., 2019). Opponents of the No Excuses model have argued for alternatives that protect the dignity of children of color. The racial uprisings of summer 2020 culminated into teachers of large charter management organizations, often the organizations labeled as No Excuses schools, developing public, anonymous social media accounts to expose practices and experiences of racial inequality.

In the context of high stakes accountability, highly regulated and highly prescriptive disciplinary No Excuses policies are one of the ways that test score outcomes create “sharper curricular and pedagogic squeeze, resulting in a qualitatively different education than that experienced by white, affluent counterparts (Au, 2016, p. 52).” Although the mission of charter management organizations that subscribed to No Excuses was to “close the achievement gap,” their educational experiences caused harm since their emergence for thousands of Black students who moved through their schools. Even with recent moves to create rhetorical and political distance between their past and reformed disciplinary approaches, Black children were the casualties of the proliferation of that model, as No Excuses subscribers were often well-resourced charter management organizations supported by venture philanthropy (Reckhow & Snyder, 2014; Scott, 2009Kretchmar et al., 2014), primed to scale and often prioritized for authorization (Henry & Dixson, 2016).

Conclusion

Similar to other issues, Black organizations vary in their responses to charter growth from calls for a moratorium (NAACP) to anti-privatization and community control (Movement for Black Lives) to increased school choice (BAEO). The broader history of Black education struggles demonstrates that Black people deployed various strategies in relationship to the emerging order of a particular education reform moment to advance educational opportunities for Black students, including both collaboration and resistance, that preceded neoliberalism in education (Todd-Breland, 2018). Therefore, Black participation in the charter sector – as activists, leaders, teachers, and parents – should not be read as collusion or complete buy-in into a market-oriented approach (Todd-Breland, 2018). Rather, Black organizations continue to leverage school choice as a policy mechanism to meet the ends of self-determination, community control, and cultural autonomy (Pedroni, 2006; Scott, 2013b, Todd-Breland, 2018). Despite efforts by Black leaders and educators to utilize charter schools as a mechanism for ends rooted in commitments that depart from pathologizing Black children and families, the long-term political and economic implications of charter growth require exploration. Many Black parents seek to avoid the traps of “pro” or “anti” charter positions and focus on school quality and governance agnosticism. Black parents in search of alternatives to traditional public schools that do not serve their children well pragmatically enroll their children in charters, which in many places are the only alternatives made available to them by local and state policymakers. However, I argue that this middle ground has important implications. This article explored the possibilities and limitations of charter schools to work in service of those ends by situating charter growth in a broader political economic framework.

By drawing parallels to the subprime mortgage crisis, I illuminated how deregulation of the private financial and banking industry coupled with the historical exclusion of Black families from homeownership made Black neighborhoods a lucrative site for subprime mortgage concentration. In short, under the auspices of inclusion in the housing market, Black communities became frontiers for unregulated financial instruments and served as as sites for subprime opportunities and capital accumulation. In education, prior containment in urban cores and subsequent disinvestment established the path where market based education reforms became the answer to low performing public schools in the wake of fiscal crisis caused by the Great Recession. I have also illuminated the limited conceptions of empowerment that the disciplinary state allows for states and districts serving Black students in addition to the casualties of charter growth on Black teachers, mothers, and children. The concepts of rollback and rollout illuminate how the state may shrink its scope to allow more power for market actors in housing and schools, while it increases its power to discipline those abandoned by these shifts.

This analysis provides the basis for the consideration of alternative educational policies that de-center charter schools as the dominant policy option to improve and transform Black education. It is possible to cohere around an educational policy agenda that is rooted in more just political economic arrangements as well as tie educational policies to a broader public policy agenda grounded in racial and economic justice. This article also calls for broadening the scope of the criteria for “what works” by calling into question education policies that work to reinforce existing structures of racial domination, while simultaneously limiting and eclipsing Black political power over public education.

The body of evidence on charter schools has the potential to serve as grounds to reshape the claims that Black parents make on the state such as calling for more equitable charter schools and choice systems by establishing a more robust regulatory framework (Mead & Green, 2012; Orfield & Frankenberg, 2013). Scholars argue that market-based reforms will reproduce inequality without regulations that advance equity such as transportation, parent information, and diversity goals (Orfield & Frankenberg, 2013; Scott & Wells, 2013). I argue that charter school growth without policy regulation for equity aims could result in exacerbation of inequality, amounting to subprime educational policy and opportunity.

It could also inform critical questions about the extent to which the policy mechanism of charter schools is necessary or even the best option if Black community control of schools and school-level autonomy are the desired ends. This framework provides an overview of the how currently existing school choice policies and practices are limited as a viable mechanism to achieve ends rooted in a commitment to transform Black education and increase Black political empowerment. However, the most important dimensions that charter policy affords –school-based site management and increased autonomy – are not inherently yoked to the private management inherent in charter schools. For example, in Memphis, Tennessee, school district turnaround efforts that extended the school autonomy traditionally reserved for charter operators to traditional public schools outperformed state-turnaround efforts that relied on charter schools as the intervention (Zimmer et al., 2017). These findings suggest that school autonomy within a traditional local school district—particularly when the approach includes increased funding for teacher salaries and centralized professional development for teachers and leaders as is the case in Memphis—is a viable pathway to increased academic achievement outcomes without disrupting democratic governance of predominantly Black districts or democratic accountability for public funds. Therefore, there are policy options available to those seeking to improve educational opportunity for Black students that are not tied the private management of public education. Despite claims that #charterswork, an advocacy campaign designed to preclude any legitimate debate on the evidence of how charters are working, I argue that evidence shows alternatives work as well.

Alternative visions for Black education and more just political economic arrangements are possible, and require attention to constructing more just set of federal and regional policies that address poverty and economic redistribution (Anyon, 2005). Situating educational policy in a historical trajectory of the relationship to the political economic changes affords an opportunity to explore the impact of charter expansion from a different perspective than whether individual Black parents and their children love or benefit from their charter school experience. There is much to be learned from charters that are working for students who have historically been underserved by traditional public schools and their voices, lived experiences, and perspectives matter. However, securing educational opportunities on the current terms of charter school expansion may cost much more to Black communities than the dominant or popular analytics in contemporary public discourse allow us to grasp which delimit the possibility of viable alternatives beyond charters that can increase educational opportunity and school quality for Black children.