Neoliberal Progressivism: Charter Schools as Claims to Urban Space,Asian American Self-Determination,and Multiracial Solidarity

Do the Progressive Ends of a Charter School Justify Its Neoliberal Means?

Scholars, like journalists, tend to have a “bad news bias.” While providing incisive critiques and important in-depth analyses of the problems, we have tended to under-analyze how people are creating change, often through contradictory means, to address those problems. Educational scholarship abounds with critiques of how progressive projects are coopted by the neoliberalization of education. Here, I use progressive to signal a set of political ideologies that critique capitalism, are concerned about the widening of inequalities and the rights of marginalized groups, promote multiracial democracy, and advocate for collective social change. I define neoliberalism as the fetishization of free-market capitalism, deregulatory policies, and the retrenchment of state services that have often led to increased inequality and a diminished quality of life for poor and working-class people. In education, the rise of school choice (instantiated through policies like vouchers and charter schools) is often cited and critiqued as an example of how neoliberalism has moved from the economic sphere to the sphere of education. Given how progressive politics are concerned about growing inequality, and that neoliberal policies have widened these inequalities, this set of literature importantly demonstrates how well-intentioned progressive projects can often lead to the unintended effect of promoting neoliberal market logics. I, myself, have contributed to that set of literature.

While that corpus of scholarship undoubtedly describes much of what is happening in education today, it is incomplete in that it underthematizes the creative, if fraught, neoliberal strategies that organizers and activists employ to advance progressive goals. In this article, I offer an in-depth case study of how community organizers in Philadelphia’s Chinatown used a neoliberal technique of government—that is, the establishment of a charter school—to achieve the progressive aims of Asian American self-determination, the right to the city, and convivial forms of interracial sociality—values that anchored the founding and mission of the Folk Arts and Cultural Treasures Charter School (FACTS). By tracing this founding to the decades-long history of community activists’ fight against urban development in Philadelphia’s Chinatown, this article seeks to create a discursive space for exploring the question: what progressive outcomes are possible when using a neoliberal technique of government to establish a charter school?

In the next section, I provide a history of how progressives and black freedom fighters deployed “school choice.” I do this to situate FACTS’ mission within this longer history of freedom struggles and to recuperate the possibility that strategies we now almost-exclusively associate with conservative impulses (i.e., “school choice”) can be repurposed to effect the progressive change we hope for. The bulk of this article details the history of community organizing in Philadelphia’s Chinatown to establish the context for FACTS’ founding, its values, and the progressive aims it hoped to achieve through the school. I end with a discussion about the contradictions of movement-building work and frame the establishment of a progressive charter school as “winning a loss,” as Ruth Wilson Gilmore puts it. A note about terms: progressive and the black freedom struggle are nowhere near synonymous, and in fact, black liberation has often been sacrificed at the altar of progressivism. However, for the purposes of this article, many of the goals that FACTS hoped to achieve are similar enough to the way in which black freedom fighters imagined what education could be, and similar enough to some of the goals of progressivism, that these will at times be used interchangeably.

Conservative and Progressive Notions of “School Choice”

Today, it is common to associate school choice with conservative neoliberal projects. “School choice,” in this sense, is viewed as the primary right of the individual to choose the best schooling option, often as a means of furthering social mobility. The alignment between this notion of school choice and neoliberalism is clear: the deregulation of schools comes from the free-market belief that greater competition provides expanded and better choices for parent-consumers. As the logic goes, deregulation breaks up the state’s monopoly on public education and allows individuals to more fully exercise their right to choose.

A number of scholars have observed how neoliberal logics have become so ubiquitous in education that it has diverted once-progressive ideas toward different purposes. Johanna Brenner and Nancy Fraser use the term progressive neoliberalism to refer to the cooptation of progressive values toward neoliberal ends. There are a number of examples of progressive neoliberalism in the charter school movement. ¹ While conservative advocates of charter schools often claim that they promote democracy, these understandings of “democracy” are based on neoliberal ideologies that promote individual liberties, such as the “freedom to choose,” rather than notions of democracy that are based on equity and justice. ² Using the language of “advancing equity and opportunity for communities long harmed by a state monopoly on public education,” conscious capitalists and venture philanthropists have invested private money toward the creation of charter schools. ³ Moreover, progressive charter schools have succumbed to an increased focus on testing, competition, and a managerial approach toward governance, at the expense of authentic engagement and more inclusive enrollment policies. ⁴ The language of equity is put in the service of neoliberal reforms that displaced communities of color and further stratified educational opportunities. ⁵ As Janelle Scott has persuasively argued,

‘‘Simple rendering of choice as the fulfillment of the otherwise unfinished business of the Civil Rights Movement does violence to the incredibly complex goals and inestimable sacrifices of those who put their lives on the line to fight for a just society.’’ ⁶

Despite popular (conservative) renderings of choice in individualistic terms, “choice,” as it turns out, has a progressive history—one built on critiques about the inadequacy of the public schools (including the psychological harm done to children of color), a desire to educate children in culturally relevant ways and to raise their critical consciousness of the injustices in society. James Forman, Jr. documented the lesser known 1960s history of how progressives and black freedom fighters imagined education as a vehicle for furthering their aims, particularly through the Mississippi freedom schools, the free schools movement, and progressive voucher plans. Excavating this history can fine-tune our thinking about potential strategies that can be used today.

The Mississippi freedom schools of 1964 were an alternative summer school system organized by major civil rights leaders from Student Non-Violence Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Congress of Racial Equality. Through modeling alternative educational approaches, it directly challenged the way the Mississippi public schools educated black students. Freedom schools aimed “(1) to raise academic achievement for black children, (2) to dramatize the inadequacy of the existing public schools, and (3) to develop racial pride by teaching subjects that organizers believed the traditional curriculum ignored.” ⁷ Fannie Lou Hamer, among other civil rights organizers, took issue with the public school establishment for maintaining black subordination through educational approaches that were didactic and intellectually stunting. ⁸ They acknowledged that critique was not enough. Charlie Cobb, one of the SNCC organizers, felt that SNCC had to create “our own institutions to replace the old, unjust, decadent ones which make up the existing power structure.” ⁹

Taking inspiration from the Mississippi freedom schools, free schools of the late 1960s and early 1970s, particularly those geared toward black students, sought to create institutions that instantiated a vision for education and liberation. Like the critiques formulated by the freedom schools, free schools were independent and established outside the public school system to demonstrate the inadequacy and violence of an established order that refused to reform. Free schools critiqued the lack of humanity in large bureaucratic structures and emphasized small caring communities. Elizabeth Todd-Breland showed that for black students who attended an African-centric independent educational institution in Chicago, being politically educated—that is, learning “to change the cultural consciousness of Black people as a means of transforming social, political, and economic conditions within their own communities” ¹⁰ —was a central piece of their education. “Free schools, in many respects, resemble some of today’s African-centric charter schools.” ¹¹

Also in the late 1960s, a few leading progressives in education “endorsed vouchers . . . for many of the same reasons that had led others to advocate for freedom schools, [and] free schools . . . Principal among them was anger at how inner-city schools had failed black children.” ¹² Progressive voucher proposals were notably different from the conservative plans we know today. Acknowledging that the private market often disadvantaged poor people, these proposals called for a progressive funding approach, with poorer children receiving more valuable vouchers. Furthermore, progressive school vouchers were proposed as one part of a larger “Poor Children’s Bill of Rights” that included guaranteed income, as well as healthcare and welfare benefits. ¹³

More contemporary examples have shown how charter schools gained the backing of unlikely groups. ¹⁴ “Different iterations of charter school reform have had support from some teachers unions, community-based organizations, and advocates of ethnocentric education, even as more conservative and neoliberal adherents also backed the adoption of charter school legislation.” ¹⁵ In Hawai‘i, establishing a culture-based charter school was seen as a road that led to Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination, despite recognition that the charter school movement and the movement for Hawaiian independence were tense bedfellows. Some scholars who documented the history of progressive notions of school choice were driven to consider how the implementation of school choice was what mattered, and how implementation could advance progressive goals—the same motives that animate this article. While we have developed important understandings of how progressive values are repurposed toward strengthening neoliberal projects in education, we have more to do in thinking seriously about the possibilities of using neoliberal tools as a way of advancing progressive aims including claims to urban space for communities of color, the right to self-determination, and multiracial solidarity—values reflected in FACTS’ founding.

FACTS’ Founding

In 1997, Pennsylvania enacted a charter school law that opened the doorway for FACTS’ founding. When charter schools first gained traction in the late 1980s, it was Albert Shanker, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, who provided momentum for the idea. He envisioned that this reform model would free teachers from bureaucratic constraints, empower them to experiment, and encourage educational innovation. He imagined that these teacher-led reforms would help “children of different racial, ethnic, economic, and religious backgrounds come together to learn from one another.” ¹⁶ The publicly funded aspect of charter schools, along with the autonomy to design the school in ways that promoted progressive values, made it an attractive vehicle for FACTS’ founders.

Established in 2005, FACTS has a founding history that was intimately connected to the Philadelphia Chinatown community’s exercise of Asian American self-determination, forged through their ongoing struggles against top-down, large-scale urban development projects. In an interview conducted in 2010, one of the school’s founders, Debbie Wei, explained how a publicly funded school serves as a community anchor and a reclamation of Chinatown space:

As long as there aren’t these big institutional anchors, it’s easy for the community to be decimated. It’s easy for people to come in and put these big projects here because they think people don’t actually live here. There are certain things that mark a community, and a school is a big one. And as long as there isn’t a public school in your community, it’s just a lot easier to say, You’re not really a community.” ¹⁷

She continued to explain how “all these things were churning in our minds as critical to claim the space. We want to build things for the community in these spaces.” Building something “for the community” meant building a school, which served as a community anchor.

Not only was the establishment of a school an intentional part of their community organizing strategy but having a publicly funded school was also significant. In a 2002 film, Wei reflected on the destruction of Chinatown because of large-scale urban development projects and noted, “The thing that I think is really painful about all this development is that it was all government money used to displace Chinese residents.” ¹⁸ So it stood to reason that if taxpayer dollars were used to dispossess residents, then it should be taxpayer dollars that were used to re-establish the community. FACTS’ founding as a charter school is situated within a longer history of freedom fighters who used public, private, and hybrid means to advance progressive aims.

It’s founding as a charter school also provided the founders a measure of autonomy to design the school in a way that catered to a particular set of values and a particular student body. Or in the parlance of proponents of the marketization of education, it allowed the school to develop a “unique brand” that catered to a “market niche.” Though market logics governed the establishment of charter schools, FACTS’ example shows that it was a Trojan horse that trafficked in progressive values. Like the Mississippi freedom schools of 1964, FACTS developed racial and ethnic pride in its students, along with a healthy sense of multiracial solidarity. And like the free schools of the late 1960s and early 1970s, it provided a political education that critiqued capitalism and instilled an appreciation for everyday culture, the folk arts, and the value of collective social change. FACTS’ founding was motivated by frustration toward Philly public schools and their inadequacy in educating Asian American students.

In considering the possibility of using charter schools—a writ large example of the neoliberalization of education—it is useful to distinguish between neoliberalism as an “art of government” and neoliberalism as a class-based ideological project. ¹⁹ Although progressive politics would eschew the ideological project of neoliberalism—one that fetishizes free-market capitalism, deregulatory policies, and the retrenchment of state services that have led to increased inequality and diminished quality of life for poor and working-class people—it can potentially draw from neoliberal techniques of government to achieve progressive aims. James Ferguson gives the example of programs in southern Africa that provide direct cash payment to poor people. While these programs activate neoliberal techniques of government that valorize market efficiency, individual choice, entrepreneurship, and skepticism toward the state, “the politics are avowedly (and, I think, on balance, genuinely) ‘pro-poor.’” ²⁰ These progressive initiatives “involve not just opposing ‘the neoliberal project,’ but appropriating key elements of neoliberal reasoning for different ends.” ²¹ Just as Ferguson used this cash payment program to think through the potentialities of employing neoliberal techniques of government, I use the history of Chinatown and the founding of FACTS to think through the possibilities of retooling market-based education reforms, like charter schools, to advance progressive aims.

American Cities, Capitalism, and Highways

After World War II, Philadelphia garnered the reputation of a blighted city in decline. As the middle class moved out to the suburbs, the city and its businesses suffered. It was remarked that the heyday of city living seemed to be over. ²² Heralding a new redevelopment plan for Center City, Edmund Bacon, an urban architect and planner who served as the executive director of the Philadelphia Planning Commission from 1949 to 1970, sought to carry out his master vision for the city. These large-scale transformations of the city included the development of Penn Center, Market East, Independence Mall, Penn’s Landing, and Society Hill. ²³

The enormous scale of these projects, and its effects on the people it displaced, cannot be understated. A 1964 Time cover story featured Bacon and his urban renewal projects. The author of the article likened the process to “emergency surgery,” because “considerable pain is involved, and sometimes shock,” and the “inevitable destruction of healthy tissue.” ²⁴ Bacon’s plan drastically reconfigured the infrastructure of the city, earning him the moniker, the “Father of Modern Philadelphia.” Referring to Bacon’s redevelopment of Center City, Kathryn Wilson, historian of Philadelphia’s Chinatown, noted the following: “At heart, this plan, like many of the period’s urban-renewal schemes, ‘sought to replace social and geographic history of the city with a mythical future’ that was scientific, corporate, and efficient.” ²⁵

The scale of urban change that occurred during the postwar period was not unique to Philadelphia. Cities and metropolitan areas across the United States were drastically transformed during this time. Robert Moses built a system of highways in New York that entailed the “total engineering of . . . the whole metropolitan region.” ²⁶ Edward Logue, their Boston counterpart, also favored major public projects, building and rebuilding sites that included Faneuil Hall-Quincy Market, Government Center, and Scollay Square. ²⁷ David Harvey has referred to these processes of urban restructuring as creative destruction—processes by which the destruction of old buildings, streets, and infrastructures make way for the new; “[v]iolence is required to build the new urban world on the wreckage of the old.” ²⁸

The massive scale of urban restructuring in the 1940s succeeded in propping up a capitalist system that was weakened during the Great Depression era of the 1930s when high rates of unemployment created social discontent, and surplus products went unabsorbed. ²⁹ Just as World War II provided a boost to capitalism by absorbing capital surplus as a result of military production, the grand plans to transform cities across the nation continued to power capitalism. While creative destruction refers to physical transformations, it is just as apt to speak of the creative destruction of former ways of life and political commitments, particularly notions of the collective good.

Suburbanization not only transformed physical infrastructures but also created new ideas of the “good life.” ³⁰ The “good life” now consisted of home ownership, refrigerators, air conditioners, two cars in the driveway, the unparalleled consumption of oil and other natural resources, and periodic shopping excursions to the city to acquire the best new products. Along with these changes, politics shifted to conservative republicanism as the defense of individual property and goods overshadowed values of community, collective action, and the common good. ³¹ Saddled down with debt to satiate consumerist appetites, Harvey has reasoned that workers were less likely to go on strike for fear of loss of pay and their jobs. ³²

Cities were recreated as epicenters of tourism, fashion, food, and a consumerist lifestyle. Bacon and other city planners imagined that middle-class suburbanites would be the main drivers of a thriving urban economy. ³³ They would come into the city, indulge in these delights, and retreat to the safety and greenery of suburban living. The main urban planning obstacle was to find a relatively quick and easy way for suburbanites to enter the city, spend money, and leave. ³⁴ Construction of an integrated highway system was proposed as the solution to this problem. Bacon’s master plan for Philadelphia relied on car accessibility to Center City by way of highways. Since the mass production of cars in the 1920s, automobiles became a part of everyday life for the middle class. Infusing capital into the city center required accommodating this new car-based lifestyle.

In 1945 the Philadelphia City Planning Commission first presented the idea of the Vine Street Expressway (I-676) that would run along Vine Street from the western end of the city near the Philadelphia Museum of Art, to the east side of the city, cutting through the northern boundaries of Chinatown. ³⁵ Estimated to cost $26 million at the time, it was intended to be the northern part of a planned highway loop that connected the Schuylkill Expressway (I-76) to the west, the Delaware Expressway (I-95) to the east, and the proposed Cobbs Creek Expressway (I-695) to the south, running across the city along South Street. ³⁶ Although the Center City highway loop was an integral piece of Philadelphia’s postwar development plan to draw people back into the city, the funding to complete these projects were lacking and did not materialize until more than a decade after it was initially proposed. ³⁷

In 1957 the Vine Street Expressway was again proposed but this time as part of the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956. ³⁸ The word “defense” appears in the title of the act because some of the money came from defense funding and because having an interstate highway system was rationalized as a defense strategy that allowed military forces to quickly mobilize in case of an attack. ³⁹ When President Eisenhower signed the bill into law, federal funding to the tune of $25 billion were authorized for the construction of 41,000 miles of the interstate highway system that would eventually stretch across the forty-eight contiguous states. ⁴⁰ Ninety percent of the cost of constructing the Vine Street Expressway were funded by federal money, and the rest were apportioned between state and municipalities. ⁴¹ With the infusion of federal money, construction of the Vine Street Expressway began in earnest.

Capitalism has a “perpetual need to find profitable terrains for capital-surplus production and absorption,” and the construction of this integrated highway loop, among other highways built across the country, contributed to temporarily calming the crisis of capitalism. ⁴² The immense infusion of federal money for the development of interstate highways absorbed capital surplus, which in the process stabilized employment, and amassed significant wealth for capitalists. Race and class conflict is made manifest in urban restructuring when considering whose interests are prioritized in these schemes. In Bacon’s urban development plans, the interests of the predominantly white middle class were privileged over poor and working-class communities of color. Suburban middle-class consumers were imagined to be the main beneficiaries of the construction of the Center City highway loop. The urban and metropolitan landscape was transformed to meet the needs of this group. Buildings were torn down and rebuilt at the expense of those remaining in the city—that is, those who were predominantly people of color and predominantly poor or working class.

Displacing Residents and the Save Chinatown Movement

These urban renewal plans touched off a series of protests from members of the Chinatown community who were at risk of being displaced in the process of making a “modern Philadelphia.” By the time the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was finally repealed in 1943, Philadelphia’s Chinatown grew and transitioned from a bachelor society to a more “family-oriented community as enlisted Chinese servicemen brought ‘war brides’ to America.” ⁴³ During this time, various social, cultural, and religious organizations were established to meet the community’s growing needs including the Holy Redeemer Chinese Catholic Church and School (HR; 1941), Chinese Christian Church and Center (1941), Chinese Gospel Church (1952), the Chinese Benevolent Association (CBA; 1951), and the YMCA also known as the Chinese Cultural and Community Center (1955). ⁴⁴

But as the Chinatown population grew, its geographic boundaries were hemmed in, significantly hindering its growth. In the earliest threat to Chinatown’s existence, the Independence Mall, which began development in 1963, displaced 25 percent of Chinatown’s homes and businesses that were located east of Ninth Street. ⁴⁵ Cecilia Moy Yep, a young Chinese American widow with three children at the time, was right in the crossfire of construction. Between 1960 and 1966, her block was systematically cleared out and acquired by the city without notice of residents’ rights or what the larger plans were. ⁴⁶ Yep explained:

[It was] the early 1960s [when] a lot of the properties on the east side of Ninth Street were taken, commercial, residentials. People were relocated without knowing what their rights were. We were just told the city was just taking their property, knocking them down, and we all had to move. We had no relocation rights. . . . [T]hey just said, “You have to move, and this is what we’re giving you for your property. If you don’t like it, take us to court.” ⁴⁷

Ignoring the city’s demand to vacate, Yep stayed put. “I refused to move, because basically there was no place to move to. There was no decent affordable housing in Chinatown. Most of the houses were over a hundred years old.” ⁴⁸ Yep recalled the systematic dispossession of neighbors on Ninth Street. “I was the only house standing on the whole block from Race to Filbert. From Ninth to Eighth. My electric bill was unbelievable—300 something every month. My gas bill, to try to heat that place for the kids.” ⁴⁹ Proudly, she recalled how her situation was referred to as the “‘Chinatown Alamo’ because it was the only house standing on the whole block. And I refused to move out of it.” ⁵⁰

But it wasn’t until news of the imminent destruction of HR to make way for the Vine Street Expressway that Chinatown galvanized. HR served as one of Chinatown’s only recreational spaces, hosting basketball games, community meetings, weddings, and funerals, and “became the icon of the Chinatown struggle.” ⁵¹ In a photo, dated April 8, 1966, children are seen marching outside of HR, carrying signs that read, “Save Holy Redeemer”; “Where will I go to School?”; and “What about me?”

This was Chinatown’s foray into community organizing, and there were many lessons to learn. As part of the mobilizing effort, the Committee for the Preservation and Advancement of the Chinatown Community was formed as an arm of the CBA. CBA was the “traditional governing body” of Chinatown and mainly consisted of first-generation Chinese immigrants. ⁵² In 1969, the committee broke away from CBA, was incorporated as a non-profit organization, and became the Philadelphia Chinatown Development Corporation (PCDC). Cecilia Moy Yep was instrumental to the founding of PCDC, and in 1976 she became its executive director. PCDC’s first task was to gain approval from the older generation, represented by CBA, to serve as the recognized voice of Chinatown in matters of urban development. Though some conflict emerged over whether such an “Americanized” organization should represent Chinatown, PCDC became the public face of Chinatown because of the English fluency and higher formal education of its leadership and members. ⁵³ As the default leader of the Save Chinatown Movement, PCDC built a coalition of people and organizations that stretched across barriers of language, religion, politics, and generation.

Though this coalition organized around the struggle for urban space, their claims were connected more broadly to issues of cultural citizenship, and to self-determination. The Save Chinatown Movement was part of a “larger movement that defined Chinatown’s claims to land and resources in the context of citizenship, history, and cultural worth.” ⁵⁴ Saving Chinatown was not merely about preserving brick-and-mortar institutions, or having the “individual liberty to access urban resources,” but more centrally about the “right to change ourselves by changing the city.” ⁵⁵

This message was apparent in artifacts from 1973—a year that Mary Yee, a central figure in the movement, referred to as “momentous.” ⁵⁶ In a bilingual English and Chinese flyer that advertised an Easter rally and town hall meeting to protest construction of the Vine Street Expressway, a sentence on the one pager read: “As taxpayers, the community has the right and the responsibility to determine its future.” Touching upon a similar theme that highlighted the rights of tax-paying citizens, another protest sign in a photo read: “Your Taxe$ at Work.” In this surreal photo, dated August 3, 1973, eighteen people sit atop a heap of rubble as the imposing jaws of an excavator hover ominously over them, threatening to swallow up the protestors in one mouthful.

The emphasis on being taxpayers, which appears in these protest paraphernalia, was meant to both encourage Chinatown community members to claim the rights of citizens in a democratic nation and point out the discrepancy between the ideals of democracy and its reality, especially for people of color. The decision to construct the Vine Street Expressway and the proposal to bulldoze HR were depicted by protest leaders as stomping on Chinatown’s “right and responsibility to determine its future” (Easter rally advertisement). In an archival video from the 1973 Easter rally, banners and yellow balloons billow in the wind as a young woman is seen standing on a stage, delivering an impassioned speech. In an excerpt from the speech, she argues the following:

Now saving Chinatown is not just an issue of preserving a number of houses and businesses that just happen to be Chinese. More significantly, the movement is based on the issue of self-determination—that is, the right of the Chinese community to take part in making decisions that affect it. We see this as a democratic right long recognized in principle in the tradition of American government. However, the course of events in the last six years has demonstrated to us that rather than being a right duly granted to us, it is a right that we must struggle to exercise. ⁵⁷

She tied the instrumental goal of “preserving a number of houses and businesses” with the broader goal of self-determination—“that is, the right of the Chinese community to take part in decisions that affect it.” By stating that these homes and businesses were not incidentally Chinese, or in her words, they don’t just “happen to be Chinese,” she maintained that the movement was about claiming rights for people of color in the United States. For Chinese Americans, the course of events related to the Vine Street Expressway shows how this was not a “right duly granted to us, it is a right that we must struggle to exercise.”

Factions within the Save Chinatown Coalition

Though the Save Chinatown coalition spoke in one voice concerning community members’ right to self-determination, there were different ideas of what form self-determination should take. The two main factions within the coalition were PCDC and Yellow Seeds. PCDC was the more pacifistic and accommodationist group in the coalition. While maintaining the right to difference, PCDC’s integrationist approach meant that it was in support of Bacon’s modernist notions of “progress” that centered on commercial development. In response to charges that leveraged stereotypical understandings of Chinese culture as traditional, and therefore anti-modern, PCDC asserted the following: “Recent events have led people to believe that the Chinese community is against progress—against the City’s attempt to promote commerce and revitalize the inner core. That is untrue” (statement of the Chinatown community, October 1973). By resolutely asserting that it was not against “progress” or the “revitaliz[ation] of the inner core,” PCDC was arguing for a seat at the table. In other words, it was advocating for Chinatown community members’ democratic right to representation in a political economic system that they wanted to leave largely intact. Toward that end, PCDC positioned Chinatown as vital to Philadelphia’s social and economic development and made a “worthy contribution to [the city’s] commercial life” (statement of the Chinatown community, October 1973).

In contrast, the Yellow Seeds—the more radical and self-proclaimed militant group in the coalition—struck a less conciliatory tone. Established in 1971, Yellow Seeds was an important forerunner to progressive Asian American activism in Philadelphia and served as a progenitor to Asian Americans United (AAU), one of the founding organizations of FACTS. Knowing the role that Yellow Seeds played in the Save Chinatown movement provides an understanding of FACTS’ vision for self-determination and claims to urban space.

Yellow Seeds’ provocative protest material, produced for the Save Chinatown movement, is indexical of its more radical approach. In an artifact from 1973, a map depicts urban development plans as a “noose around Chinatown,” with the following message at the top: “Save Chinatown!! Stop the Cultural Genocide!!” ⁵⁸ Rather than trying to gain representation in the political process, this message conveyed that urban development plans were killing off the social and cultural life of this community. The visual representation, combined with text, provided a graphically effective means of rallying community members because it conveyed the violence and creative destruction wrought to Chinatown and the Chinese community in Greater Philadelphia.

The Yellow Seeds took an anti-capitalist stance decrying the very premise of revitalizing the inner core by making it a center for commerce and big business:

These projects are all geared to bring in more people from the suburbs to buy merchandise from the big department stores like Gimbels. Market St. East is just a new huge complex of business to which the Expressway and the Commuter Rail Tunnel will funnel in more and more shoppers so that big business can make more and more profits. We can see from this that the Government is a tool of the monopoly capitalists to protect them and their profits . . . In the long run Chinatown will gain nothing unless the people stand up and fight for their democratic rights. The capitalistic system under which we all live understands only one word—profits—all at the expense of the working class who creates and builds everything. We cannot rely on misleaders like PCDC, CBA, or T.T. Chang to lead us in these struggles. Their blind faith in the government and the legal system will only lead our struggles down a dead end. Our true rights can only be won through a change in our system brought about by the militant action of the working class. (Yellow Seeds broadside flyer)

Though agreeing on the point that Chinatown community members needed to exercise their democratic rights to participate in determining its own future, Yellow Seeds were clearly at odds with PCDC’s position that tended to toe the political line. It opposed big businesses and distrusted community leaders, who they believed would lead them “down a dead end.”

Yellow Seeds also advocated for solidarity among the working class and among other people of color. One of its broadsides read: “Same Struggle, Same Fight,” making a connection between the Save Chinatown movement and the “social justice struggles of African Americans, Latinos, and other ‘minority and working people.’” Yellow Seeds’ mission statement said that it sought to “participate in all the struggles for the promised—yet denied—democratic rights of Asian people in this country.” Yet they understood that this required “unit[ing] with all oppressed people . . . [and] work[ing] together with other Third World organizations and progressive white friends on various projects” (Yellow Seeds, undated). Yellow Seeds’ anti-capitalist, pro-working class, and multiracial solidarity stance informed its vision for Chinatown and FACTS’ founding.

Further Incursions on Chinatown Space

Since the Save Chinatown movement of the 1970s, the community continued to work to define itself against efforts to be defined by urban developers. By the 1980s the proverbial noose around Chinatown was once again being tightened. Despite Chinatown’s population doubling in the 1980s, there was less and less housing available to Chinatown residents. In 1983 a dispute broke out between Chinatown and its neighbor to the east—the Pennsylvania College of Podiatric Medicine—which further exacerbated housing instability. ⁵⁹

At issue were a few parcels of land on the east side of Ninth Street between Race and Cherry that both parties wanted to purchase from the Redevelopment Authority. The College of Podiatric Medicine intended to use the land to build retail stores, parking, and student housing to expand its growing foot health center. Depicting this feud was a graffiti message that appeared on the wall of a row house across the street from the parcels of land under dispute. Scrawled in ersatz “Chinese”-style font was a defiant declaration of the community’s ethnicized claim to urban space: “This is, was, will be Chinatown.” Just below that message read, “Get off our back,” along with an image of a large foot trampling on a person’s back. Clearly, the artist had a knack for visual communication: the disproportionately large foot symbolized the College of Podiatric Medicine, and the relatively small person being trampled underfoot represented the beleaguered Chinatown.

This particular block held great symbolic value for Chinatown, for it was not the first time that it was the subject of conflict. The very parcels of land under dispute were the site of Cecilia Yep’s “Chinatown Alamo” of the 1960s, which eventually, in the 1970s, made way for the Commuter Rail Tunnel that connected Suburban Station and what we now know as Market East Station. Succinctly summing up the predicament of Chinatown, Yep stated, “We’re being hemmed in.” ⁶⁰ Gaining these parcels of land for Chinatown was seen as a way to reclaim the eastern boundaries of the community.

During the same year, two proposals to build the Pennsylvania Convention Center were introduced. Both plans envisioned that the convention center would be a hulking behemoth of steel and concrete. An architect for one of the competing plans characterized it this way: “Did you ever have something caught in your throat, so you can’t quite swallow? That’s what this convention center is like. It feels a little too big. It’s very hard putting it into the city.” ⁶¹ The convention center was estimated to take up two city blocks, or the equivalent of six football fields. One news reporter referred to it as a “monster” but qualified that it was a “benevolent one” that would result in the creation of 9,000 permanent jobs. ⁶² He further noted, “Even a friendly monster makes a big impact, however, and wherever the convention center goes will never be the same.” ⁶³ This turned out to be a prescient statement.

The construction of the convention center became the next major incursion that Chinatown had to contend with. In August 1983, a two-hour long meeting took place over proposed plans for the Pennsylvania Convention Center. ⁶⁴ A decade had passed since the Save Chinatown movement was forged to prevent the destruction of Holy Redeemer. Though the fate of HR still hung in the balance, Chinatown was gearing up for another fight. The meeting was attended by about seventy-five community residents and two plans were presented: the Reading Plan and the Franklin Town Project.

Debbie Wei, nineteen years old, sat quietly at the back of the room, listening intently to the two proposals. ⁶⁵ At the time, little did Wei know that she would eventually become one of the founders of AAU and FACTS, devoting much of her life to fighting against top-down urban development projects in Chinatown. Wei was told that the Reading Plan would displace twenty-three families, including her, her four siblings, their parents, grandparents, and an uncle who lived in a five-bedroom apartment on Eleventh Street. ⁶⁶ The Franklin Town Project would spare Chinatown of the disruption that the convention center would wreak, including exacerbating traffic congestion, the rising cost of real estate, and years of dirt and demolition. ⁶⁷

Leaders and community members of Chinatown sounded off. “As residents, we’re going to hate it,” said Cecilia Yep, executive director of PCDC. ⁶⁸ While those who pushed for the Reading Plan argued that it would increase home values in Chinatown, Yep responded with the following: “If we’re a community of moderate-income people, we have to receive protection against real estate values. I hope we won’t be priced out of our homes and businesses.” ⁶⁹ Some, however, saw the convention center as a positive opportunity and believed the benefits would outweigh the costs. Steve Parks of the Reading Company claimed that because the convention hall would include retail stores at the street level, it would be a “commercial extension of Chinatown.” ⁷⁰ A few Chinatown businesses were in favor of the Reading Plan because it would “help the whole community grow.” ⁷¹

Despite community opposition to the Reading Plan, it was unanimously approved by the city Planning Commission in late October of 1983, just two months after the community learned of the proposals. ⁷² Two members of PCDC castigated the Planning Commission for approving the plan without any meaningful community input from Chinatown. ⁷³ The Reading Plan had always been favored out of the two proposals because it integrated the convention center with the Reading Terminal Market, the Gallery Mall, and the city’s core retail area. Placing the convention center in the heart of Market East built on twenty years of city planning efforts that began since the days of Edmund Bacon, and more than $600 million in public and private money that was invested into further developing Market East. ⁷⁴ These factors tilted the scales toward the Reading Plan and sealed the fate of Chinatown. Guo, the Chinatown businessman who was intimately involved in the land dispute with the College of Podiatric Medicine, offered a sober suggestion: “We have no choice . . . The only way to go is north.” ⁷⁵

Going North to Grow Chinatown

As a result of the Save Chinatown movement, activists pushed for and were granted a professional neighborhood plan on the city’s dime. The 1975 Gluck and Chadbourne Comprehensive Plan proposed that Chinatown’s boundaries extend south to Arch Street and north to Callowhill Street for the construction of new affordable housing and community centers. ⁷⁶ Though the notion of “going north” germinated from this neighborhood plan, it was not until the late 1990s that pieces of the plan came to fruition. Between 1999 and 2003, PCDC built sixty-one mixed-income housing units in Chinatown North, or what others have referred to as Callowhill—a neighborhood known for its manufacturing and old factory buildings built in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. ⁷⁷

Just as Chinatown began to lay down roots on the north side of Vine Street, in 2000 the Street administration proposed to build the new Phillies baseball stadium at Twelfth and Vine. ⁷⁸ This was one idea among several being floated, but it was the front-runner site as far as Center City locations were considered. Mayor Street, attempting to follow in the footsteps of several other cities with downtown ballparks, rationalized that building a stadium in the downtown corridor would generate additional revenue for the city. It would take advantage of “impulse decisions” of office workers to attend games at the last minute and fans that would dine and shop in the area. ⁷⁹

Chinatown was in uproar. An umbrella group of different organizations rallied together. Among these organizations, AAU, established in 1985 as a successor to Yellow Seeds, stood out for its leadership. Organizers quickly mobilized over 1,500 people to protest these plans. ⁸⁰ Donning T-shirts and holding signs that declared in red ink “No Stadium for Chinatown,” they took to the streets, shutting down major arteries in Center City. ⁸¹ Other catchy baseball puns included signs that read: “Pitch it Somewhere Else,” and “Don’t Foul Up Our Neighborhood.” ⁸²

Debbie Wei, who was nineteen years old when she fought against the Pennsylvania Convention Center, was now a board member of AAU, and she echoed the claims of cultural genocide expressed decades earlier in the Save Chinatown movement. “Cultural genocide is wrong,” she said, “and using taxpayer money to commit cultural genocide is wrong.” ⁸³ She expounded on her thoughts in a documentary that she co-produced a few years later. Reflecting on the stadium protests, she said:

The thing that I think is really painful about all this development is that it was all government money used to displace Chinese residents and a community that was already small and inhibited from growth at a time when there’s so much pressure to find homes for families that needed them. So when the city announced plans to put a stadium in Chinatown, no one could believe it. I mean, people were just outraged. ⁸⁴

Touching on a personal note, Lai Har Cheung, a youth organizer from AAU, noted the impact that a baseball stadium would have on her own family life:

I’m living in South Philadelphia. My grandmother lives in Chinatown. The reason why my family moved is because of housing issues. Otherwise, I think we would have stayed together. And now they want to have another thing that keeps families away, to spread out people, to break apart families. ⁸⁵

Both Wei and Cheung spoke specifically about the negative consequences of the downtown ballpark, while also indexing a longer history of displacement.

On April 26, 2000, a public meeting was convened to discuss the different possibilities for the ballpark. ⁸⁶ Several Center City businessmen commanded airtime to advocate for a downtown ballpark. First, it was Bruce Crawley, chairman of the Convention and Visitors Bureau and noted friend of the mayor. ⁸⁷ Next up, Paul Levy from the Center City District urged for a downtown stadium citing the economic boom it would create for the city. ⁸⁸ By the time Tom Muldoon, director of the Visitor’s Bureau, took control of the microphone, community members who had waited in line for over an hour to speak simply had enough. ⁸⁹ Someone from the upstairs gallery shouted, “You have got to be kidding!” ⁹⁰ Another added, “They already spoke.” ⁹¹ Chants of “No stadium in Chinatown!” quickly drowned out Muldoon’s remarks. ⁹² Residents from various communities in which the ballpark was being proposed also came out to register their discontent. Cheung, AAU’s youth organizer, defiantly challenged public officials, saying, “If you want to build something, build a public school . . . but don’t you dare build a baseball stadium.” ⁹³ In the end, Citizens Park, home of the Phillies, was built in the South Philadelphia Sports Complex because of the high costs associated with building downtown, and because of community opposition.

Though the ballpark battle was won, Cheung’s message—“if you want to build something, build a public school”—remained in the hearts and minds of community members. It was a message that reverberated through the decades since the days of the Save Chinatown movement. Even in the 1973 statement of the Chinatown community, PCDC noted the need for more community facilities, and that “[p]resently there is no public elementary school closer than the McCall School.” For many Chinatown residents, McCall was perceived as primarily serving the needs of Society Hill’s more middle- and professional-class families. At 1.4 miles away, McCall was not only geographically distant as far as neighborhood schools go, but it also felt socially and culturally distant. ⁹⁴

McCall was severely lacking in services for Chinatown’s students. Even when AAU successfully lobbied for bilingual support and bus services for Chinatown’s students, these victories were often short-lived. With teacher- and administrator-turnover, the changes that AAU worked so hard to obtain were quickly erased. In many people’s minds, Chinatown desperately needed a public school to counter claims that it was no more than a commercial and tourism hub, and to provide Chinese immigrant students the educational services they needed. According to community activists, making Chinatown legible to outsiders as a bona fide community entailed establishing a public school.

The Founding of FACTS and Its “Different Vision”

The founding of FACTS was a practice of self-determination by building institutions that the Chinatown community wanted. During a 2010 interview I had with Debbie Wei, who became FACTS’ first principal, she relayed the story of the school’s founding in a manner that pointed to her activist roots. Wei’s oration of the events was rousing and oozed with moral urgency. Appealing to the right of the Chinatown community to state provisions she said, “We really needed a public school. This community is entitled to as much of the commonwealth as anyone else.” Then she explained the strategic logic of founding a school in Chinatown to rebuff top-down urban development efforts.

As long as there aren’t these big institutional anchors, it’s easy for the community to be decimated. It’s easy for people to come in and put these big projects here because they think people don’t actually live here. There are certain things that mark a community, and a school is a big one. And as long as there isn’t a public school in your community, it’s just a lot easier to say, “You’re not really a community.”

Sitting in a cozy corner of a classroom at FACTS, Wei pointed out the symbolic significance of our locale. In a poetic turn of events, the school was located where the Phillies ballpark complex would have been built. Wei explained:

This particular area of Chinatown, where we’re sitting, this building would have been demolished for the baseball stadium. This building is the parking lot outside the third base baseline. When the city said, “Well you’re not going to do anything with that space anyway,” it felt like all these things were churning in our minds as critical to claim the space. We want to build things for the community in these spaces.

The threat of the Phillies stadium prompted AAU members to “claim the space, and to build things for the community in these spaces.”

Within Chinatown’s struggle for self-determination the stakes of the game have always involved more than the individual right to determine one’s own lifestyle within the city or the decision regarding what to erect and what to tear down. Helen Gym, a board member of AAU and founder of FACTS, explained it this way:

Chinatown launched an unprecedented struggle 12 years ago to fight off the stadium and on this place we would build a beautiful school that would honor that struggle by working with many different artists to create young people who would sing and dance and drum their way to a different vision.

AAU’s “different vision” of Chinatown rejected efforts by big box developers, city planners, and even those within the Chinatown community who were either indifferent to or even promoted the idea of Chinatown as a site for play and pastiche.

This “different vision” of Chinatown, and of American schooling, was highly influenced by FACTS’ two institutional partners. AAU was founded with the mission to develop “leadership in Asian American communities to build our neighborhoods and unite against oppression.” ⁹⁵ The Philadelphia Folklore Project (PFP), established in 1987, existed to “build critical folk cultural knowledge, sustain vital and diverse living cultural heritage in communities in our region, and create equitable processes and practices for nurturing local grassroots arts and humanities.” ⁹⁶ FACTS embodied the combined values and expertise of PFP and AAU. It was a vehicle for advancing a vision of Chinatown characterized by face-to-face connections, intergenerational bonds, and the passing on of folk traditions; it advanced a vision that valued the cultural backgrounds of racial and ethnic minority students, while also fostering convivial cross-racial friendships.

This vision worked to directly challenge a dominant narrative—articulated by corporations like the Convention and Visitor’s Bureau—that positioned Chinatown as important primarily because it added to Philadelphia’s faces of diversity, where diversity was commodified. It challenged dominant values of American society based on the primacy of the market, big business, consumerism, and social disconnection. This was conveyed in a children’s book about Chinatown that was published by PFP in 2004. In response to the fact that “Chinatown is in the heart of the city, a place where rich people want to live and big businesses want to move,” the authors asserted that “Chinatown is a community,” and defined it as “the people in that place, and the way they work, play, and live together. It includes people’s memories of the past and their dreams for the future.” ⁹⁷ FACTS was envisioned to be a vehicle for carrying forth this community-based vision of Chinatown.

In addition, AAU and PFP imagined that FACTS would offer a different vision of schooling. In 1985, AAU provided guidance to a group of immigrant and refugee students who, represented by the Education Law Center, brought a suit against the School District of Philadelphia over inadequate services provided to English language learners. ⁹⁸ The lawsuit resulted in a series of “remedial orders and stipulations” to address “the provision of ESL [English as a Second Language] services, bilingual tutoring, translation services, and other supports.” ⁹⁹ In 2004, nearly two decades after the lawsuit was initiated, an independent evaluation of the district found that “some school level programs are clearly floundering and students are not succeeding because the local level of expertise, knowledge of the needs of [the students] and resources are not adequate to the task.” ¹⁰⁰

This lawsuit was cited in FACTS’ charter application as evidence of the poor educational services afforded to immigrant students and to argue for the need of a school like FACTS. It was a counterexample to the schools mentioned in the evaluation of the district. According to its charter application, FACTS “expressly fights against unilineal assimilation by valuing students’ home culture.” ¹⁰¹ This went against the grain of American public schools that tended to devalue minority students’ home languages and cultures in assimilating them.

This “different vision” of schooling not only valued students’ home languages and cultures, but also believed it was possible to create congenial forms of interracial sociality. In another part of the charter application, the founders wrote that although they bring “expertise about the needs of Asian American immigrants in particular, [FACTS] is committed to building a multi-racial school serving the educational needs of other diverse immigrant and non-immigrant communities city-wide.” ¹⁰² In the charter application, the founders explained:

For diverse populations such as the students we anticipate at [FACTS], folk arts serve as vehicles to bridge children to elders, school to community, and school community members to each other . . . Folk arts education will also teach students skills and concepts to explore cultural participation, both in their own lives and in the lives of others. ¹⁰³

The deliberate fostering of solidarity was intended to engender interracial friendships that differed, in quality and substance, from what was happening in other parts of Philadelphia and from images of racial conflict depicted in the media. Teaching children to value their own and others’ culture was not the superficiality of “Multicultural Day”; it was not based on notions of culture and folklore as timeless and unchanging. Folklore was seen as “improvising new ways forward by building on a body of tradition. It is bricolage.” ¹⁰⁴ In short, the founding of FACTS was also a “different vision” of how schools could mobilize culture in ways that were dynamic and non-essentializing.

Contradictions and “Winning a Loss”

The education world has changed since the first charter school law was introduced in 1991. While charter school reforms have undoubtedly exacerbated existing inequities, there is little to indicate that these laws will be abolished any time soon. As James Ferguson has pointed out: “I doubt you can run history backward . . . The world has changed, and simply re-asserting Third World sovereignty will not get us very far in dealing with a fundamentally reconfigured politico-spatial world order.” ¹⁰⁵ Given the reconfigured landscape of education, using the establishment of charter schools as a neoliberal technique of government is a strategy for advancing progressive aims. Janelle Scott offers a note of possibility for forming alliances within a reconfigured educational landscape. She recognized that within the market-based reform network there is

“ideological diversity that holds some promise for connecting the more progressive individuals and organizations with grassroots organizers. What might a retooled approach to advocacy and public education look like for those with such enviable resources and an inclination toward working with organizations that have experience and knowledge about community needs and preferences?” ¹⁰⁶

While trying to establish alliances out of ideological opposites would be a waste of time, as Scott says, “connecting the more progressive individuals and organizations with grassroots organizers” could redirect resources in ways that hold promise.

One of FACTS’ founders, Helen Gym, illustrated how progressives might be able to engage in the contradictions of this work. While she worked tirelessly to build the school, she was also a vocal critic of how charters were being implemented in Pennsylvania. After arguing that the charter school system in Pennsylvania created an untenable situation of under-resourced public schools in Philadelphia, she stated, “As a charter founder myself, I believe there is a discrete and limited role for charters within a vibrant public school system. But maintaining two massive school systems simply isn’t working.” ¹⁰⁷ Gym understood that while it was important to critique the effects of wide-scale charterization, a serious response to the question “what do we want?” required an equally serious exploration of the possibilities of establishing a charter school to further progressive goals.

I return now to the question that animated this article: what progressive outcomes are possible when using a neoliberal technique of government to establish a charter school? The case of FACTS demonstrates that the charter school law helped community activists and organizers achieve a few important goals. First, the school helped the community make an ongoing claim to the right to the city. Within the past year, Philadelphia Chinatown has encountered additional threats of encroachment, this time through the proposal of the 76ers basketball arena. As Debbie Wei stated years ago, establishing a publicly funded school that serves predominately Asian American students gave Chinatown greater legitimacy as a bona fide community. FACTS’ ongoing existence has served as an institutional anchor and bulwark against top-down urban development and helped community members assert the right to Asian American self-determination. Second, through its mission and curricular and co-curricular offerings, FACTS has taught its students about their right to cultural citizenship—the “right to be different . . . without compromising one’s right to belong.” ¹⁰⁸ The school’s emphasis on cultural heritage and pride, and its provision of bilingual services, has nurtured a generation of students who do not see assimilation into white mainstream society as the only pathway to belonging. Third, the school has served as form of prefigurative politics for the kind of futurity and interracial relations it wishes to create more broadly in society. Having folk arts as a cornerstone of the school not only instilled cultural pride in one’s own heritage, but also facilitated students’ deeper understanding of their peers’ cultural backgrounds and histories. Through the values and dispositions of the folk arts—active listening and intercultural connection—multiracial solidarity was fostered.

Through FACTS’ example, we are challenged to bring a creative and improvisational spirit of jerryrigging to our progressive politics, or what Ferguson refers to as bricolage—“a piecing together of something new out of scavenged parts originally intended for some other purpose.” ¹⁰⁹ I re-pose a set of Ferguson’s questions, edited here to reflect the education landscape:

Can we find ways of thinking creatively about the progressive possibilities (and not only the reactionary dangers) of this new terrain of [entrepreneurialism in education]? Can we imagine new “arts of government” that might take advantage of (rather than simply denouncing or resisting) [the blurring of the public-private domains vis-a-vis education]? ¹¹⁰

While I am compelled by these questions and the openings they suggest, I am also skeptical of hitching one’s horse to progressive politics.

Insofar as progressive politics are seen as a utopian horizon, it falls woefully short. Savannah Shange, who studied a progressive school in arguably the most progressive city in the United States, rhetorically asked:

If Robeson is the best-case scenario and it still fails the basic needs of Black youth and educators in southeast San Francisco, what does that reveal about the political imaginaries that shape social reforms aimed at the democratization of social services like education and health care? ¹¹¹

An answer she posits is to “work through and across contradiction” so that “even as we resist the defunding of public institutions at the hands of white nationalist austerity, we can also hold putatively progressive service providers accountable for the violences they perpetuate while trying to keep the doors open.” ¹¹² This entails abandonment of liberal and modernist teleologies that promise a pot of gold at the end of the progressive rainbow. “This shift in emphasis allows us to do the work of extending Black life through any means at hand, including nickel-and-quarter progressive reforms, while inuring ourselves from the late liberal logic of win and loss.” ¹¹³

Outside of education, and outside of the political nomenclature of progressivism, there are helpful examples of people thinking through the questions that Ferguson posed. Deborah Thomas’s ethnographic work among the Rastafari community highlights the contradictions of how they are advancing self-determination through the vehicle of neoliberalism, specifically by culturally commodifying Rastafarianism in the form of a Rastafari village that tourists pay to experience. She cautions against the knee-jerk reaction of giving “these sorts of tourism-related initiatives a very cynical read.” ¹¹⁴ Rather than reflexively crying cultural essentialism, she states:

[I]f during the modernist moment of the mid-twentieth century Rastafarians condemned the state, defined citizenship in relation to Africa, and refused wage labor and instead emphasized self-determination and self-sufficiency through a form of communal living, in the neoliberal era they seek greater recognition from and representation within the Jamaican state. And while they continue to emphasize self-determination and self-sufficiency, the means by which this might be realized have changed. ¹¹⁵

Thinking creatively about what is presently available requires an analysis of a reconfigured sociopolitical landscape and a willingness to dive into the contradictions, as Bill Ayers is often known to say.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore, writing about the fraught relationship between the radical liberatory goals of non-profits and funding agencies, reorients our understanding of “wins” and “losses.” Although non-profits creatively jerryrigged restrictive funding rubrics and repurposed them toward radical possibilities, “they did not fool themselves or others into pretending that winning a loss—sticking a plant on a mound of putrid earth in a poisoned and flooded field—was the moral or material equivalent to winning a win.” ¹¹⁶ We might imagine the establishment of a progressive charter school that strengthens Asian American self-determination and fosters cross-racial solidarity as “winning a loss.”

adrienne maree brown, drawing on the lessons she learned from Grace Lee Boggs, shares about the importance of being engaged in the process and the contradictions because this is “where we must embody the practices of the future. [L]et our visions show up in our every action and every step.” ¹¹⁷ The case of FACTS encourages scholars to resist facile analyses in which the punch line is predetermined—that is, how progressivism is swallowed up whole by neoliberalism. It encourages us to take more seriously the question of how people are taking advantage of a reconfigured neoliberal landscape to advance today’s freedom movements. This question engages us in the process, and its contradictions, helping us see already-existing ways in which the future is being practiced in the present.