The Costs And Consequences Of School Governance Change In Detroit From Proposal A To The Education Achievement Authority

This chapter examines the relationship between school closures and school governance change in Detroit, what is arguably (next to New Orleans) the greatest case of dismantling the traditional public school system in the United States. Our historical analysis involves the overlaying of existing data on school closures in Detroit (Grover & van der Velde, 2016) upon a narrative that details the emergence of neoliberal school governance beginning in 1994 (Kang & Slay, 2017). By doing so, we find that the greatest number of school closures occur at the moment in which efforts to institutionalize neoliberal school governance accelerate. Unlike other studies that have attributed school closures to declining enrollment or financial mismanagement, we argue that school closures signal the transition to neoliberal school governance, a fundamental change in who manages and decides. As other studies have shown the detrimental effects of school closures on communities that are predominantly Black and Brown, our study focuses on how governance change in such communities is a threat to democracy and public schooling, a look as to where we have gone since Brown v. Board. We conclude the chapter by discussing how Detroit's unprecedented number of school closures are indicative of the dilemmas of neoliberal school reform, with consequences that are situated within the particular racial, sociopolitical, and historical context of the city made visible by the creation of a statewide "recovery district," the Education Achievement Authority (EAA).