Amid the growth of charter schools, autonomous schools, and private management organizations, an increasing number of urban districts are moving toward a portfolio management model (PMM). In a PMM, the district central office oversees schools that operate under a variety of governance models. The expansion of PMMs raises questions about local…

This article examines the intertwining of neoliberal urbanism and education policy in Chicago. Drawing on critical studies in geography, urban sociology and anthropology, education policy, and critical analyses of race, the author argues that education is constitutive of material and ideological processes of neoliberal restructuring, its…

This article uses the global city of Chicago as an urban exemplar of a thirty-year worldwide economic shift toward public (state) private (corporate) partnerships. Advanced by racialized youth-development discourses in Chicago, private corporations, public education, and social housing are in alliance to transform "the problems of urban…

The Chicago Public Schools, along with the city of Chicago itself, serve as an exemplary case of neoliberal reorganization, as corporate and governmental "leaders" remake Chicago into a global city meeting the needs of capitalism. As such, Chicago provides us with an example of "actually existing neoliberalism," in which…

For 35 years, "Anthropology and Education Quarterly" has provided analyses of education in social and cultural contexts. In this article, I describe the present context as the conjuncture of global neoliberalism, resistance, and U.S. drive for world domination. I propose ethnography that politically engages relationships between…

Public higher educational institutions, where about 80 percent of all college students and 65 percent of all four-year college students are educated, appear to be in serious trouble. In order to delve more deeply into this topic, the author invited a wide-ranging team of experts to examine changes in public higher education over the last quarter…