In response to growing pushback to decades of privatization and disinvestment in high-poverty communities of color, elected officials and business leaders in the United States have turned to 'community-engaged strategies' to advance education reform. This qualitative case study of a California school district, the Oakland Unified School District, from 1989 to 2019 uses a Gramscian analysis of hegemony to illuminate the shift from "coercive" practices of financial audits to building "consent" through the district's formal engagement strategies as tools to manage public dissent around divisive decisions. Findings reveal that a manufactured crisis facilitated the 2003 state takeover of OUSD to further advance austerity measures and audit processes that served as racialized forms of fiscal surveillance. When local resistance to these measures intensified, district actors shifted tactics to 'engage' community members through a "portfolio strategy" to manage school choice options and other public-private partnerships. Oakland public schools are a prime case of how democratic mechanisms serve as the vehicle to manufacture public consent for district redesign by way of marketization. This paper contributes new insights into local and global debates on educational privatization by critically examining the role of parastatal audit agencies in shaping community support for public-private education governance along with tracing the shifting tactics of elite policy actors.