Marketing Schools, Marketing Cities

Who Wins and Who Loses When Schools Become Urban Amenities

Maia Bloomfield Cucchiara

• Éditeur: University of Chicago Press
• Année: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780226016962
• Sujet: Bildung
• Sous-sujet: Bildung Allgemein

Discuss real estate with any young family and the subject of schools is certain to come up—in fact, it will likely be a crucial factor in determining where that family lives. Not merely institutions of learning, schools have increasingly become a sign of a neighborhood's vitality, and city planners have ever more explicitly promoted "good schools" as a means of attracting more affluent families to urban areas, a dynamic process that Maia Bloomfield Cucchiara critically examines in Marketing Schools, Marketing Cities. Focusing on Philadelphia's Center City Schools Initiative, she shows how education policy makes overt attempts to prevent, or at least slow, middle-class flight to the suburbs. Navigating complex ethical terrain, she balances the successes of such policies in strengthening urban schools and communities against the inherent social injustices they propagate—the further marginalization and disempowerment of lowerclass families. By asking what happens when affluent parents become "valued customers, " Marketing Schools, Marketing Cities uncovers a problematic relationship between public institutions and private markets, where the former are used to leverage the latter to effect urban transformations.

CHAPTER ONE

A Strategic Opportunity

If people want white and affluent parents to send their kids to public schools and have a greater stake in the system, some accommodation has to be made.—Editorial, Philadelphia Daily News (2006)

Philadelphia is a divided city. The downtown, which has been the target of sustained public and private investment, is bustling and affluent. Other parts of the city, where streets are dotted with long-vacant factories and crumbling rowhouses, are very poor. As in cities across the country, revitalization strategies over the past decades have focused on attracting and retaining professionals or “knowledge workers,” with the assumption that this group—with its skills, motivation, and expendable income—would help revive the city’s economy and build prosperity. In the early twenty-first century, Philadelphia’s civic, educational, and business leaders applied a similar strategy to the schools, hoping to convince young middle- and upper-middle-class families in the downtown to use their local public schools rather than fleeing to the suburbs when their children reach school age. City leaders marketed a handful of downtown public schools to professional-class families, using a set of policies and practices that treated them as highly valued customers. In other words, as the editorial suggested, “some accommodation” to the special demands and expectations of this group was made.

Philadelphia is not alone in hoping to bring middle- and upper-middle-class families back to the city and city schools. Urban areas have experimented with voluntary choice programs, magnet schools, charter schools, and, in some cases, city-suburban integration—all designed, at least in part, to slow suburban flight and increase race and class integration in schools.¹ Yet in contrast to these other strategies, Philadelphia’s school campaign drew heavily on market strategies of urban development that identify “knowledge workers” as critical to the city’s future and seek to use key amenities to attract and retain this group. This book examines Philadelphia’s effort to market public schools to professional-class families and the questions it raises about equity and the nature of citizenship in an era of market-oriented solutions to social problems.

In the late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century context of ideological shifts to the right and government retrenchment, a set of solutions to chronic social problems—such as persistent poverty, urban decline, and ongoing school failure—has emerged. These include the creation of mixed-income housing, the “revitalization” of downtowns as centers of the information economy, and policies (and informal practices) that strive to increase economic integration in urban schools.² Though they address a diverse set of problems, such efforts share key assumptions and a core logic that attempts to use various incentives to bring the resources (social, cultural, and financial) of the middle and upper-middle classes to bear on major social problems. While there is no doubt they produce some positive outcomes, the costs and limitations of such policies have not been adequately explored. In this book, I use a study of an education initiative in Philadelphia to examine the consequences of policies and policy discourses that position the middle and upper-middle classes as inherently more worthy and important than other sectors of the population.

Perceiving families as unequally valuable is at the heart of the school-reform policy I discuss in this book. The Center City Schools Initiative (CCSI) was a Philadelphia effort to use market strategies to lure middle- and upper-middle-class families into the city and the city schools as a way to reverse urban decline and improve public schools. The initiative aimed to further the revitalization of Philadelphia’s downtown (already home to a sizable white, highly educated, and relatively affluent population), increase the city’s tax base, generate political support for the public school system, and catalyze improvement efforts at targeted schools. It has been widely touted as a pioneering solution to chronic urban challenges.³

In Philadelphia and around the country, the renewed interest in city living among middle- and upper-middle-class families and the efforts of business, civic, and political leaders to attract and retain such families is reshaping urban educational policy and practice. In cities such as Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Richmond, Milwaukee, and San Francisco, public schools have reached out to these families, trying to convince them to enroll their children in urban schools.⁴ And in some areas, groups of middle-class parents have started their own campaigns to transform and market their neighborhood schools. These parents hope that by attracting other middle-class families, they will be able to improve local schools enough to avoid the need to move to the suburbs or use private school.⁵ Philadelphia’s CCSI bears some resemblance to these other efforts, but it is unique in two important ways. From the beginning, the initiative drew an explicit and public connection between attracting professional-class families and the future of the city, and it was created as a public-private venture—a partnership between the public schools and the Center City District (CCD), a local business improvement district (BID).⁶ Thus, a study of the CCSI is uniquely suited to shed light on the consequences of marketing public schools to the middle and upper-middle classes and on the degree to which an infusion of market principles creates new mechanisms and spaces of privilege within a public institution.

The particulars of this initiative are unique to Philadelphia. The story I tell, however—of discourse about middle-class virtue and value, of urban decline and “revitalization,” of the dominance of market-oriented ideas and practices, of growing spatial inequality, and of dynamics of privilege and marginalization at a local elementary school—is shared across many cities nationwide. Focusing on Philadelphia’s experiences offers a revealing look at efforts to enlist schools in the pursuit of a particular vision of urban prosperity.

In 2004, just after the CCSI was unveiled, I began conducting research: asking questions; reading documents; following media coverage; and interviewing business and civic leaders, school district officials, policymakers, parents, and other stakeholders. My goal was to understand the initiative’s origins, evolution, and consequences. To examine the “on-the-ground” effects, I conducted a two-year ethnography of one of the targeted schools (see appendix A for more details).

In my research, I encountered a range of assumptions and tensions around issues of urban growth and education and around the benefits of an increased middle-class presence in cities and schools. Many of my informants struggled to balance ideals of equity with more “pragmatic” goals. The CCSI brought to the forefront the clash between market principles and strategies and ideals of justice, fairness, and equality. In doing so, the initiative posed questions that usually go unasked. What does it mean to sacrifice equity in the pursuit of a greater “common good”? How do strategies for reversing urban decline or improving public schools that rely on the resources of the middle class reshape the relationship between citizens and the state? The answers draw attention to the complicated outcomes of market mechanisms when they are applied to public institutions.

While sympathetic to the goals of the CCSI and the problems it was trying to address, I argue here the benefits of this project came at some cost to important sectors of the population. Low-income and minority students in particular found their access to resources and opportunities constrained by the initiative. The CCSI was successful in bringing more middle- and upper-middle-class families into five Center City schools, but it also exacerbated the ongoing stratification of Philadelphia and its schools. It brought additional resources to a few relatively high-performing schools and helped an already advantaged population secure access to them, while marginalizing other families and making it more difficult for them to share in the benefits of the best of Philadelphia’s schools.

The Genesis of the Center City Schools Initiative: “You Have to Deal with the Fact that People with Six-Year-Olds Keep Moving to the Suburbs”

When he was interviewed for a 2007 Wall Street Journal article, CCD president Paul Levy explained his organization’s focus on encouraging more families to live downtown by noting that “empty nesters and singles are not enough.” If Philadelphia was “to sustain the revival” that had been drawing highly educated young professionals to the region, the city needed to convince the “people with six-year-olds” not to head for the suburbs.⁷

The CCD, whose 120-block span (roughly one square mile) makes it one of the largest BIDs in the nation, has worked for the past two decades to promote the revitalization of Philadelphia’s downtown, locally known as Center City.⁸ In 2004 the CCD, led by Mr. Levy, approached the School District of Philadelphia with a proposal aimed at retaining the downtown’s young, affluent residents as they married and began families. Given an abundance of evidence that “the percent of the downtown population ages 25–34 has steadily grown,” an early CCD report identified “a strategic opportunity for Center City to become a premier neighborhood of choice in the region for young families with children—if we can improve the quality and customer focus of public schools.” In partnering with the downtown business community, the school district would, among other things, embrace “an entrepreneurial model in which principals are encouraged to see their primary role as attracting and retaining Center City families by delivering a high-quality educational experience.”⁹ The CCD hoped that as more Center City families entered the public schools, suburban flight would be stemmed, the city would be more affordable for middle- and upper-middle-class parents (because they would not have to pay for private schools), and Philadelphia’s appeal as a place to work and live would be enhanced.

With the school district’s collaboration and support, the CCSI evolved into a multipronged effort to rebrand downtown elementary schools.¹⁰ The initiative was comprised of a marketing campaign, an increase in resources for certain Center City elementary schools, and a change to the district’s administrative structure to create a new academic region. In addition, it gave students who lived in the downtown area priority over students from other parts of the city in admission to some of the district’s most desirable elementary schools, which were located within the newly formed academic region. The initiative re-envisioned public schools as a potentially alluring amenity of urban life. Like museums, boutiques, sidewalk cafés, and attractive housing within walking distance of work, these newly marketed public schools were cast as a perk of life in the city and another way for families to participate in an affluent urban lifestyle.

Meanwhile, the explicit emphasis on the downtown area and professional families led one school district insider to exclaim in an interview, “They don’t even pretend it’s for the whole city. It is for Center City to try to draw whites back into Center City, to appease Center City businesses. . . . It is elitist. A lot of people are very upset!” Educational policy and practice traditionally have been heavily informed by ideals about equality of opportunity. These ideals combined uneasily with the CCSI’s goals and strategies.

American Cities in the Twenty-first Century: Splendor, Decay, and the “Creative Class”

In 2009 Kristian Buschmann and Carol Coletta, from a national organization of business, civic, and political leaders called CEOs for Cities, praised Levy as a “particularly bold urban pioneer” for his work on the CCSI, proclaiming him “the first of what will likely become a steady stream of urban leaders who realize that this market [of professionals] is ready to return to cities that will solve their problems.”¹¹ Why would a public-private partnership that markets public schools as an urban amenity generate so much enthusiasm? The answer lies in the scope, severity, and longevity of the problems the CCSI and other revitalization strategies seek to solve.

Over the past half-century, a series of social, political, and economic developments crippled once-vibrant industrial centers in the Northeast and Midwest, leaving cities like Philadelphia, Baltimore, Newark, Chicago, and Detroit facing unprecedented social and economic decline.¹² In response, late twentieth-century urban policy sought to transform cities to better compete for mobile capital and labor and slow middle-class flight to the suburbs. Former manufacturing centers compensated for the loss of industrial jobs by recreating themselves as centers of the new service and information economy, assuming their economic future was dependent upon the ability to compete in these arenas. Thus, revitalization efforts in the closing decades of the twentieth century generally involved such projects as the construction of downtown shopping malls, the creation of gentrified areas within distressed cities, and the formulation of downtowns as business-friendly centers for corporate offices, hotels, convention centers, and entertainment complexes.¹³

Many of these projects were designed to bring middle- and upper-middle-class residents, workers, and visitors back to the city, in large part because these groups are seen as vital to a city’s economic health. Not only are these people essential to the businesses—such as law, insurance, architecture, and banking—that cluster in revitalized downtowns, but they are also the “knowledge workers” or “creative people” whose skills move the new information economy along.¹⁴ Perhaps no one has done more to popularize the connection between urban economies and the highly educated than Richard Florida. In The Rise of the Creative Class, Florida argues that “scientists, engineers, artists, musicians, designers and knowledge-based professionals,” or people who are “paid principally to do creative work for a living,” are essential to urban prosperity, and that they find some cities more appealing than others.¹⁵ He dubs these cities “Creative Centers,” noting that they are characterized less by shopping malls and entertainment districts and more by “abundant high-quality amenities and experiences, an openness to diversity of all kinds, and above all else [provide residents] the opportunity to validate their identities as creative people.”¹⁶ It follows, then, that if cities are to compete in this new economic order, they need to provide these sorts of amenities and opportunities. In struggling cities, the task is larger still: urban leaders must not only create such amenities but also market the new urban lifestyle to pote...