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作者

Stephen Danley;Julia Sass Rubin

来源

JOURNAL OF URBAN AFFAIRS,Vol.42,Issue4,P.663-684

语言

英文

关键字

作者单位

Rutgers University–Camden

摘要

Neoliberal education reformers advance a set of strategies intended to improve public education by incorporating market-based approaches. To facilitate the adoption of these often unpopular ideas, neoliberal reformers advocate for governance mechanisms that make it more challenging for communities to control their public schools. The prevalence of such undemocratic governance mechanisms has grown over the last decade, undercutting communities’ efforts to organize in opposition to the neoliberal education agenda. However, these governance mechanisms do not necessarily shut down the organizing. We examine what facilitates sustained community resistance to neoliberal reform in the presence of undemocratic governance mechanisms and find that access to social and economic capital and timely access to information via an engaged press are present in the existing accounts of such resistance. We explore this emerging hypothesis via in-depth comparative case studies of Newark and Camden, New Jersey. Our analysis of these 2 cities provides additional evidence for the hypothesis that access to social and economic capital and to information makes sustained resistance possible. We also identify a third variable, extreme political control as manifested through political machines, that intersects with the other variables to limit the sustainability of resistance movements in the presence of undemocratic governance mechanisms. Neoliberal education reformers advance a set of strategies intended to improve public education by incorporating market-based ideas and approaches. These strategies include fostering competition between public schools and privately managed but publicly funded charter schools; for-profit management of public schools; taxpayer-funded vouchers to pay for private and religious schools; the use of high-stakes standardized tests to evaluate, punish, and reward students, teachers, and school administrators; and the closing of public schools that are determined to be “underperforming” (Lipman, 2011; Ravitch, 2010). To facilitate the adoption of these often unpopular strategies, neoliberal education reformers advocate for governance mechanisms that make it more challenging or impossible for communities, particularly low-income communities of color, to control their public schools (Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools, 2015; Henig & Rich, 2004; Morel, 2018; Sunderman, 2017). These undemocratic governance mechanisms include mayoral and state control of public schools, the creation of special school districts run by state-appointed managers, the replacement of elected school boards with appointed ones, and the use of appointed boards and commissions and private organizations to approve new or expanding charter schools. 1 The prevalence of such undemocratic education governance mechanisms has grown over the last decade in tandem with an expansion of national, state, and local policies that further a neoliberal agenda (Lipman, 2011; Morel, 2018). In fact, undemocratic governance mechanisms have become so pervasive as to be considered a key feature of neoliberal education reform (Gutierrez & Waitoller, 2017; Lipman, 2015).What enables communities to resist neoliberal education reforms? Lessons from Newark and Camden, New JerseyAll authorsStephen Danley & Julia Sass RubinJuliaSassRubinJuliaSassRubin https://doi.org/10.1080/07352166.2019.1578174Published online:24 April 2019 Table 1. Racial and ethnic composition. CSVDisplay Table Neoliberal education reformers have responded to critiques of these governance mechanisms as undemocratic by reframing the concept of democracy. They argue that allowing parents to “choose” schools for their children beyond the boundaries dictated by housing is actually more democratic. Dehli (1996) speaks to these different conceptions of democratic versus consumer choice: Both neoliberal and more progressive versions of choice would grant greater participation and power to parents. Both assume that the empowerment of parents would lead to better schooling. However, the terms of parental participation and the context and consequence of choice are conceived quite differently. While the market discourse of neo-liberalism constructs an image of the abstracted, individual parent who interacts freely in a consumer democracy to maximize his or her gains, progressive choice strategies speak in terms of a revitalized public sphere for the realization of democratic citizenship, greater equality and collective rights. (p. 77) Making it more challenging for communities to control their public schools undercuts efforts by those communities to organize in opposition to the neoliberal education agenda (Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools, 2015). However, it does not necessarily shut down the organizing. In New York City (Haimson, 2012; Henig, Gold, Orr, Silander, & Simon, 2011), Philadelphia (Good, 2017; Maranto, 2005; Simon, Quinn, Golden, & Cohen, 2017), Chicago (Lipman, 2017), New Orleans (Buras, 2013, 2014; Dixson, Buras, & Jeffers, 2015; Huff, 2013; Jabbar, 2015), Memphis (Glazer & Egan, 2016, 2018), and other communities that lack local democratic control of their public schools, parents, students, and other community members are sitting in, walking out, marching, filing lawsuits, going on hunger strikes, and otherwise “ris[ing] up in protest against the market-based agenda” (Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools, 2015, p. 3). As undemocratic education governance mechanisms proliferate, it is increasingly important to identify and understand what factors facilitate community resistance in the presence of such mechanisms. Historically, examinations of urban education governance have focused on the importance of politics and the makeup and motivations of different governing regimes for understanding structures and outcomes (Orr, 1999; Stone, 1989, 1998a, 1998b; Stone, Henig, Jones, & Pierannunzi, 2001). More recently, scholars have linked undemocratic education governance mechanisms directly to neoliberalism, highlighting the roles of race and ideology as both causal factors and tools. Lipman (2011) argues that neoliberal education policy, including undemocratic governance mechanisms, reflects “urban restructuring in the interest of capital accumulation [and] racial containment” for the benefit of the wealthy few (p. 148). Oluwole and Green (2009) and Morel (2018) find that the growing number of state takeovers of school districts disproportionately affect “black communities with higher levels of political empowerment” (p. 11). Morel (2018) connects the growth of such governance mechanisms to the rise of conservative, Republican-dominated politics at the state level, concluding that the takeovers are motivated by political power and control of resources in response to “black political empowerment in U.S. cities” (p. 11). A separate thread of case-based empirical literature has chronicled campaigns of community resistance to neoliberal education reform, including a few that took place in communities that lack local democratic control of their schools (Ansell, Reckhow, & Kelly, 2009; Epstein, 2012; Glazer & Egan, 2016, 2018; Good, 2017; Henig et al., 2011; Jabbar, 2015; Lipman, 2017; Maranto, 2005; Orr, 1999; Scott & Fruchter, 2009; Simon et al., 2017). These authors have proposed localized explanations for the presence of resistance and its occasional successes. However, the literature has not offered a broader analysis of why such resistance takes place in some communities and not others. In this article, we review the literature on community resistance in the presence of undemocratic governance mechanisms and find two factors present in sustained resistance campaigns: access to social and economic capital and timely access to information via an engaged press. We explore this emerging hypothesis via in-depth comparative case studies of Newark and Camden, New Jersey. We selected Newark and Camden because of their many similarities, including the lack of democratic governance of public education. Both school districts have been under state control, with superintendents appointed by and accountable to the state’s governor. Both have experienced subsequent increases in the number of privately managed charter schools; the firing of teachers and staff, particularly those of color (Weber, 2015; Weber, Baker, & Oluwole, 2014); and the handover of public school buildings to charter school chains (Mooney, 2012a, 2014). However, community responses to these neoliberal reform efforts have differed greatly in the two cities. Newark residents have aggressively fought the reforms, helping to fuel the election of Mayor Ras Baraka (McDonald, 2014), a city councilman and high-school principal whose popularity was driven, in part, by his skepticism of state-imposed neoliberal education reforms (Eustachewich, 2012). As of spring 2018, Newark was completing the process of returning to local democratic control and its elected school board had just selected a new superintendent (Yi, 2018). In contrast, Camden’s response has been quieter, with coalitions struggling to form to oppose the reforms and with the reform side largely avoiding controversy while pursuing policies similar to those imposed in Newark. There are no immediate plans to return Camden public schools to local, democratic control (Mooney, 2017). Our analysis of community resistance in Camden and Newark provides additional evidence for the hypothesis that access to social and economic capital, along with access to information, makes sustained resistance possible (although it does not guarantee its success). Our analysis also identifies a third variable, political control, that intersects with social capital, economic capital, and access to information. Extreme political control, as manifested through what Stone (1989) and others call “political machines,” can limit the sustainability of resistance movements by undercutting the social and economic capital and free-flowing information that are preconditions for such movements. Ultimately, our argument is that these three intersecting explanatory variables—access to social and economic capital, access to information, and level of political control—help to explain what allows opposition to exist, not to prevail. Idiosyncratic variables make it tough to predict when the resistance will prevail in an undemocratic environment. Community organizing for education reform Efforts by residents of low-income communities of color to control and improve their public schools are not a new phenomenon. Following the Civil War, African American communities organized both locally and in coordination with northern allies to provide educational opportunities that slavery had forbidden (Anderson, 1988; Cross, 2003; Payne, 2007; Shirley, 2011). More recently, urban communities mobilized in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s to fight for high-quality public education by advocating for specific goals such as desegregation and community control (Warren, 2011). Two of the best known of these efforts are the struggles for community-based control of public schools by the Ocean Hill–Brownsville neighborhoods in Brooklyn (Podair, 2002) and the campaign that led to the reorganization and decentralization of the Chicago school system and the creation of local school councils (Fabricant, 2010; Lipman, 2011, 2017). 2 In the 1990s, growing elite support of for-profit management of public schools and conversions of neighborhood public schools to charter schools precipitated a different type of organizing, as communities mobilized to resist the privatization (Scott, 2011). Scott and Fruchter (2009) detail the successful 2001 campaign by a coalition of local parent groups, the New York City teachers’ union, and the New York chapter of the community organizing group Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) to stop the city from converting five public schools into charter schools and turning their control over to the for-profit Edison Schools Corporation. The coalition prevailed through a combination of tactical superiority and a significant structural advantage in the form of New York’s charter school law that required 51% of a school’s parent body to approve a school’s conversion to charter. Any parents who did not vote were counted as opposing the conversion. As Scott and Fruchter (2009) point out, Having a privatization proposal that mandated a democratic process helped ACORN and other advocates to have a meaningful voice in the issue … without the requirement of a high-stakes vote, the outcome in New York, as well as the organizing strategies, would likely have been quite different. (p. 200) Indeed, the requirement of a community vote set the New York City experience apart from Edison’s more successful school takeover efforts in other cities. However, as Maranto (2005) found in examining community responses to the state of Pennsylvania’s efforts to turn Philadelphia and Chester public schools over to Edison, local control alone cannot explain differential intensity of organizing for public education. Although both cities’ school districts were under state control, the process was very different for each of them. Nine of the 10 public schools in the Chester–Upland school district were transferred to Edison with little opposition. However, efforts to do the same in Philadelphia were met with broad resistance from the mayor, teachers’ union, and community members. Simon et al. (2017) found similarly strong levels of community resistance to more recent neoliberal education reforms in Philadelphia, especially in response to forced large-scale school closings. Similarly, Lipman (2017) chronicled sustained community resistance to a neoliberal agenda of forced school closings and charter school expansions in Chicago. What explains why some communities mobilize against neoliberal education reform, even in the presence of undemocratic governance mechanisms, whereas other communities do not? To answer that question, we turned to literature detailing why specific communities operating under undemocratic educational governance mechanisms resisted neoliberal education reform. We found that, in cities with strong resistance, the opposition had access to different forms of social and economic capital to support their campaigns. A secondary factor was timely access to information about the specific tactics used by neoliberal reformers, which generally was provided by an engaged press. Access to social and economic capital Existing accounts of community mobilization against neoliberal education reform under undemocratic governance mechanisms refer to and define social and economic capital in different ways. However, they consistently discuss the need for the resistance to have access to economic resources and components of social capital such as “trust, norms and networks” that can facilitate “coordinated action” (Putnam, 1993, p. 167). Maranto (2005) uses the term “community capital” (p. 182) in explaining the different responses to privatization in Philadelphia and Chester and defines it as a combination of social capital and economic vibrancy. He posits that the strong resistance in Philadelphia reflected the city’s “more, better organized, and perhaps more talented interest groups fighting to block or modify the reform” (Maranto, 2005, p. 183). In contrast, he attributes Chester’s more lackluster response to the absence of community capital: There is not much of a business community in Chester: the main employers left years ago. There is no city paper, though the Delaware County Times does cover Chester. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, ministers’ organizations, and neighborhood associations are all thought moribund. As a local academic stated, “the churches are really fragmented: there’s lots of really small ones. In the core of the city the population has turned over quite a bit, so there are not many organized groups”. … Another former superintendent lamented that “there is no leadership from the community.” (p. 182) Similarly, Simon et al. (2017), in their analysis of present-day community resistance to market-based education reform in Philadelphia, attribute the resistance to the presence of three factors. The first of these is funding. In Philadelphia’s case, the William Penn Foundation played a key role in financially supporting civic and community capacity building around education. When the foundation’s new president shifted resources away from those organizations and toward market-based reform, it left “community groups struggling for survival” (Simon et al., 2017, p. 62). Some of those groups did not make it, leaving fewer to advocate for public education. The second factor noted by Simon et al. (2017) is “a diverse universe of organizations that bring a complementary set of tactics and strategies to the shared goals of equitable public education and democratic and pluralistic policymaking processes” (p. 72). The third factor is a variant on social capital that Simon et al. (2017) refer to as “a ‘culture of activism’ around education [that] is characterized by both common and complementary practices, a group of experienced people, and strong trusting relationships built over time among people and groups engaged in this work” (p. 71). Lipman (2017) finds a similar culture of activism in examining Chicago’s resistance to neoliberal reforms. She notes that the current community opposition to Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s agenda of forced school closings and privatization is built upon “more than a decade of grassroots organizing and city-wide opposition” (p. 18) to similar tactics by the prior mayor, Richard Daley. Lipman also focuses on the importance of social movement unionism, which provides an additional source of social and economic capital for the Chicago resistance. In describing the opposition to the state-run Tennessee Achievement School District, Glazer and Egan (2018) make clear that these are individuals with substantial social capital in their community. Glazer and Egan (2018) note that the opposition leaders they interviewed are “members of the local school board, employees of the local district, leaders of community organizations, members of the State Department of Education” who are “predominantly local to Memphis and strongly identified with the city’s historical experience” (pp. 23–24) and whose “presence is acutely felt in Memphis” (p. 24). These examples highlight the many forms of social and economic capital that can facilitate community organizing for resistance, pushing back against the suggestion that social capital exists only in middle-class or affluent communities (Yosso, 2005). As we discuss in subsequent sections, however, having economic resources can be a necessity when dealing with the combination of undemocratic governance mechanisms and extreme political control such as we find in Camden (Stone, 1998a). Access to information The literature also points to the role that the press plays in informing and mobilizing the resistance. Maranto (2005) credits the news media in Philadelphia with assisting the resistance by preventing privatization efforts from moving “more silently” (p. 183), as they had in Chester. Simon et al. (2017) and Lipman (2017) discuss the opposition’s use of the press to communicate their messaging and call out the neoliberal education reforms. Glazer and Egan (2018) note the role that “local newspapers and other media outlets” played in provid[ing] a platform for [the] views” (p. 24) of community members opposed to the Tennessee state-run school district. Methodology To test the emerging hypothesis that resistance to neoliberal education reform in the presence of undemocratic governance mechanisms requires access to social and economic capital and to information via an engaged press, we combined a comparative case study approach, triangulation of data sources and methods, and a critical policy analysis lens. We conducted in-depth comparative case studies of community responses to neoliberal education reforms in Newark and Camden, two New Jersey cities whose school systems were under state control throughout our study. Comparative case studies allow an examination “in rich detail” of “the context and features of two or more instances of specific phenomena” (Campbell, 2010, p. 2). Although comparative case studies still strive for the “‘thick description’ common in single case studies … the goal … is to discover contrasts, similarities, or patterns across the cases. These discoveries may in turn contribute to the development or the confirmation of theory” (Campbell, 2010, p. 2) The case studies are based on multiple data sources and methods of data collection, to increase validity and capture different dimensions of the phenomenon we are studying (Stake, 1995). We conducted more than 200 observations of approximately an hour each at various education and community venues in Camden and Newark. The observations were grounded in critical ethnography that sought to identify power dynamics within the situations observed (Madison, 2011). We also interviewed 40 residents of and stakeholders actively engaged in Camden and Newark. These interviews lasted approximately 45 min each and included activists and elites from the policy, nonprofit, and political communities. We cross-referenced the observations and interviews with news accounts and secondary sources. We analyzed the resulting data by identifying emerging themes (Charmaz, 2008). Creswell (2007) describes this as “an emerging qualitative approach to inquiry, the collection of data in a natural setting sensitive to people and places under study, and data analysis that is inductive and establishes patterns or themes” (p. 37). This process enabled us to look systematically at the comparative case studies of Newark and Camden in order to develop theory. Our overall approach uses a critical policy analysis lens (Prunty, 1985; Taylor, 1997). Prunty (1985) developed critical policy analysis specifically in the context of education research, noting that such research often fails to incorporate values and ethical challenges. Taylor (1997) builds on this critique, arguing that much education writing “is managerialist, technicist and uncritical in approach” (p. 23). Critical policy analysis intends “to discover and/or question the complexity, subjectivity, and equity of policy as well as to illuminate intended and unintended consequences of the policy implementation process” in order to uncover the true “distribution of power, resources, and knowledge in policy creation and implementation, and the creation of winners and losers” and “to promote agency, resistance, advocacy, and praxis” (Diem, Young, Welton, Cummings Mansfield, & Lee, 2014, p. 1083). Both the critique and remedy proposed by critical policy analysis are particularly relevant to the study of resistance to education reforms. Such resistance is often framed in terms of the technical outcomes of education reform. The use of critical policy analysis allows for inquiry into a multitude of values that extend beyond student outcomes and include community values. The ability to use critical policy analysis to incorporate a variety of values into the study of education reform has led to its use across a wide international context including Japan (Takayama, 2010), Russia, (Minina, 2014), China (Pun, 2013), Australia (Hunkin, 2016), and the United States (Au, 2009). Newark and Camden, New Jersey Like many other postindustrial U.S. cities, Newark and Camden experienced dramatic demographic changes throughout the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s due to fewer job opportunities, redlining, White flight, and race riots. Both cities also experienced the disinvestment that came with suburbanization, as commercial activity followed residents and jobs to the suburbs. This suburbanization and deindustrialization worked in parallel with racial discrimination. As more African Americans moved to the cities seeking industrial work, Whites fled (Gillette, 2006; Mumford, 2008). The racial segregation in both cities was made worse by New Jersey’s system of home rule, which enabled small municipalities to write discriminatory zoning laws that have kept low-income, largely minority families from leaving the city for the surrounding suburbs (Karcher, 1998). In New Jersey, the legacy of discriminatory zoning practices and strong home rule have resulted in particularly sharp segregation between cities and their more affluent surrounding suburban areas (Gillette, 2006). This segregation is apparent in the economic and racial makeup of both cities. In contrast to their surrounding regions and the state as a whole, Newark and Camden have very high levels of poverty. According to the 2017 U.S. Census estimates, 28.3% of Newark’s population and 37.4% of Camden’s population lived in poverty, versus 10.0% of the state as a whole. Median income tells the same story. Whereas New Jersey’s 2017 median income was $76,475, Newark’s was $34,826 and Camden’s was $26,105. As Table 1 shows, Black and Hispanic residents made up the overwhelming majority of both cities yet constitute a minority of the state as a whole. In 1985, the New Jersey Supreme Court decided in the first of a series of rulings that came to be known as Abbott v. Burke that the state’s education funding was unconstitutional because of disparities in per pupil amounts between urban impoverished districts and wealthy suburban districts (Education Law Center, n.d.a). With education largely funded by local property taxes, cities such as Camden, Newark, Paterson, and Elizabeth struggled to provide a minimally adequate education for their students. Citing a clause in the New Jersey Constitution requiring the state to provide a “thorough and efficient system of free public schools,”  (Education Law Center, n.d.b, p. 2) the court ruled that the state had to provide aid to 31 of its most impoverished school districts to ensure that they were funded at levels comparable to those of its wealthiest districts (Education Law Center, n.d.a). Camden and Newark were among the districts that benefited from the resulting state investment. In 2008, the New Jersey Legislature adopted a school funding formula that replaced Abbott but continued to provide additional aid to high-need districts such as Camden and Newark (Education Law Center, n.d.a). Between 2010 and 2016, the demographically adjusted per pupil funding rate for both districts was approximately $10,000  (Education Law Center, n.d.c). Both Camden and Newark are state-controlled districts whose residents are denied the right to democratically govern their public schools. Newark has been under state control since 1995. Camden was taken over by the state in May 2013, although a state-appointed monitor was very involved in running the district even before the takeover. In New Jersey’s state-controlled districts, superintendents are appointed by the commissioner of education, who is appointed by the governor, and local school boards act only in an advisory capacity, with no ability to overrule the superintendents’ decisions. In 2011, New Jersey’s Republican governor Chris Christie appointed Cami Anderson as superintendent of Newark Public Schools, replacing the superintendent appointed by his Democratic predecessor (Resmovits, 2011). In 2013, following the state takeover, Governor Christie appointed Paymon Rouhanifard superintendent of the Camden City School District and stripped the local school board of its authority (Davis, 2013). Anderson and Rouhanifard share similar career trajectories and policy preferences. Both are alumni of the Teach For America program, and both held leadership positions in the New York City public schools during the mayoral administration of Michael Bloomberg, a strong supporter of neoliberal education reform. The types of neoliberal reforms that Anderson and Rouhanifard enacted in their respective cities rely on standardized test scores to evaluate teachers and schools and focus on increasing the number of charter schools. Both Anderson and Rouhanifard helped drive demand for charter schools by forcibly closing local public schools and adopting universal enrollment systems that facilitated the transition of students to charter schools. Newark resistance Newark residents lost the right to democratically govern their public schools many years before Chris Christie was elected governor. Unlike the prior gubernatorial administrations, however, Christie used the unilateral power granted by state control to dramatically alter the composition of schools within the Newark school district and to shift a large percentage of Newark students to privately managed charter schools. Indications that changes were in store were evident a few months after Christie’s January 2010 inauguration, when he critiqued Newark Public Schools as “an absolutely disgraceful public education system” (“Newark Superintendent,” 2010, para. 1). Following on the heels of this admonishment were sweeping plans to overhaul the city’s education system and the appointment of a new, and very controversial, superintendent. Both moves drew substantial opposition from community residents, students, unions, and other organizations. In September 2010, Christie appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show with Newark Mayor Cory Booker to announce a $100 million donation by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg intended to improve Newark’s public schools. This announcement sparked suspicion regarding “how the money would be used and what role Booker would play” and resulted in months of contentious Newark school board meetings (Giambusso, 2011a, para. 2). In January 2011, Christie announced the approval of 23 new charter schools across the state, including 9 that would be located in Newark (“N.J. Approves 23 New Charter Schools,” 2011). In spring 2011, Christie announced that Cami Anderson would be Newark’s new superintendent, making good on his promise not to renew the contract of Newark Public Schools Superintendent Clifford Janey, who had been appointed by the previous administration. (Mooney, 2011). Anderson’s 4-year term was a period of continual change and reorganization. On June 14, 2011, her second day on the job, Anderson held a press conference to announce that she was moving forward with a consultant’s plan that recommended closing or consolidating “several of the city’s public schools to make space for 11 charter schools in a massive reshuffling that could affect thousands of students” (Heyboer, 2011, para. 1). However, Anderson promised to co-locate slightly fewer charter schools in district buildings and not to proceed with the school closings recommended by the consultant. The reprieve from school closings proved to be short-lived. In February 2012, 7 months into the job, Anderson announced “a sweeping reorganization of Newark public schools”  (Mooney, 2012a, para. 1) that ultimately closed six district schools and “renewed” eight more with new leadership, faculty, and programs (Mooney, 2012b). A year later, she announced the closing of two additional schools but then decided to halt school closings in Newark for at least a year, while she conducted a new analysis of all the district schools to determine which were the most vulnerable (Mooney, 2013a). Most of Anderson’s changes were greeted with strong opposition, starting with her reorganization and school closings announcement. The Star Ledger, New Jersey’s largest newspaper, which was located in Newark at the time, ran a leaked version of the plan the morning of her announcement, and a thousand angry residents showed up to the presentation to heckle and boo Anderson (Mooney, 2012a). Newark School Advisory Board meetings consistently drew large crowds, including political and civic leaders who spoke out in opposition to neoliberal reforms as a profit-driven exploitation of Newark’s children. In July 2012, prior to a vote by the Newark advisory board to reject Anderson’s recommendation to lease five closed district schools to charter schools, city councilwoman Mildred Crump testified that “we know who the enemy is, and we must fight to our last breath to save our children and to save Newark public schools. … For those of you willing to sell our children for profit, shame on you” (Mooney, 2012c, para. 17–18). Longtime civic activist Junius Williams added that this was “a real estate scheme to put public property in private hands” (Mooney, 2012c, para. 19). The most strident opposition, however, came in response to the One Newark universal enrollment plan, announced by Anderson in December 2013, 6 months after she announced the 1-year hiatus on school closings. Under One Newark, parents were required to submit a list of school preferences to the district. Their children’s resulting assignments to either district or charter schools were based on those preferences and space availability, among other factors. Stories abounded of children from the same family being sent to different schools or across town, creating transportation challenges in a city where many residents do not own cars (Layton, 2015). The One Newark plan also led to multiple school closings and reorganizations and the turning over of many district schools to charter management (Layton, 2015). The One Newark announcement precipitated large-scale protests, including a letter of opposition that was signed by 75 religious leaders; multiple street demonstrations by students, parents, teachers, and other school staff; legislative hearings; a 4-day sit-in by Newark high-school students in Cami Anderson’s office; and a bill sponsored by Newark’s legislators to stop the forced school closings. Ras Baraka’s opposition to the One Newark plan also played a role in his subsequent election as mayor of Newark. Anderson’s numerous reforms were also critiqued for their educational impact and equity. A report published by the Alliance for Newark Public Schools showed that 2 years after the first set of school closings and renewals, the schools that Anderson had “renewed” performed worse on standardized tests than they had previously (Alliance for Newark Public Schools, 2014). Analyses conducted by Rutgers University researchers found that the schools selected for closing and reorganization under the One Newark plan were not the lowest performing academically or the most underutilized; rather, they were schools that had “substantively and statistically significantly greater shares of low income and black students” (Weber, 2014, p. 2). Those schools also were more likely to employ Black and Hispanic teachers, who would be negatively impacted by the school closings and reorganizations (Weber et al., 2014). The analyses further found “little evidence that the interventions planned under One Newark … would lead to better student outcomes” (Weber et al., 2014, p. 2). Lauren Wells, Mayor Baraka’s education adviser, noted that Anderson’s reforms had led to substantial instability, with “60 percent turnover of principals across the district” (Wells, 2015, para. 9) between 2011 and 2015 and some schools having multiple principals during that time. Wells also pointed out that Anderson had cut “alternative education programs that existed in 2012 to reconnect 3,800 youth who have left school to academic programs”  (Wells, 2015, para. 10) and that Anderson’s reorganizations had resulted in hundreds of employees being removed from their jobs but continuing to draw salaries, costing the district $22 million (Wells, 2015). Newark’s activism appeared to pay off. On June 22, 2015, 18 months after Anderson launched One Newark, the New Jersey education commissioner, David Hespe, announced that Anderson would be stepping down as superintendent to be replaced by the previous education commissioner, Chris Cerf. A week later, Governor Christie and Mayor Baraka released a joint statement, pledging to work together to return Newark Public Schools to local control and naming nine members to the Newark Educational Success Board, tasked with setting “the city on the path toward regaining control of its schools after 21 years of state operation” (Mooney, 2015, para. 4). Three years later, Newark was fully under local control and its board of education was able to select a new superintendent for the district—a power they had not been able to exercise since the state takeover in 1995 (Yi, 2018). Camden resistance Camden’s loss of local democratic control of its public schools and implementation of neoliberal education reforms also predate the Christie administration. In 2002, the district’s board of education was converted from elected to appointed as part of the state takeover of the city’s finances. The system of education choice began in 1994 with the launch of Brimm Medical Arts High School, a magnet school that selected top students for training in the medical field. Privately managed school choice began in 1996 with the approval of the first Camden-based charter school, LEAP Academy (Bonilla-Santiago, 2014). By the time Christie was sworn into office in January 2010, 16% of Camden’s publicly funded students were already attending charter schools (New Jersey Department of Education, personal communication, January 18, 2018). The pace of neoliberal reform and political disenfranchisement picked up substantially under Governor Christie. Over the first 6 years of Christie’s governorship, his Department of Education approved four new Camden-based charters, closed two other charters, and allowed existing charters to expand their enrollment, nearly doubling the number of charter school students in Camden, from 2,462 in October 2009 to 4,457 in October 2015 (New Jersey Department of Education, personal communication, January 18, 2018). The Christie administration’s brand of neoliberal education reform and disenfranchisement of Camden residents resulted in a few flashpoints of resistance: isolated actions by students to protect their teachers, by parents to protect their schools, or by unions to protect their members. But these actions were organized to address specific threats and were ineffective; as a result, they dissipated quickly. There has been little in the form of coalition building, sustained effort, or political carryover from individual actions. Nor has the movement extended into the wider resident population, as was the case in Newark. The earliest Camden protests were against the administration’s failure to build a new school to replace the one in Lanning Square, which had been demolished in 2002. When Christie came into office in 2010, funds to build a replacement school and construction plans were already in place. Thus, when he visited Lanning Square for a press conference on January 12, 2012, local activists attended, expecting to hear that their local public school would be rebuilt. Instead, the governor announced and signed the Urban Hope Act, creating renaissance schools, and promised that Lanning Square would be the site of the first such school (Mulvihill, 2012). 3 At the heart of the renaissance school model are a number of distinctions from charter schools, responses to critiques of charter schools, and economic development objectives. Though renaissance schools, like charter schools, are run by third-party, nonprofit operators (in this case, Knowledge is Power Program [KIPP], Mastery, and Uncommon, all of whom run charter schools in other districts), they must be approved by the local school board rather than the New Jersey Commissioner of Education. Theoretically, this would make them more accountable to local communities than charter schools. In practice, however, such accountability has not emerged because Camden is the only city to adopt renaissance schools and all approvals have taken place while the city is under state takeover. A second major distinction between charter and renaissance schools is that renaissance schools use a hybrid enrollment model, with a catchment area in which students from a community have priority seats in the school, but the school also has the option to accept applications from elsewhere if they have remaining capacity. The hybrid model is specifically designed to respond to concerns that charter schools “cream” students from existing districts and destabilize urban communities. In practice, catchment areas interact with school closings to serve a secondary purpose: ensuring that new renaissance schools do not sit empty in a city in which school capacity vastly exceeds the number of actual students. The catchment areas also allow renaissance schools to scale up faster by giving them a designated constituency. Critics of the Urban Hope Act argue that the catchment area model is also designed to give gentrifying neighborhoods specific schools for their children (Benson, 2015). In theory, renaissance schools held the potential to be a new form of charter-like schools that adapted to progressive critiques about local accountability, “creaming,” and neighborhood destabilization. In practice, under state control in Camden, it is unclear whether any aspect of this progressive promise has been realized. When Camden’s school board considered the first five proposed renaissance schools, community members opposed to more privatization protested, and the board rejected all of the applications. However, after it became clear that no school would be built at Lanning Square unless it was a renaissance school, the board came under substantial pressure to reconsider, and two of the board members reversed their votes and approved KIPP’s renaissance application. In 2013, the Lanning Square land was turned over to KIPP to become the site of the first renaissance school, the KIPP–Cooper Norcross School, a collaboration between the family foundation of Camden County Democratic Party leader George Norcross and the KIPP charter network (Vargas, 2013a). In 2013, shortly after this brief display of school board autonomy, the state took over control of the Camden City School District. Prior to the takeover, the school board was preparing to hire a new superintendent and to enact a new 5-year plan that included elements to root out corruption in its professional service agreements, to incorporate community schools into the district, and to address the empty school building in Lanning Square through a request for proposals for the type of district-run school that the neighborhood had publicly called for. After the state takeover, those school board representatives who had been critical of state control or who had voted against the renaissance schools resigned in protest or were cycled off the school board (Vargas, 2013b). This restructuring effectively squashed the reform visions of the local board. Community activists subsequently focused on returning local control as a prerequisite for any more positive changes in the district. Following the state takeover, Governor Christie appointed Paymon Rouhanifard as superintendent. In 2014, after a 100-day listening tour, Superintendent Rouhanifard launched the Camden Commitment. On its surface, the Camden Commitment focused on noncontroversial items, such as guaranteeing student safety and building more modern school facilities and did not overtly mention school choice or charter schools. But Jose Delgado, a former Camden school board member, quickly pointed out that the promises for new school buildings were de facto promises of renaissance schools, because there was no indication that the district planned to build any new schools. The Urban Hope Act also included a clause requiring the first renaissance schools to be housed in new facilities. Similarly, promises to increase “excellent schools” largely referred to plans to use renaissance schools to educate more than half of the school district’s student body (Mooney, 2014). The Camden Commitment initiative led to a substantial expansion of “no excuses” renaissance and charter schools. This model, which was already being used in Camden by charter schools such as LEAP and Democracy Prep, focuses on strict discipline and features longer school days, double periods of math and reading, and standardized test scores as a measure of school quality. Rouhanifard argued that while reforming the existing traditional public schools was necessary, the low performance of the district would take time to correct and current students in the system deserved expanded choices immediately, as evidenced by the low test scores at existing schools. However, a Rutgers University analysis found that those schools targeted for closing and conversion to charter schools under the Camden Commitment were “not the ‘most struggling schools’ in Camden, as the district assert[ed]” (Weber, 2015, p. 5). The analysis further found that the conversions would negatively impact “Camden’s black teachers more than its white teachers” and also would negatively impact staff “with 5 to 24 years of experience” versus those “with less than 5 years” (Weber, 2015, p. 1). Even before the community was informed about the school closings, the launch of the Camden Commitment drew hundreds of angry residents, many of whom came to protest the rumored focus on charter and renaissance schools. However, there was no public comment allowed at the announcement. At the next board meeting, many of the protesters who attended in order to voice their opposition found themselves silenced once again; they were prevented from entering the building when the meeting room was deemed too small to accommodate them. The protesters stood outside in freezing temperatures for several hours while Camden police officers from nine patrol cars ensured that the protesters did not enter the building, not even “to use the bathroom facilities” (Wheeler, 2014, para. 3). Later that year, after the district announced that 206 teachers would be let go, students at Camden’s four public high schools staged a walkout, marching to the district offices in defense of their teachers (Laday, 2014). The Camden Education Association—Camden’s teachers’ union—also protested, partnering with local activists to show up in force to a handful of board of education monthly meetings. But these incidents were not sustained despite organizing efforts by local activists. Although there was little formal protest activity, public comments at board meetings were almost universally against the changes proposed by the new superintendent. Rouhanifard insisted that a greater number of parents were supportive behind closed doors, pointing to the high number of parents already in charters and to increases in the enrollment numbers once the renaissance schools opened. But in public meetings, critics outnumbered by almost 10 to 1 those speaking in support of the Christie administration’s changes (Danley, 2015). In the spring of 2015, however, that started to change. Parents of children at the new renaissance schools, which had been open for just under a year, began organizing under the banner Parents for Great Camden Schools. Though ostensibly for any “great schools,” the group routinely gave testimony about the benefits of renaissance schools and argued for school choice. In addition to a paid executive director, Parents for Great Camden Schools employed a professional organizer. 4 The organization has refused to disclose to the authors the funding source that enabled these hires. When the district began a series of forums to discuss the future of individual Camden schools, few parents, residents, or activists showed up, in part because earlier efforts at the Camden Commitment launch and board of education meetings had produced little effect. At the meetings, the superintendent presented data that indicated that specific schools in the district were far below state averages and had low attendance. He offered several potential solutions, including having the schools join the New Jersey Education Association’s Priority Schools Initiative, a program that supported schools’ development of long-term planning through engagement of in-school and community stakeholders. However, his comments indicated that he believed that the best option was for the schools to be converted to renaissance schools. Most of the public comment at the forums came from Parents for Great Camden Schools, whose members testified about their own children’s experiences in the existing renaissance schools. The parents of children in the public schools being targeted for conversion were conspicuously absent. After the forums, the Camden School District proceeded with the conversions, pointing to the public comments from Parents for Great Camden Schools to justify their decision. Even when parents showed up, it had little impact. For example, the conversion of McGraw Elementary School to a Mastery renaissance school prompted a contentious meeting in which parents stated that they were against the takeover. Activists gathered signatures of parents who wanted the school to remain public. However, because parents in Camden had no formal say regarding the conversion process—not even an elected school board to champion their cause, as was the case in Newark—the district moved forward in turning McGraw over to the Mastery charter network. There were other isolated protests. In September 2015, when Camden County hosted a school choice conference by the New Jersey School Choice Education Reform Alliance, protestors organized by the union-backed nonprofit New Jersey Communities United and the grassroots organization Save Camden Schools chanted outside the conference and even confronted George Norcross, who was speaking at the conference. The police responded and surrounded the protestors, resulting in pictures that likely contributed to public perception of the protesters as fringe actors, making it more challenging to generate further community resistance. When facilities workers and other staff were laid off at the end of the 2015–2016 school year, their union staged a series of political actions. And in the summer of 2016, local activists teamed up with New Jersey Communities United once again to try to put a question on the ballot that would ensure that Camden had an elected school board rather than an appointed school board. A similar effort the previous summer failed to garner the necessary signatures, primarily because activists in the city struggled to unite to organize a large and consistent enough team to go door to door to collect the signatures. The second effort was better organized and gathered the necessary number of signatures. However, a local official said that the signatures would not be considered because it was not possible to put the issue on the ballot during a state takeover. An attempt to convert the board of education back to an elected board through a lawsuit was dismissed on similar grounds. With the school board stripped of its power by the state takeover, the increase in the number of renaissance schools proceeded without formal opposition. In the spring of 2014, the Philadelphia-based Mastery charter school chain received approval to take over schools in north and east Camden, and the Uncommon charter network was granted approval to take over a school in Whitman Park (Mindock, 2014). Those schools, along with KIPP–Cooper Norcross Academy, opened in fall 2014 (Dunn, 2014). Mastery, Uncommon, and KIPP also moved forward with plans to renovate and build additional facilities (Steele, 2015, 2016; Walsh, 2016). By the fall of 2017, 25.5% of Camden’s publicly funded students were attending renaissance school, 28.8% were attending traditional charter schools, and 45.7% were attending district schools (New Jersey Department of Education, personal communication, January 18, 2018; New Jersey Department of Education, 2017). The renaissance schools’ percentage is likely to continue increasing as they add more grades and additional renaissance school facilities come online. The Camden City School District capped the total enrollment of renaissance schools at just under 10,000. That would leave less than 10% of Camden’s students in district schools, assuming current charter and total enrollment levels. With the exception of a few isolated incidents, the reaction to the Christie administration’s reforms in Camden has been fairly quiet. No elected officials have spoken out against the reforms. No candidates have gained traction using opposition to changes in education policy as a key rallying issue. There have been few public demonstrations, and the individuals who represent Camden in the state legislature introduced and supported the Urban Hope legislation that created renaissance schools. There is no indication that Camden will see the type of political upheaval or sustained community protest against neoliberal reforms that Newark experienced. A tale of two cities Our analysis of why residents of Camden and Newark responded so differently to the state’s efforts to impose neoliberal reforms on their schools is consistent with the hypothesis that such resistance requires social and economic capital and access to information. Both of those factors were in short supply in Camden, undermining activists’ abilities to expand their coalition and mount a consistent resistance. Economic and social capital Resistance to neoliberal education reform in Camden has been hampered by the city’s extreme poverty and lack of a middle class. Like Newark, Camden has long been a depository for those who find themselves impoverished and excluded from the surrounding New Jersey suburbs. Unlike Newark and many other postindustrial cities, however, Camden faces almost universal extreme poverty. The 2017 estimated poverty rate for the city of Camden was 37.4% versus 10% statewide (U.S. Census Bureau, 2017). This limits the amount of economic as well as social capital that Camden’s residents bring to political battles. Newark is more economically diverse than Camden. Its extreme poverty is concentrated in specific wards, whereas other wards are solidly middle class and house many residents with long-standing ties to the city. Unlike Camden, many of whose residents leave as soon as their economic situation allows them to, being a longtime resident of Newark comes with bragging rights and is almost a prerequisite for political legitimacy. When Cory Booker first ran for mayor in 2002, 5 years after moving to the city, his opponent, Sharpe James, successfully tagged him as an outsider, drawing on the distrust that such a short tenure generated from many Newark residents (Giambusso, 2013). Newark’s historic middle class includes some of the most prominent leaders of the resistance to neoliberal education reform. Mayor Ras Baraka’s father, Amiri Baraka, was a nationally renowned Newark-based poet and civil rights leader whose parents worked as a postal supervisor and a social worker in the city (Parks, Giambusso, & Queally, 2014). Many of the other leaders of the resistance to neoliberal reform also came from middle-class families with long-standing ties to Newark. They included Antoinette Baskerville-Richardson, who was president of the Newark School Advisory Board and both attended and taught in Newark public schools; Junius Williams, a Yale-educated lawyer who directed the Abbott Leadership Institute at Rutgers University; Deborah Smith-Gregory, a retired Newark public school teacher who, in 2013, became president of the Newark Branch of the NAACP; Mary Bennett, chair of the Newark Educational Success Board, who grew up in Newark and worked for 26 years as a teacher and principal for Newark Public Schools; and Wilhelmina Holder, president of the Secondary Parent Council, “an organization made up of parents and grandparents of Newark public school students” (ACLU New Jersey, n.d., para. 1). Being middle class gave these individuals economic capital, and having roots in Newark provided them with the social capital and political credibility necessary to wage a multiyear resistance campaign. Newark’s social capital is further strengthened by its robust civic sector, which houses many nonprofit organizations. Some of those nonprofits played a key role in Newark’s resistance to the neoliberal reforms. For example, in October 2012, the Education Law Center, a Newark-based advocacy organization responsible for the Abbott decisions that led to New Jersey’s progressive school funding, filed a legal challenge to the Christie administration’s control of Newark schools. 5 This was part of the organization’s ongoing provision of information and assistance that helped the resistance mount legal challenges, such as the July 2012 filing of a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, alleging that the prior year’s school closings had “disproportionately affected minorities and students with disabilities” (Black, 2015, para. 1). Another nonprofit, New Jersey Communities United, organized parents and high-school students in opposition to the reforms. The student organizing took place under the auspices of the Newark Students Union, which was formed by high-school students who used street protests, walk-outs, and sit-ins at district headquarters to very publicly challenge and embarrass Superintendent Anderson. For example, in April 2013, 900 students from half a dozen Newark public high schools walked out midday to protest the Christie administration’s underfunding of their schools (Mooney, 2013a). That evening, the Newark School Advisory Board cast a unanimous vote of “no-confidence in the vision, leadership and direction of the state-appointed superintendent, Cami Anderson” (Mooney, 2013b, para. 5). The Newark civil sector’s ability to take action also was strengthened by collaboration among both Newark-based and local, regional, and national organizations. A subset of the Newark nonprofits and most of the local unions coordinated their resistance through the Coalition for Effective Newark Public Schools, which they formed following the fall 2010 announcement of Zuckerberg’s donation to jointly “fight back against the assault” and respond “to the maelstrom” they were facing in the district (Pugliese, 2013). 6 Meeting regularly, the coalition, which subsequently morphed into the Alliance for Newark Public Schools, played an important role in coordinating the resistance of its member organizations (Goldstein, 2010). Some Newark nonprofits also are linked to national or regional organizations that provide them with access to financial resources and networks of support and information. For example, PULSE, a small organization started by two Newark parents, is part of the national Journey for Justice Alliance, a coalition of groups across the country fighting against neoliberal education reform and in support of equitable public education. In contrast, Camden’s civil society infrastructure is much smaller and weaker. The small number of middle-class residents makes it more challenging for advocacy groups to survive without financial support from the local businesses and foundations connected to the Camden County Democratic Party. The very high levels of poverty limit the number of individuals who can afford to volunteer their time. Community groups also know not to speak too loudly or in opposition to local politicians for fear of being punished by losing access to city hall or other resources—among the few opportunities to earn a middle-class salary in Camden. For example, Camden Churches Organized for People, a historically influential faith-based organizing operation, largely stayed out of the Camden education discussions, seeing the issue as too big of a political risk to its economic justice and criminal reform campaigns (author’s field notes, March 11, 2015). Residents often speak of being “blacklisted” if they stand against the local Democratic Party, claiming that they are unable to get jobs in county government, to receive grants from county government, or even to get phone calls returned by city hall (author’s field notes, March 11, 2015). A culture of extreme retaliation, in combination with extreme poverty and little local political control, has contributed to a community hesitant to invest in sustained political resistance. As Father Michael Doyle, a priest in Camden’s Waterfront South neighborhood, acknowledged, “It’s hard to stand up with your foot on my neck” (Gillette, 2006, p. 95). Jose Delgado, a former school board member, describes it similarly, saying, “If you frustrate a community for a long period of time, the community has a tendency to go give up” (author’s field notes, July 7, 2015). With few Camden residents on either side of the education debate engaged and a mixture of state control and local political retaliation limiting the effectiveness of any protests, it is difficult to tell what the majority of residents want or believe about specific reforms. What is clear, however, is that activists have been unable to spark a fire in residents who have “given up” because they are used to having little control over local institutions. Access to information Newark activists benefited from having access to local and national news outlets that provided ongoing reporting about education in the city. Locally, coverage came from the Newark-based Star-Ledger newspaper and from a blog written by former Star-Ledger reporter and columnist Bob Braun. Both provided a venue to highlight news leaks about neoliberal reform efforts and were read by large numbers of Newark residents. Stories by the Star-Ledger about secret plans to close and/or reorganize schools brought out many angry residents to advisory board meetings where they loudly challenged the superintendent on several occasions. An example of this is the February 2011 Star-Ledger story about a secret plan “drawn up by an outside consulting firm” that recommended closing or consolidating “several of the city’s public schools to make space for 11 charter schools in a massive reshuffling that could affect thousands of students” (Heyboer, 2011). News of this leaked plan contributed to a growing suspicion among community residents, prompting about 300 parents and community members to attend that evening’s Newark school board meeting and express “vociferous outrage”  (Calefati, 2011, para. 1). A majority of the school board also expressed “disbelief about the lack of transparency surrounding the new plan”  (Calefati, 2011, para. 1). The board president indicated that the board was “deeply disrespected by this process,” and another board member “demanded an apology from the Christie administration” for excluding the board from the preparation of the report (Calefati, 2011, para. 1). As this episode demonstrates, the broad reach of the Star-Ledger into Newark facilitated the board’s resistance. Braun’s blog helped inform and energize activists by breaking stories such as his January 2014 multipart expose on Pink Hula Hoop, a for-profit corporation created by TEAM/KIPP Charter School trustees to facilitate the purchase and renovation of a public school building (Braun, 2014). Braun’s Pink Hula Hoop coverage was so widely read and influential that it forced the head of TEAM charter school to respond publicly to the resulting outcry (Hill, 2014). The Newark resistance also benefited from the national exposure generated by Zuckerberg’s gift and its connection to the rising political stars of Cory Booker and Chris Christie. Beyond the extensive press coverage of the announcement itself, Zuckerberg’s donation prompted former Washington Post reporter Dale Russakoff to research and write a book that detailed the reform efforts and the many problems that they faced. Russakoff previewed her findings in a widely read excerpt published in the May 19, 2014, New Yorker (Russakoff, 2014). In contrast, Camden does not have a local newspaper. Its residents must rely on periodic coverage of the city by regional papers such as the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Courier Post. The sporadic coverage minimizes the impact of any Camden-related stories. For example, as in Newark, there was a leaked consultant report about Camden that laid out a state plan to increase the number of “no excuses” charter schools, close local schools, and strip power from the local school board (Weber, 2012). However, the relative weakness of the reporting newspaper, South Jersey’s Courier-Post, meant that the story was shared mostly through education bloggers. In Camden, it became little more than an urban legend, compounded by the fact that the Courier-Post did not preserve the story in its archives. As the newspaper industry has shrunk and consolidated, coverage of Camden has become even more sporadic and rare. The lack of local reporters has made it easier for the Camden superintendent and other reform leaders to target regional and national news outlets as venues for public relations accounts of the neoliberal reforms. For example, in March 2016, CNN ran a 7½-min segment lauding the KIPP renaissance school. The piece included interviews with Mayor Redd and the head of the Camden teachers’ union but failed to interview a single Camden resident opposed to the reforms or even one Camden district parent (Harlow, 2016). Political control Our analysis of community resistance in Camden and Newark identified a third variable that intersects with social and economic capital and access to information. That variable is control of the city through political machines that limit the sustainability of resistance movements. In Newark, resistance to neoliberal education reform was led and supported by numerous elected political leaders, including board of education and city council members and some of the state legislators. Following the May 2014 election of Ras Baraka, Newark’s resistance was also led by the city’s mayor. This broad-based political leadership provided direction, information, and assurance to residents. It also served as a “legitimate” voice of opposition that influenced media coverage, resulting in a generally positive portrayal of the resistance to neoliberal reforms. In contrast, almost all of Camden’s political leaders supported the neoliberal reforms. The city’s political leaders even supported the state takeover of the district, unlike in Newark. Camden Mayor Dana Redd stood by Governor Christie’s side when he announced the takeover and spoke approvingly of his actions. Camden’s board of education refused to challenge the takeover, with the majority of the board voting to waive its right to a legal hearing over the state’s intervention. Camden’s state legislative delegation also introduced and championed the passage of the Urban Hope Act, which created the renaissance schools. The difference between the way the political establishment in Newark and Camden responded to neoliberal education reforms reflects the hegemonic control of Camden politics by Camden County Democratic Party Leader George Norcross. Camden’s mayor and other city and state political leaders are part of the Norcross political organization, as are almost all of the state legislators representing southern New Jersey's seven districts, accounting for more than 15% of all New Jersey state legislators and 25% of all Democratic state legislators (Lizza, 2014). Norcross’s power is such that it enabled him to use his broad political reach, his positive relationship with Governor Christie, and the support of Republican legislators to enact public employee pension and health-care reform legislation that was strongly opposed by the overwhelming majority of Democratic state legislators and their constituents across the state (Rizzo, 2011). Norcross’s influence even helped his brother Don become a congressman. 7 The Norcross reach is very evident in Camden, where the city’s first renaissance school bears his name. The KIPP–Cooper Norcross Academy was built just blocks from Cooper Hospital, whose board of directors is chaired by George Norcross. As a state senator, George’s brother Don sponsored the Urban Hope legislation, which made renaissance schools possible. The absence of political leadership for the opposition to neoliberal reforms in Camden also reflects the city’s lack of an elected board of education. Although Newark’s elected advisory board of education did not have the power to govern the district because of state control, its members were able to lead the resistance, meeting regularly and offering a friendly forum for residents who opposed neoliberal reforms. Being elected by the residents also gave Newark’s board members a political legitimacy and stability that Camden’s board members lack. In contrast, Camden’s appointed board has no autonomy or external legitimacy. After Camden’s board initially voted down the KIPP–Cooper Norcross Academy renaissance school application, Mayor Redd replaced those members who opposed it or had failed to support neoliberal reforms in other ways. This echoed Camden’s 2002 loss of a democratically elected board of education after the elected board challenged pay-to-play contracting and stripped a politically connected firm of a large district contract (Gillette, 2006). Newark is no stranger to this kind of parochial politics. In fact, Steve Adubato Sr., who was a politically powerful leader of Newark’s North Ward, partnered with Norcross and the Christie administration in passing the pension and health care reform legislation opposed by other Democratic legislators (Rizzo, 2011). However, Adubato’s influence weakened as he aged, culminating with his 2012 decision not to run a slate in the Newark board of education election (Giambusso, 2012). The Children’s First slate supported by Ras Baraka secured two of the three available spots in that election, demonstrating Baraka’s power in advance of his successful 2014 run for mayor (Eustachewich, 2012). Newark also has nearly four times the population of Camden. 8 As a result, Newark residents constitute the majority of voters in two state legislative districts, the 28th and 29th, versus Camden’s single legislative district. The two legislative districts split geographically and politically, with the state senator and two assembly members in the 29th legislative district aligned with Adubato and the state legislators in the 28th district helping to lead the opposition to neoliberal reforms. Lessons learned Our study of resistance to neoliberal education reforms in Newark and Camden affirms prior findings regarding the importance of social and economic capital and access to information for creating conditions that enable sustained resistance under undemocratic governance mechanisms. We also identify an additional factor that helps explain the different levels of community resistance in Camden and Newark: the role of parochial and oppressive politics that include retaliatory tactics that undermine resistance. These factors interact with each other in important ways. For example, Camden’s oppressive politics and lack of economic capital impeded the emergence of potential leaders for the resistance. Ultimately, our argument is that these three intersecting explanatory variables help to explain what enables sustained resistance to neoliberal reform. However, we make no claims about the success of that resistance in stopping or reversing the reforms. Any gains by opponents of neoliberal reform can be fragile and co-opted (O’Toole & Meier, 2004). Urban communities also are frequently subject to multiple undemocratic governance mechanisms. Although Newark residents have regained local democratic control of their public schools, they still are vulnerable to the state’s ability to approve new charter schools and expand existing ones, regardless of local community wishes. By the fall of 2017, close to 16,000 Newark residents attended charter schools, nearly three times as many as when Christie was first elected governor (New Jersey Department of Education, personal communication, January 18, 2018). The Christie administration also approved more than 9,000 additional charter school seats to come online in Newark over the next few years. If the strain of the rapidly growing charter sector tips Newark public schools into financial insolvency, the city’s strong grassroots resistance to neoliberal education reform may prove insufficient to ensure the survival of its local public schools. Nevertheless, we believe that it is important to understand what enables sustained resistance to exist in the presence of undemocratic governance mechanisms, in order to help build an infrastructure supportive of such organizing. That infrastructure could emphasize alternative media (such as we saw with Bob Braun’s blog in Newark), open political processes, and denser and better-connected networks of activists. Even when that infrastructure is present, grassroots organizers often face an uphill climb. Lacking that infrastructure tips the scales overwhelmingly away from communities and toward the neoliberal education reformers. Acknowledgments We thank Alex Barree for his research assistance and Barbara Ferman, Michelle Fine, Ryan Good, Stan Karp, Sharon Krengel, Leah Owens, Alan Sadovnik, and Lauren Wells for their helpful feedback. Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors. Table 1. Racial and ethnic composition.  White (%)a Black (%)Hispanic (%)Asian (%)Camden5.9%45.4%48.5%3.2%Newark10.7%50.1%36.4%1.7%New Jersey55.1%15.0%20.4%10.1% Note. Data from U.S. Census Bureau (2017). aWhite refers to non-Hispanic Whites only. Notes 1. Mayoral control of public schools is not technically undemocratic because mayors are elected, frequently with higher turnout than found in school board elections. Models of mayoral control also vary in their levels of community input into the decision-making process. Nevertheless, we include mayoral control as one of the undemocratic governance mechanisms because many mayoral control models replace locally elected or locally appointed school boards with governing bodies selected entirely by the mayor. This removes, or at least attenuates, the ability of residents of the communities where those schools are located to impact the boards’ decisions (Ravitch, 2010). 2. The local school councils were composed of teachers and parents and were given a degree of decision-making authority over personnel, budgeting, and curricula. 3. The Urban Hope Act was written by state legislators who represented Camden specifically for that district. Although the legislation provided an opportunity for three New Jersey cities—Camden, Trenton, and Newark—to have renaissance schools, Trenton and Newark never adopted the program. They had been added to the legislation to disguise the fact that it was intended solely for Camden. 4. The executive director of Parents for Great Camden Schools is married to a member of Camden's school board whom the mayor appointed to the board, following the state takeover. 5. The Education Law Center argued that the state had to return local control to Newark since the district had met the performance requirements that triggered relinquishing state control. In response, the education commissioner conducted an unprecedented midcourse reevaluation of the Newark district’s performance and dramatically lowered the grades it had received only a year earlier. The court then rejected the Education Law Center’s legal challenge on the grounds that Newark’s performance no longer warranted a return to local control (Education Law Center, 2012). 6. Organization members of the coalition included Abbott Leadership Institute; City Association of Supervisors and Administrators; Essex/West Hudson Central Labor Council; International Union of Operating Engineers Local 68 and its branches; Newark Chapter of the NAACP; Newark Education Workers Caucus; Newark Secondary Parents Council; Newark Teachers Association; Newark Teachers Union; New Jersey Communities United; Parents Unified for Local School Education; Newark Municipal Council Education Committee; SEIU Local 617, and Thirteenth Ave. School PTA (Pugliese, 2013). 7. Don Norcross rose quickly to power as part of a game of musical chairs with Norcross-aligned Democratic politicians. Don Norcross was elected to the New Jersey Assembly in 2009. 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Race Ethnicity and Education , 8(1), 69–91. doi:10.1080/1361332052000341006  [Taylor & Francis Online], [Google Scholar]Additional informationAuthor informationStephen Danley Stephen Danley is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Public Policy and Administration at Rutgers–Camden University and a Marshall Scholar. Dr. Danley’s research examines the intersection of activism and urban social movements, often using ethnography. Recent projects include investigations of neighborhood movements in post-Katrina New Orleans and research on community activism in Camden, New Jersey. Julia Sass Rubin Julia Sass Rubin is an Associate Professor at the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy, Rutgers University, and a Visiting Associate Professor at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. Dr. Rubin’s research examines the intersection of education policy, community development, and social justice. Recent projects include investigations of the impact of charter schools on suburban communities and parental organizing in response to market-based education reform.