NEOLIBERALISM AND THE RHETORIC OF SCHOOL CLOSURE IN LATINA/O

Chad M. Nelson

A Dissertation

Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

May 2019

Committee:

Alberto González, Advisor

Christopher Frey Graduate Faculty Representative

John Dowd

Ellen Gorsevski

© 2019

Chad M. Nelson

All Rights Reserved iii ABSTRACT

Alberto González, Advisor

In February 2012, Emergency Manager Roy Roberts announced the closure of

Southwestern High School in the City of Detroit. I argue in this dissertation that the rhetorical discourses used by policymakers to justify the school closure represent a neoliberal restructuring of the urban environment and social relations in the city, particularly for Latina/o Detroit.

Applying the critical methodologies of ideology rhetorical criticism and a dialectical approach to culture, I analyze the ideological mystification of three neoliberal logics—crisis, instrumental rationality, and innovation—in education and urban policy texts in relation to the cultural sensibilities and experiences of the Latina/o community in Southwest Detroit. Critique of the rhetorical features of these neoliberal logics reveals mystification of is not only a matter of inducing audience cooperation, but also enforcement that there is no alternative to the current arrangement of education politics. Situated within an urban crisis situation, a neoliberal public vocabulary confines the school’s value to its financial output and in the entelechial pursuit of perfecting school closure criteria, technocrats and ordinary people are compelled by a terministic compulsion to carry out the implications of instrumental rationality. As people participate in market valuations of school spaces and colorblind market argumentative criteria, the neoliberalization of school and education meanings is mystified through a rhetorical process of enclosure that entails closing off, seizing, and repurposing ways of perceiving and acting in urban spaces that are irreducible to market terms. Consequently, the Latina/o community in

Southwest Detroit is dispossessed of a communal resource and their cultural sensibilities and experiences negated as third persona in the school closure discourse. Blurring the line between persuasion and coercion, I have concluded that these rhetorical features are systemically violent in that they normalize an inequitable status quo and silence victims of the structural violence of iv school closings. I also conclude that commoning represents a vernacular cultural practice for

Latina/o students in Southwest Detroit to struggle against neoliberalism and toward locating non-commodified communal values in order to claim a right to the city not only for themselves, but for all Detroit Public School (DPS) students.

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To my spouse and best friend, Naomi Nelson, whose constant support, many sacrifices, and

gentle reminders made this all possible. vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It truly takes a village of mentors, colleagues, friends, and family to write a dissertation and this is no exception. This project began and finished under the generous guidance of my advisor, Dr. Alberto González. In addition to his insightful instruction and constant encouragement, his mentorship continues to help me navigate this strange world of the academy.

It’s truly an honor to call myself one of your advisees. To my other dissertation committee members, I cannot adequately express my gratitude for your patience and appreciation for your feedback. Dr. Ellen Gorsevski introduced me to rhetoric for which I will be forever grateful; Dr.

Christopher Frey kindly shared his deep understanding of the field of education policy with me; and Dr. John Dowd stepped in to offer crucial insights that were instrumental in finalizing the dissertation. This dissertation would have been sorely incomplete without the mentorship of others at Bowling Green State University (BGSU) such as Dr. Michael Butterworth, Dr. Clayton

Rosati, and Dr. Tom Mascaro. For good or ill, I am a product of your collective efforts to make me a better academic and human being. I am in your debt. This dissertation also came about through many interactions with treasured colleagues and dear friends. In particular, Dr. Matt

Meier and Dr. Chris Medjesky were greatly influential in contributing fresh ideas and encouragement when I needed it. Thank you, guys. I’d also like to thank Adrianne Meier, along with Matt, for the many conversations we had in their living room and over dinner. The arguments in this dissertation were also shaped by conversations with my writing group partners at Florida Gulf Coast University (FGCU). Thank you, Dr. Eun-Young Lee, Dr. Jon Braddy, and

Dr. Margaret Hambrick for your detailed advice on earlier drafts. To my other colleagues and friends at FGCU who helped throughout this dissertating process, including Dr. Sachiko Tankei-

Aminian, Dr. Kevin Aho, and Dr. Bethany Petry, your kindness will not be forgotten. Although we are far away from each other now, Dr. Courtney Wright, Dr. Brion White, and Dr. Suzanne vii Berg (who passed away before she could see this project finished) were invaluably encouraging.

Dr. Thomas Pedroni and Elena Herrada were early contributors to this project as they pointed me to pertinent policy documents to include in the study. And lastly, I could not have made it to this point without the laughs shared with my brothers, Jonathan Nelson and Eric Nelson; the help of my dear grandmothers, Lucy Nelson and Ruth Adkins; and the support of my parents, Vickie

Holmes and John Nelson (who sadly passed away while I was proposing this project). Thank you for teaching me by example to be inquisitive. I hope your care for others is reflected in these pages. Finally, this dissertation would be sitting incomplete on my desktop without the sacrifices and love of my spouse, Naomi Nelson. Words cannot express my appreciation and admiration of you.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………… ...... 1

Neoliberalism and U.S. Education Policy...... 4

Rhetorical Studies and Ideology ...... 7

Latina/o Communication Studies ...... 10

Methodology and Procedures ...... 12

Overview of Dissertation ...... 16

CHAPTER II: A HISTORY OF THE CITY OF DETROIT AND ITS EDUCATION

POLITICS, 1909-2005 ...... 19

The Progressive Era: Struggles in the “Wonderful City of the Magic Motor”

(1909-1929)...... 21

The New Deal Era: The Contradictions of Rights-Based Liberalism (1929-

1971)……………………………………………………………………………...... 36

The Neoliberal Era: The Urban Donut and Corporate Sensibilities (1971-

Present)...... 55

Conclusion ...... 70

CHAPTER III: CRISIS IN DETROIT: THE KAIROS OF RACIALIZED

ACCUMULATION BY DISPOSSESSION...... 72

Rhetorical Situations and Rhetorical Crises……………………………………….. 77

A Rhetorical Situation of Crisis in Detroit and Detroit Public Schools………….... 83

Underutilization and Underperformance: Constructions of Southwestern High

School’s Crisis………...... ……………………………...... 95 ix

Rhetorical Constructions of Crisis and the Dispossession of a Latina/o Urban

Space…………………………………………………...... 111

Conclusion...... 122

CHAPTER IV: INSTRUMENTAL RATIONALITY: RHETORICAL SPECTERS OF

THE MARKET AND WHITENESS IN SCHOOL CLOSING CRITERIA...... 124

Instrumental Rationality and Rhetoric…………………………………………...... 133

Instrumental Rationality: A Rhetorical Pretext for the Entelechial Advancement of

the Market …..…………………………………………………………………...... 143

The Standard of Whiteness: Colorblindly (E)Race(ing) to the Top of the

Meritocracy……………………………………………………...... 156

The Third Persona in Southwestern High’s Closure……………………………….. 165

Conclusion...... 170

CHAPTER V: INNOVATION: RHETORICAL STRUGGLES OVER THE COMMONS

EDUCATION AND SCHOOLS IN SOUTHWEST DETROIT…………………………… 173

Legitimizing Rights to Innovate School Governance: The Emergency Manager’s

Presumption...... 178

Legitimizing Rights to Innovate School Governance: Student Challenges ...... 185

Defining Innovation of Quality Education: The Emergency Manager’s

Movement..…...... 192

Defining Innovation of Quality Education: Student’s Alternative Imagination ...... 201

Conclusion...... 211

CHAPTER VI: CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………… 214

Reviewing ……………………………………………………………...... 215 x

Contributions and Suggestions for Future Research……………………………….. 218

Neoliberalism in rhetorical studies ...... 218

Neoliberalism in intercultural communication...... 222

REFERENCES ...... 225 1

CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION

Driving north on the Fisher Freeway over the River Rouge, the architecturally eclectic

Detroit skyline comes into view for the first time. The freeway follows the towards the city turning abruptly away from the river near the Ambassador Bridge, one of the busiest international trade crossings in North America (Wilbur Smith Associates, 2010). Before crossing over Avenue and arriving in Corktown, motorists on the Fisher Freeway pass under the

Bagley Pedestrian Bridge. Constructed in 2010 as part of the $230 million I-75 Gateway Project, the pedestrian bridge spans 407 feet suspended by 15 tension cables that hang from a central 150 foot concrete tower. The bridge connects the Southwest Detroit community that was once ruptured by the construction of the Fisher Freeway. This community has become known as

“Mexicantown.” Since 1917, Latina/os primarily from , Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the

Caribbean have migrated to Detroit, particularly Southwest Detroit (Badillo, 2003; Weeks &

Benites, 1979). According to the U.S. Bureau of the Census (2011), 30 percent of all Latina/os in

Detroit reside in the Southwest district, and in the seven census tracts that comprise the majority of Southwest Detroit, 67.7 percent identify as Latina/o. In a city hemorrhaging residents since the late 1950s, the Latina/o population in Detroit is the only growing population, increasing by

70 percent since 1990 (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 2011). Media outlets hail the “barrio” as the city’s “small glimmer of hope” (Llenas, 2013, ¶ 3). But these news narratives obscure what I argue in this dissertation is a neoliberal restructuring of Detroit’s barrio. By neoliberal restructuring, I mean an attempt to subject all social life to the dictates of capitalist markets. One way towards understanding how this transformation of urban environment and social relations operates and its significance is through a close reading and critique of the language used to justify the closure of a neighborhood public school—Southwestern High School. 2

Before its abrupt closure, Southwestern High School, which served Boynton-Oakwood

Heights, Delray, and Springwells Village in Southwest Detroit, housed the only Sheltered

English Instruction Program in the city. Parents and activists saw threats of the school’s closure as an attack on Spanish-speaking students (Cersonsky, 2013). Closing Southwestern High would leave Southwest Detroit with only one high school, which is a violation of the Equal Education

Opportunities Act and Title VI, according to State Representative Rashida Tlaib (Dawsey, 2013).

In one of the most heavily polluted neighborhoods in the (Abdel-Baqui, 2018), the school supplied after-hours access to a heated pool, a renovated running track, and a full-service

Henry Ford health clinic. A bedrock of the community, Southwestern High provided a sense of stability for the neighborhood. But despite its communal importance, in February 2012, Detroit

Public Schools (DPS) Emergency Manger Roy Roberts announced that it and eight other schools would be closed at the end of the 2011-2012 school year. As Roberts (2012a) wrote in a letter to parents and guardians of DPS students, Southwestern High School is “far under-utilized,” and so the decision has been made to “close, consolidate and merge schools, allowing us to drive additional resources to a smaller group of higher-quality facilities” (p. 1). Taking into account the possible disenfranchisement and displacement of Latina/o communities implicated in this school closing, those market terms—“under-utilized,” “consolidate,” merge,” and “drive additional resources”—used to justify the closure of Southwestern High beg critical rhetorical attention.

In particular, rhetorical criticism can bring to light what is not readily apparent in the neoliberal restructuring of Latina/o Detroit, namely, the mystification of neoliberalism in the city’s education politics. Mystification refers to rhetoric’s symbolic capacity to cover up or conceal something that it purportedly describes. Dana Cloud (1994) argues, ideology criticism 3

provides a theoretical approach to rhetorical texts that challenges the givenness of political and economic realities, reveals their underlying interests, discloses the mechanics by which audiences are convinced to cooperate with an ideological position, and inquires how people expose representations of realities to be elaborate persuasive constructs and use rhetoric toward locating possibilities for change. This dissertation sets out to answer the following critical questions:

1) How does rhetoric mystify the neoliberalization of the meanings of Southwestern High School and education in the urban space of Southwest Detroit? 2) How are the Latina/o community’s social relations and cultural sensibilities shaped by and mobilized to challenge the neoliberal restructuring of Southwestern High School and education in the city?

Rhetorical critic James Aune (2011) has suggested "it may be wise for those of us interested in combating neo-liberalism as an ideology to pay closer attention to the micro-politics of force and persuasion" (p. 432). With critical attention to the micro-politics of force and persuasion, I argue that the neoliberalization of the city’s education politics discourse is mystified through rhetorical maneuverings that could be conceptualized as a form of violence.

Briefly, Žižek (2008) makes an important distinction between what he calls subjective and systemic forms of violence. Subjective forms of violence refer to “violence performed by a clearly identifiable agent” (Žižek, 2008, p. 1). And systemic violence is “the often catastrophic consequences of the smooth functioning of our economic and political systems” (Žižek, 2008, p.

2). While the sheer horror of subjective violence (e.g., school shootings) often obscures systemic forms of violence (e.g., school accountability) from public purview, systemic violence is essential to the “normal” functioning of everyday life. Similarly, Johan Galtung (1969) differentiates three types of violence: direct, cultural, and structural violence. Direct violence corresponds most closely with Žižek’s subjective form of violence while the cause of direct 4

violence is structural violence. For instance, the inability of neoliberal capitalism to satisfy all human needs creates economic inequality, which is a form of structural violence. On the other hand, cultural violence is a symbolic form of violence and corresponds with Žižek’s articulation of systemic violence. Cultural violence makes legitimate direct and structural violence through the normalization of justifications for the status-quo and silencing the victims of structural and direct violence (Galtung, 1969). While a school closure could be interpreted as a subjective or direct form of violence, the rhetorical choices used by education policymakers to justify

Southwestern High School’s closure reveal rhetoric’s systemic or cultural violence at work in the neoliberalization of Detroit’s education politics. I argue that this perspective of rhetoric as a form of subjective or cultural violence suggests that mystification is not only a matter of inducing cooperation in audiences, but also the enforcement that there is no alternative to neoliberalism.

With critical attention paid to their relations to material contexts, I argue that the rhetorical features of policy documents, speeches, achievement data, and non-profit reports in the case of

Southwestern High School’s closure disenfranchises Latina/o communities in Southwest Detroit while creating moments for non-commodified social change.

Neoliberalism and U.S. Education Policy

Neoliberalism is challenging to define. But I understand neoliberalism as a class project that redistributes resources upward and governs through the marketization of society (Duménil &

Lévy, 2004; Harvey, 2005; Peck, 2012). The difficulty in defining the term stems in part from the fact that it has never had a united front. The term has been used to refer to concepts as wide- ranging as Milton Friedman and Paul Volcker’s monetarist economic principles; Gary Becker’s rational choice theory; Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Walter Lippmann’s repurposing of classical liberalism; Murray Rothbard’s brand of American libertarianism; Ayn Rand’s ethic 5

of rational self-interest; and U.S. President Ronald Reagan and U.K. Prime Minister Margaret

Thatcher’s union busting and deregulation political policies (see Aune, 2001; Mirowski &

Plehwe, 2009).

Despite these varied and often contradictory concepts, the organizing principle of neoliberalism is that capitalist markets are the best guarantor of individual freedoms and prosperity; so all human activity should be organized around market exchange (Dean, 2009). As a governing idea, neoliberalism arose in response to the aftermath of World War 2 and gained political traction after the 1973 oil crises (Harvey, 2005). Ideologically, neoliberalism has promoted market competition, deregulation, free trade, deficit reduction, and cuts to the welfare state to “improve quality, and reduce costs, both directly to the consumer through cheaper commodities and services and indirectly through reduction of the tax burden” (Harvey, p. 65).

These political strategies obscure and advance neoliberalism as a “project for the restoration of class power” (Harvey, p. 16). I understand class as a relationship and process that evolves and changes over time (Thompson, 1963). In other words, class is coming into being; it is not an already formed identity. As Thompson (1963) argues, understanding class as process and relation recognizes the historicity and situatedness of class, accentuates the role of cultural practices in class formation while acknowledging the determining influence of objective class situations such as capital accumulation. I also understand the term power as both the capacity to make public decisions and as influence over how people think and act (Lukes, 1974).

Our neoliberal moment is characterized by the dominance of financial elites and their ways of making meaning out of the social world (Duménil & Lévy, 2004). As a political project, neoliberalism represents an uneven attempt to restore the class power of financial elites in response to challenges from below, including labor unions and others that have clamored for 6

their share of global wealth (Harvey). The state has played an active role in this class project removing regulations that impede the functionality of the market, defending private property rights, and upholding the rule of law (Slobodian, 2018). Consequently, the political project of neoliberalism has remade the state. As Wacquant (2012) argues, neoliberalism is “the remaking and redeployment of the state as the core agency that actively fabricates the subjectivities, social relations and collective representations suited to making the fiction of markets real and consequential” (p. 68). In the process of actualizing this ideal market society, human beings become market actors (Brown, 2015). And as Noam Chomsky puts it in an interview with The

Nation, the social harm of neoliberalism is its “undermining mechanisms of social solidarity and mutual support and popular engagement in determining policy” (Lydon, 2017, ¶ 16).

Neoliberalism has also shaped education policy in the United States. Neoliberal reforms include but are not limited to venture philanthropy in education, rigorous adherence to accountability regimes, the implementation of charter schools and vouchers, and reliance on high stakes testing (Saltman, 2009; Apple, 2005a; Ball, 2004; Hursh, 2008). Neoliberalization has advanced in U.S education policy primarily through four discourses: privatization, marketization, performativity, and the ideal of the enterprising individual. While privatization makes an enemy out of public entities, marketization utilizes the state to create markets where they once did not exist. Cloaked in "natural" and "neutral" language, state-sanctioned marketization moves to legitimatize markets through a strategy of depoliticization (Apple, 2001). Under these marketization discourses, "capital removes itself from any viable form of state regulation, power is uncoupled from matters of ethics and social responsibility, and market freedoms replace long- standing social contracts that once provided a safety net for the poor, the elderly, workers, and the middle class" (Giroux, 2003, p. 195). Performativity discourses emerge to justify 7

marketization. Performance measures such as entrepreneurial efficiency and quality of outcomes determine funding for schooling, and the enterprising individual ideal demands a constant demonstration that students are progressing toward the entrepreneurial goal and in the process extreme forms of individualism are enforced. But as Pauline Lipman (2011) makes clear, the neoliberalization of education policy has also played a significant role in struggles over urban space, which Harvey (2008) calls the right to the city. According to Harvey (2008), the right to the city can be understood as:

Far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights. (p. 23)

Ultimately, neoliberalism seeks to undermine this right to the city. And in the case of the closure of Southwestern High School, the collective efforts of students in the form of a walkout and freedom school represent rhetorical mobilizations of community to struggle for this right to the city.

Rhetorical Studies and Ideology

In this project, I take a historical materialist approach to the ideology critique of rhetoric.

This approach seeks to uncover opportunities for social change as human beings use rhetoric to collectively struggle against and within systems of domination. Neoliberalism is one such system of domination. Michael McGee was among the first in rhetorical studies to engage in what he calls social materialism. For McGee (1980b), social materialism “ought to be a study of ‘usages’ which have been effective in justifying decisive historical change” (p. 45). In particular, McGee is concerned with how rhetoric instrumentality affects the material conditions of people and 8

events. Similarly, Wander (1983; 1984) argues that rhetoric allows for deliberation about the possibilities for collective action to change material situations. He also argues there is a misunderstanding of materialism in rhetorical theory. For Wander (1984), Marx did not use the term ideology to suggest that ideas only get their meaning from the economic mode of . But materialism "takes seriously Marx's principle that our spiritual and intellectual life is not self-contained and wholly independent but also an expression of material interests"

(Wander, 1984, p. 362). Wander’s (1984) materialism recognizes the significant—but not totalizing—role the economic system—neoliberal capitalism—has in determining dominant ideas. Within this conception of materialism, Wander (1983) contends that ideology criticism should uncover not only the inequitable actions prescribed by policies, but also the interests underlying policies, reveal the existence of alternative interests, and assist in recognizing "good reasons" (p. 18). McKerrow (1989) terms this practice of criticism the critique of domination and argues it is a call for rhetorical critics “to unmask or demystify the discourse of power” (p. 441).

Demystification is one of the crucial roles that ideology critics have in social change.

As I understand it, a historical materialist approach to demystification seeks to expose the political and economic interests underlying rhetorical constructions of reality. By reality, I mean

“the existing world of nature, social arrangements, and the experiences of people living in them”

(Cloud, 2018, p. 6). While Cloud (2006) admits there is no universal reality, without a category of the real, critics are left without an ontological and epistemological base for political judgment.

Similar to my approach, "the materialism I am advocating here is insistent upon the need for extra-discursive standards for critical judgment, optimistic about collective human agency, but also critical and cognizant of constraints posed for such agency in class society" (Cloud, 1999, p.

180). Without extra-discursive standards such as everyday experiences of people, it is difficult to 9

critique the persuasive and coercive constructions of purported truths without sacrificing “the notions of practical truth, bodily reality, and material oppression” (Cloud, 1994, p. 159).

For Ronald Greene (1998), the problem with "the logics of representation" refers to the assumed bipolar model of power wherein rhetoric mediates this relationship between the ruling class and the masses. Greene takes issue with this essentialist rendering of the subject and power and advocates for a destruction of what he calls "any replication of a base-superstructure model of materiality that conceptualizes the materiality of rhetoric as an epiphenomenal effect of the more primordial 'structures of power'" (p. 38).

Eagleton (2007) argues critics, such as Greene (1998), are correct in pointing out that ideological beliefs are real in the sense that ideological illusion is a material force that has bearing on how people live their lives. Ideology is embedded in our construction of social reality, so much so that mystification is often experienced as a non-ideological, normalized way of living. Ideological statements may be epistemologically true, but their function in a larger discourse could be viewed as false in that they hide something, their assumptions are wrong, or they deny any alternatives to the present situation leaving exploitative power relationships intact

(Eagleton, 2007). Furthermore, a historical materialist project accepts the classical Marxist notion that political and economic interests arise from one’s class position (Aune, 1994; Cloud,

2002; Hanan, 2013). But this is not necessarily some crude representationalist formula where ideology simply reflects interests, and therefore interests, beliefs, and values are a given. Rather, this relationship is characterized in terms of class position as a reason for one’s belief (Williams,

1977).

In summary, the utility of ideology critique from a historical materialist perspective is its ability to demystify taken-for-granted ideas in rhetorical texts, uncover who benefits from them, 10

and locate potential moments for political agency within the constraints that operate in a class society. For Cloud and Gunn (2011), the ideological mystification function of rhetoric works through “[replicating] the status quo unconsciously as a workaday logic, originally in form of distortions but gradually as an orchestrated calculation” (p. 410). One of the ideological effects of neoliberalism is its enforcement that There Is No Alterative (sometimes abbreviated TINA) way of organizing society then the current arrangement. Consequently, I argue the mystification of neoliberalization not only happens through rhetoric’s ability to induce audiences cooperation with seeing and acting toward schools and education in market terms, but also through rhetoric’s violent capacity to shut down “access to any space or sociality that threatens our ideological or material dependence on capitalist social relations, thus threatening accumulation” (Hodinkson,

2012, p. 509). In the neoliberal social order, the line between persuasion and coercion is blurred and accounting for this violent function of ideological rhetoric may explain the destructive, yet normalized advancement of neoliberalism in education politics in the City of Detroit.

Latina/o Communication Studies

As a field of study, Latina/o Communication Studies is rich with insights on identity

(re)formation in response to dominant Anglo communities and ideologies (González, 1989;

1990; Willis, 1997; Holling & Calafell, 2007). In her retrospective on Latina/o rhetorical and performance studies scholarship, Michelle Holling (2008) charts the field’s development. In the first stage, Chicano communication studies emerged from a need to understand the rhetorical resources and strategies of the 1960s and 1970s Chicano movements. Several essays were devoted to understanding the rhetorical prowess of Chicano movement leaders such as José

Angel Gutiérrez (Jensen & Hammerback, 1980), César Chávez, and Reijes Tijerina

(Hammerback & Jensen, 1980; Fernandez & Jensen, 1995). Additionally, several took interest in 11

other Latina/o communities besides Chicanos and expanded the critical gaze of rhetorical critics beyond speeches. For example, González (1990) explains how a community of Ohio Mexican

Americans used radio programming to both preserve their cultural identities and to articulate a

Mexican American ideology of participation that attempts to undermine already established positions of political and intercultural detachment and ambivalence. Jennifer Willis’s (1997) essay on “Latino Night” at a Northwest Ohio bar further elucidated these themes of Latina/o identity performance, Latina/o cultural heritage as a rhetorical resource for community empowerment, and the intercultural spaces that such Latina/o cultural performances create within a dominant Anglo community.

In the 1990s, Latina/o communication studies took a renewed interest in the Chicano

Movement (Holling, 2008). This decade began with rhetorical critiques of Chicano Movement political plans such as Cesar Chavez's Plan of Delano (Hammerback & Jensen, 1994), El Plan

Espiritual de Aztlán, and El Plan de Santa Barbara (Delgado, 1995). Lisa Flores (1996) broke from the masculine bias to explain how Chicana literature and poetry creates discursive spaces and eventually a much sought-after home for Chicanas in the physical borderlands through a

“rhetoric of difference.” LaWare (1998) also pushed Chicana/o communication studies to understand how the Chicana/o identity can politically empower Mexican Americans that live outside the physical borderlands to address local social and political challenges. This decade was also characterized by a critical critique of the discursive representations of Latina/os in immigration policy. Metaphors such as “illegal alien” or “wetback” “carry with them negative connotations and messages that speak to underlying perceptions about who is an outsider to society, who is a member of the community, and, ultimately, who is an ‘American’" (Chavez,

1991, p. 260). The use of “us v. them” metaphors in the discourses surrounding U.S. immigration 12

policy not only raise symbolic borders between individuals marking the “citizen” from the

“alien,” but also reinforce a certain ideal, normative American identity (Santa Ana, 2002).

In the 2000s, Latina/o communication studies entered a period characterized by themes such as the political mobilization of identity, re-gaining voice, and the relationship between

Latina/o communication studies and political communication (Holling, 2008). Taking up Ono and Sloop’s (1995) call for critique of vernacular discourses, Holling and Calafell (2011) argued that the study of Latina/o vernacular discourses centers on “critically examining the everyday sites in which Latin@s struggle over, produce, engage, enact, and/or perform culture, identities and community formation" (p. 20). As opposed to those studies that interrogate how dominant discourses marginalize Latina/o identities, this area of study is interested in making Latina/o self- produced texts and voices the center of critique in order to further conceptualize how Latina/os might use their identities for political liberation. González, Chávez, and Englebrecht (2014) also illustrate how Latina/o artist-activists use artistic representations of latinidad to make their ethnic identity visible to a white-majority city and to critique the structural and historical factors that have marginalized their experiences in Northwest Ohio. González et al. pushes Latina/o communication studies to consider Latina/o identities and agency in their economic contexts.

Likewise, I interrogate the relationship between the neoliberalization of education politics and

Latina/o lived experiences and cultural sensibilities in Southwest Detroit. I turn now to outline a rhetorical methodology and procedures to critique the closing of Southwestern High School in

Detroit.

Methodology and Procedures

To understand the mystification of neoliberalism in education politics, I will be analyzing the rhetorical features of three neoliberal logics—crisis, instrumental rationality, and 13

innovation)—that together justify the closure of Southwestern High School in Southwest Detroit.

Drawing from Dingo (2012), Jennifer Wingard (2013) defines a logic as a “seemingly universal set of assumptions that are constructed within a particular historical, economic, and national site.

In other words, a logic helps to forward economic and material conditions by linking in a seemingly inevitable manner sustained and known ideologies” (p. xii). Using the terminology of neoliberal logics allows the critic to link together a loosely defined set of ideological discourses that operate within a system of neoliberal capitalism and are situated in a particular site. In other words, neoliberal logic connects neoliberalism as a global, systematic restructuring project with the particularities of the rhetorical tropes used to advance neoliberalization in the locality of the

City of Detroit.

My interpretation of the rhetorical features that form the neoliberal logics that justify the closing of Southwestern High is guided by the methodological insights of rhetorical criticism, ideological critique, and a dialectical approach to culture. For Kenneth Burke (1950) rhetorical criticism is the study of “the use of words by human agents to form attitudes or induce actions in other human agents” (p. 41). Rhetorical criticism is not the mere opinion of the critic, but rather a rigorous humanistic art that is intended to produce understanding and insight into symbolic texts for a public. In this light, the process and product of rhetorical criticism can be viewed as a critical intervention into public life (Nothstine, Blair, & Copeland, 1994). In particular, rhetorical criticism as is practiced in this dissertation can critically intervene in the everyday discursive operations of power (McKerrow, 1989).

Ideology critique analyzes speech acts in texts that articulate and justify dominant ideas and locate potential moments for challenging and undermining domination (Cloud & Gunn,

2011). Instead of using the marker ideological criticism, I have selected ideology critique 14

because “criticism that recognizes how rhetoric is always wrapped up in sustaining or challenging power relations should be called ideology criticism or ideology critique—not ideological criticism, because it is the rhetoric itself that is ideological in the first place” (Cloud,

2014, p. 23). Ideological critique positions a rhetorical text in its material conditions and power relations and asks how the text is inducing cooperation with dominant ideas and who benefits from this cooperation (Wander, 1983). This type of rhetorical project acknowledges the inability to bracket the critic’s moral and political convictions from their reading of a text. In fact, ideology critique finds its justification in making good judgments in the interests of truth and justice, and one’s political and moral commitments cannot be avoided in such tasks.

Furthermore, critics cannot stay within the confines of the text, but rather must evaluate the text’s “effects on the rest of the audience” (Campbell, 1972, p. 454). Consequently, ideological critique is not only interested in what is located in the text per se, but also in the context. This is particularly relevant in that Latina/o communities are rarely directly addressed in the justifications for closing Southwestern High School, but it is precisely in that neglect wherein neoliberal ideology locates its mystifying rhetorical power.

And lastly, a dialectical approach to culture suggests that culture is a complex site of struggle over meaning (Martin, Nakayama, & Flores, 2001). According to Martin and Nakayama

(2010), a dialectical conception of culture obliges the critic to view humans in relation to each other, to simultaneously bring together seemingly opposite ideas, and to understand culture in relation to other phenomena such as the economy and politics. This is particularly relevant to critiques of neoliberalism in relation to intercultural practices since “economic systems largely influence and maintain the operation of all cultural activity” (Keshishian, 2005, p. 205). Such a dialectical approach to culture allows the rhetorical critic to ask questions about the relationships 15

between Latina/o experiences, cultural sensibilities, neoliberal logics, and the restructuring of urban spaces and education politics.

Guided by these critical methodologies, a variety of texts will be analyzed in this critique of the closure of Southwestern High and its relationship to Latina/o experiences in Southwest

Detroit. I will focus primarily on events and texts from 2009-2012. This choice has been made for several reasons. In March 2009, Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm appointed Robert

Bobb as the emergency financial manager under Public Act 72 (1990). With control of the school district taken away from the elected school board, Bobb, with backing from the governor’s office and the non-profit community in Detroit, was able to begin transferring students out of public schools into charter schools, closing public schools, outsourcing of school services to private entities, and firing teachers. Although slowly unfolding before this date, this event marks an acceleration of neoliberal restructuring and public disinvestment in DPS and the city that eventually leads to the closure of Southwestern High School and the ensuing public outcry in

2012. So it is out of this pivotal time period that the texts for this critique emerge. Secondly, these particular rhetorical texts were selected because they represent the clearest articulations of the neoliberal restructuring of the school district and the city. And lastly, I was pointed to these particular texts in personal conversations with Elected School Board Member, Elena Herrada and

Wayne State University Associate Professor of Curriculum Studies Dr. Thomas Pedroni. While the details of our conversation are not mentioned in this dissertation, these two scholar-activists were considerably helpful in identifying some of the important documents that pertain to the public justifications for closing Southwestern High.

16

Overview of Dissertation

Chapter 2 furnishes an historical context of the City of Detroit and its education politics.

In this chapter, I argue that the political, social, and ideological struggles over the school district and its education policies have always been intertwined with the city’s political economy, urban geography, and sociocultural circumstances that have historically evolved along racial and class tensions that exist in the urban space. This historical context provides an important groundwork for the remaining rhetorical critique of the justifications for the closure of Southwestern High

School in Detroit.

In Chapter 3, I turn my critical attention to the first justification for the school closure, crisis. In this chapter, I adopt both situational analysis and ideology criticism to critique the rhetorical constructions of the school’s crisis in relation to their situatedness in the neoliberal capitalist processes at work in the City of Detroit. Situated within these crisis conditions, education policymakers animate the key terms of underutilization and underperformance forming a neoliberal public vocabulary for understanding the school’s crisis. The symbolic deployment of the school space as underutilized and underperforming confines the value of the school to its potential financial output, creates a kairotic moment for softening the urban terrain for development, and disposes the school space of its meaning as a community resource, particularly for the Latina/o community in Southwest Detroit.

In Chapter Four, I attend to a second justification for the closure of Southwestern High

School, instrumental rationality. In particular, I critique the argumentative grounds for school closing criteria. Technocrats devise accountability tools such as standards, performative measurements, facility and academic plans, school ranking systems, and other criteria to fix educational problems. Relentlessly reaching to remedy perceived systemic public education 17

failures, the neoliberal form of instrumental rationality that underlies the criteria used to justify

Southwestern High School’s closure, whether realized as arguments or not, ideologically functions to reduce school closure public argument to a market abstraction and reinforce an argumentative standard of whiteness. Furthermore, instrumental rationality justifies accountability instruments such as school report cards that prescribe consumer choice as the only legitimate means for people to participate in the rectification of educational failure. While people may or may not believe they are autonomous consumers, judging schools according to these instruments reproduces a self-identifying consumer subject that negates Latina/o cultural sensibilities as the third persona in public arguments over school closures.

Drawing from the previous two analysis chapters, I introduce the term enclosure in

Chapter Five to name the violent functions of rhetoric to close off, seize, and repurpose ways of perceiving and acting in education politics that are irreducible to market terms. To illustrate these ideological functions, I critique Emergency Manager Roy Roberts’ articulation of a third justification for the school closure—innovation. In his rhetorical effort to restructure the school district into a portfolio district, he metaphorically constructs the school district as a ship, which closes-off competing rights to school district governance and opens a possibility for transferring school governance from the elected school board to portfolio managers. Furthermore, his rhetorical use of movement in the speech represents an attempt to seize and repurpose the public’s imagination of what quality education could be in DPS while (re)enforcing the necessity of precarious or non-permanent social relations to schools.

But Chapter Five also underscores that neoliberalism’s violent rhetorical maneuvers to enclose the commons of schools and education are often contested. Challenging their exclusion from the school closure discourse, Latina/o students join with other DPS students and struggle to 18

locate alternative meanings for schools and education than those provided by those in positions of power. I argue that their rhetorical acts of protest—the school walkout and freedom school— represent emergent cultural practices called commoning that exploit contradictions in the dominant discourse of innovation to cultivate non-commodified meanings for schools and education in Detroit. Through cultural practices of commoning, the students attempt to open school governance for their own participation by creating a common discursive space and imagining a quality of education that is defined by principles such as mutual benefit, human solidarity, inclusivity, community building, and is opposed to market competition. Commoning represents one way that Latina/o students in Southwest Detroit practice their cultural sensibilities in political struggle to locate innovations outside of the violent rhetorical features of the neoliberal logics that justified their school’s closure not only for themselves, but for all DPS students.

In Chapter Six, I review the dissertation and describe how I perceive the concepts of enclosure and commoning as contributing to the fields of Rhetorical Studies and Intercultural

Communication and make suggestions for future research.

19

CHAPTER II: A HISTORY OF THE CITY OF DETROIT AND ITS EDUCATION POLITICS,

1909-2005

Salas and Salas (1974) tell the story of the Martinez family. In 1929, the Martinezes left oppressive conditions in the cotton and strawberry fields of Texas for the promise of a better life working in Michigan’s sugar beet fields. Along with several other Mexican families, Pablo,

Antonia, and their seven children boarded the northern bound train with hope in their eyes and hearts. But working conditions were not much better in Caro, Michigan. So the Martinez family began the long journey back to Texas. But poverty and grueling work had left their marks on the family, killing two children, Carlota and Lola. Compounding their sorrow, when they finally arrived back in Texas, Antonia and Pablo found work made scarce by the . So, in 1937, they decided for once and for all to pack up their meager belongings and return to

Michigan. This time they found work in the fields of Imlay City picking onions, carrots, tomatoes, and sugar beets. Lured by ’s promise of $5-a-day, the Martinez family made one last move to the factory communities of Detroit in 1939, where their decedents still live.

Hundreds of similar circular migration stories could be told of Latina/o families and their struggles to find consistent, decent paying work. Because of rapid industrialization in the US following the Civil War, Detroit became an attractive locale for those searching for employment, and by 1928, approximately 15,000 Mexicans lived and worked in Detroit (Vargas, 1993). This chapter examines the complicated social conditions encountered and shaped by Latina/os in the

City of Detroit and Detroit Public Schools (DPS) from 1909-2005. For the sake of analysis, the chapter is divided into three broad eras of Detroit and DPS history according to what I interpret as its hegemonic social order: the Progressive Era (1909-1929), New Deal Era (1929-1971), and 20

the Neoliberal Era (1971- Present). Although these historical eras are marked by distinctive and complex phenomena, I claim that one unifying historical trend is the unfolding of an intricate relationship between DPS policies and practices and the uneven development of the city’s political economy, urban geography, sociocultural circumstances, and ideological conditions that regularly evolves along racial and class tensions that exist in the urban space.

I should note a few disclaimers about these historical eras. First, although I have borrowed popular names for these eras, they are artificial categories that I have constructed around certain moments of specific tensions in the histories of Detroit and DPS. I cannot recount every historical detail due to space limitations, and frankly, such a task does not fall under the purview of this dissertation. Instead I focus on the evolution of political, cultural, racial, and class conditions and histories relevant to a rhetorical analysis of the neoliberal education policies that justified the closure of Southwestern High School. Secondly, I do not mean to imply that phenomena are restricted to particular eras. This is certainly not the case. For instance, the

Progressive Era emphasis on industrial efficiency reemerges, although in a different rhetorical form, in Neoliberal Era discussions of school reform. And thirdly, these historical labels refer to what I consider to be the dominant social orders emerging from and determining each historical epoch in Detroit and DPS’s pasts. Nearly always, there are competing ways of organizing public debates and controversies, and I will briefly explore some of the competing trends and conflicts within and between each era. But this chapter’s emphasis is on those widespread trends within the city and its public school system and those events that have had some sort of lasting significance in shaping our present moment. Subsequently, this chapter draws attention to the relationships between structures and discourses that motivated and constrained individual and collective agency in the pursuit of cultural, racial, political, and class interests. 21

The Progressive Era: Struggles in the “Wonderful City of the Magic Motor” (1909-1929)

In many ways, the Progressive Era in Detroit was determined by early changes in automobile production. The enormous and extensive influence of automobile production on the political economy of the region and its various institutions, including schools and social organizations, cannot be overstated. The auto industrial capitalists built—and eventually ravaged—Detroit (Boyle, 2001). While many Mexican migrants secured employment as construction workers, janitors, baggage handlers, dishwashers, waiters, and city workers, the pot at the end of migratory rainbow was a spot on the production line and the lucrative wages that accompanied it. Thus this section focuses on the relationships between the dominant ideological, cultural, and economic conditions that emerged from automobile production—industrialization and Americanization—to shape Progressive Era schooling and the experiences of Mexican migrant workers and families in this relatively early period of Detroit’s history.

I should mention two caveats. First, it is difficult to write about the urban transformations brought about by automobile production without focusing on Henry Ford and his River Rouge and Highland Park Ford plants. As I will discuss in this section, Ford’s innovative uses of technology, managerial techniques, and social engineering influenced all aspects of life in

Detroit. Often times, but not always, this was the case because Fordism, the social system based on and mass popularized by Ford, served certain capitalist interests in the city (de Grazia, 2005). Secondly, histories of Latina/os in Detroit are relatively scarce. One of the few works on Detroit Latina/os during the Progressive Era is Zaragosa

Vargas’ Proletarians of the North: A history of Mexican industrial workers in Detroit and the

Midwest, 1917-1933 (1993), which also largely focuses on the experiences of Mexican factory workers and colonies in Detroit and the Midwest. The Black-White racial binary is dominant in 22

histories of Detroit for obvious reasons, and although I do spend time exploring Black-White relationships as they are decidedly important in the social ebb-and-flow of the city and its schools, I also reject the binary when possible to make spaces for the important histories of

Detroit Latina/os. What follows then is not a complete history of the Progressive Era in Detroit.

It highlights the tensions in industrialization and Americanization projects that permeated Detroit life, schooling institutions and practices, as well as the experiences of co-cultural communities, particularly Mexican factory workers and colonies.

At the turn of the 20th century, access to natural resources such as wood and steel, proximity to the Great Lakes, rail lines, machine shops, and capital contributed to Detroit’s meteoric industrial rise. But it was the city’s industrialists, such as Henry Ford and Walter

Chrysler, who launched the city to the center of automobile production (Farley, Danziger, &

Holzer, 2000). Their industrial innovations including the conveyor belt , standardization of products, and efficient interchangeable production resulted in mass production, low-cost of goods, and mass consumption of automobiles. By the mid-1920s,

Fordism, as this approach to production and management is known thanks somewhat to Antonio

Gramsci (1971/2012), had become all the rage in Detroit and in other industrial centers throughout the world (Greenstein, 2014). In the case of Detroit, Fordism, according to a reporter describing the in 1914, meant, “system, system, system,” or as the historian of technology Thomas Hughes (2004) describes Ford’s philosophy, “power, accuracy, economy, system, continuity, and speed” (p. 205). The Ford mode of production, if I can use that term, posted pretty impressive productivity numbers. In 1909, Ford plants, such as the Highland

Park and River Rouge plants, began producing only the Model T. Subsequently, the Model T became the least expensive in production, and Ford secured a fifty-five percent share of the 23

automobile market in 1921. By 1925, production time for a single car had diminished drastically from twelve and a half hours to one and a half hours; and by the time factories changed over to the Model A in 1927, Ford plants had assembled over fifteen million Model T’s (Hughes). These changes in production and in labor policies enacted by Ford resulted in higher wages for workers and a working day shortened to eight hours. Even though Ford was a momentary champion of the Left because of these progressive policies, it should be clear that he was not so much concerned with worker rights as with worker efficiency, reducing labor turnover, and high productivity. In a way Ford’s revolutionary approach to management resonates with James

Weinstein’s (1968) concept of corporate liberalism in that Ford sought to erase class conflict, restrain Bolshevik sentiments that were spreading through industrial trade unions in other U.S. cities at the time, stabilize markets, and promote the interests of industrialization through the gifting of worker benefits and through adopting the sentiments of liberalism to maintain his hegemonic market position. It was Ford and the hegemonic position of his automobile plants that ultimately benefited financially from these worker benefits. This brand of corporate liberalism characterizes many of the labor-management relationships and corporate policies throughout the country during the Progressive Era (Weinstein).

But Ford’s shrewd management techniques and innovative use of technologies were only part of the reason for the rapid industrial transformation that was indicative of the Progressive

Era in Detroit. Two changes in labor were also crucial to the industrial change: the large influx of migrant workers and the shift from skilled to semi-skilled and unskilled workers. In his autobiography, Henry Ford (1922/2006) writes about these changes in the labor force:

The rank and file of men come to us unskilled; they learn their jobs within a few hours or a few days. If they do not learn within that time they will never be of any use to us. These men are, many of them, foreigners, and all that is required before they are taken on is that 24

they should be potentially able to do enough work to pay the overhead charges on the floor space they occupy. (p. 79)

“Foreigners” refers to many workers, including Black workers who migrated from the South during the Great Migration (1910-1930) and workers who at one point had emigrated from

Mexico. Agricultural interests pressured to include an exclusionary clause in the Immigration

Act of 1917 that would grant Mexican workers entrance to the U.S. without having to pay a head tax or take the literacy test required of other migrants (Valdés, 1991). The reason was that rural farmers and agricultural corporations argued that Mexican labor was their last resort for conciliatory labor, and with the passage of the exclusionary clause, both agricultural companies and the automotive industrialists began an aggressive advertising campaign to woo Mexican workers to the Midwest (Valdés). Detroit automakers primarily recruited Mexican workers from sugar beet fields, rail yards, coalmines, and steel factories. Less than 10 percent actually came directly from Mexico to work in the automobile factories (Vargas, 1993). And most of the

Mexicans migrating for work with the automakers were men substantially contributing to the crafting of a masculine dominant space in industrial Detroit, and because of the seasonal nature of automotive work, many of these men were subject to the circular migration illustrated in the opening vignette of this chapter. Mass production did not require skilled laborers, so management hired semi-skilled and unskilled workers, who were mostly Blacks, Mexicans, or

Appalachian Whites, as cheap and mostly submissive labor (Vargas).

Mexican workers were first exposed to auto production in the part supplier factories, such as Briggs and Fisher Body Plant. Briggs, in particular, had an infamous reputation as a shop with horrible working conditions and a production line that ran deathly fast.

Workers lasted six months on average at Briggs before quitting due to the inhumanity. To fill 25

this constant labor turnover, management used a seemingly endless supply of Mexican labor, which management viewed as extremely reliable and industrious. But among the Mexican colonies of Detroit, Briggs had earned a reputation as el carniceria (“the butcher”). One Mexican worker commented, “Briggs killed a worker for the least pay of all the auto plants” (Vargas, p.

101). At both Briggs and Fisher Body, management viewed Mexican migrant workers as willing to do the most intolerable jobs in the plant. One manager admitted that the “dirty hot jobs are filled by Mexicans. [They] seem to stand the heat better than either Negroes or whites” (Vargas, p. 102). Consequently, Mexican workers were tasked with sanding, polishing, and spray- painting, which were among the most hazardous and excruciating jobs in the part supplier factories.

The passage of the nativist Immigration Act of 1924 and the increased demand for trucks and during and in the aftermath of World War 1 compelled the automakers to rely more on

Southern Black and Mexican migrant labor. Before the Great Depression of 1929, a considerable amount of Mexicans worked for Dodge, Buick, Pontiac, Hudson, and Ford. Certain automakers, such as Studebaker, Packard, Cadillac, and Willys-Overland in Toledo, required naturalization papers from all migrant workers, except Canadians, which limited Mexican labor at those factories (Vargas, 1993). Language barriers were also obstacles for Mexican workers who wanted to work in the automobile plants around Detroit. Those who were lucky enough to be hired faced the pressure of speedups, constant micromanagement from the foremen, and hazardous jobs and workplace conditions. Although machine-production had somewhat flattened hierarchies among workers, the foremen and management used labels such as drill-press operator and punch-press operator to ensure that the workers, particularly migrant workers, knew their place on the factory floor. These imposed, artificial job titles became status symbols within the 26

Mexican communities outside the factories leading to interethnic fracturing along class lines

(Vargas). The threat of losing one’s job, especially during the recession of the early 1920s, ensured that Mexican workers remained quiet about job related health issues, diseases contracted from the shop floor, and even ligament and limb dismemberment as a result of production.

By 1926, 10 percent of the laborers at the Ford Rouge Plant were Black, and by 1928, Ford

Motor Company employed the highest number of Mexican workers of any industrial employer in the Midwest (Vargas, 1993). As for a rationale for this unprecedented hiring of non-native and migrant workers, Beth Bates (2012) argues that Black workers were appealing to Henry Ford for two reasons: he felt that it was the moral responsibility of the “superior” race to provide jobs for

Black men, and he also knew that Black workers were necessary for keeping his shop relatively free from Bolshevik influences. Although trade unions were beginning to organize during the

Progressive Era in cities like Chicago and New York, unions were verboten in Detroit. The

Detroit Employer’s Association and their automotive backers pushed open shop policies and a disdain for collective bargaining as city mantras. The Association kept a record of “independent working men with clean records,” publicly blacklisted union sympathizers and organizers, sent spies into factories to root out the “Bolsheviks,” and frequently appealed child-labor laws and the intrusion of factory inspections and state regulations (Vargas, p. 62). Along with these anti-union tactics, the automakers used a labor surplus fueled by Black and Mexican workers to break strikes and squash labor unrest in the plants. While perhaps not the sole cause of white discrimination of Black and brown bodies, this strategic use of migrant workers to suppress native white worker complaints certainly contributed to the racial prejudice and violent discrimination Blacks and Mexicans experienced on the shop floor.

Although Black workers certainly received a disproportionate discrimination, Mexican 27

workers were also heavily discriminated against. But not all Mexican workers were treated equally. For instance, one Ford plant manager admitted “When I hire Mexicans at the gate I pick out the lightest among them. No, it isn’t that the lighter colored ones are any better workers, but the darker ones are like the niggers” (Vargas, p. 109). Another manager explained: “The educated, higher type Mexicans are like us…. They’re not damned foreigners; they’re wise foreigners” (Vargas, p. 109). The lighter the skin, the more opportunities for advancement

Mexican workers had in the Ford plants. But not even light skin color could keep most Mexican workers from the most dangerous and tedious jobs on the shop floor. Speed-ups, thinning of the workforce after the recession of the early 1920s, and prejudicial and violent treatment from the foremen were among some of the reasons that over half of the Mexicans workers at Ford quit within six months of employment and their lucrative salaries (Vargas). One particularly repressive managerial strategy referred to as “Fordization of the face” was used to demand submission and obedience to foremen and managers. The policy stipulated that no sound come from workers’ mouths for the whole workday, even at lunchtime. Those who violated the policy received dismissal slips (Vargas).

But it would be factually wrong to paint a picture of Mexican and Black workers as docile in the face of this workplace persecution and prejudicial treatment. Even though the rumblings of union representation were being actively drowned out in the Detroit automotive plants, workers still made displays of resistance to the demands of their employers. Several cases have been documented of Mexican Ford worker resistance including disobeying orders from foremen, slowing down productivity, and fistfights with supervisors. Even the act of quitting their jobs on the production line should be read as acts of resistance against abhorrent working conditions in spite of lucrative pay (Vargas). 28

Despite these wretched working conditions, one Mexican autoworker summarized why many of his compatriots desired to work in the factories of Detroit:

Almost everybody …where I lived talked of coming [to Detroit]… and the desire to go was in the atmosphere. Young fellows who had been up here told about how much they were earning [and] all became enthusiastic. I wanted to see that part of the world about which I had heard so much. (Vargas, p. 58)

Family and kinship networks in Detroit were influential in persuading Mexican workers and families to make the long journey to the city, and once in Detroit, these networks became sources of financial and emotional support. Several Mexican workers claimed in their letters to friends and family that their lucrative earnings averaged $0.75 an hour in 1919 (Vargas). But the labor activist and Labor Studies scholar B. J. Widick (1972) challenges those earnings claims.

According to Widick, Ford’s financial statements show that 30 percent of workers were receiving less than five-dollars-a-day and probationers, including women, unmarried men younger than twenty-two, divorced men, and non-English speaking migrant workers, only received $2.72 a day in 1916. While some did receive the five-dollars-a-day-promise, most did not, notably women and men that did not fit the industrial masculine and cultural norms.

At the very least, Vargas and Widick’s histories suggest that the five-dollars-a-day promise largely functioned as what Hart (1997) might call a societal myth, in that it prescribed a way, particularly for “foreigners” and women, to live. In other words, the five-dollars-a-day myth had a central role in Henry Ford’s grandiose Americanization project. The project consisted of several facets each important to understanding the ideological thrust of the Progressive Era in

Detroit. Ford and his managers used coercive management strategies and violent labor control to achieve their vision of a utopian society. The strategy most commonly associated with

Americanization programs was the requirement for all migrant workers to attend the Ford 29

English School. Volunteer Ford employees taught migrant workers the English language and

American values (Brophy, 2003). As Greenstein (2014) explains, part of their lessons on

American citizenship included a focus on vocabulary that encouraged migrant men to conform to a “role as the head of an ‘American’ family unit” (p. 268). This ideal “American” man, modeled by the paternalistic English School and the production foremen, furthered patriarchal biases and domination both inside the factory and in the factory communities of Detroit. In fact, Ford’s

Sociological Department—quite the misnomer— made sure that what was being taught at the factory, namely, English, American culture, and American masculinity was being followed in workers’ homes. It was not uncommon for Sociological Department goons to ransack the houses of new Ford workers ridding it of any items that did not fit the American ideal (Greenstein).

Clearly Americanization, as practiced at Ford plants and other automakers in Detroit, was about much more than adopting a standardized language and customs. Americanization was intended to be a total cultural, social, and ideological transformation of the migrant into a man who fit the approved cultural and social lifestyle (Brophy). Organizations led or heavily influenced by the automakers such as the Detroit Employers Association and the Detroit Urban League reinforced industrial values and traits of punctuality and efficacy both on the job and in the home as

American, and anyone who wanted to be “American” had to conform to that idea.

But the Americanization project intended more than a transformation of individuals. It implied an ideological transformation of the social world. As Greenstein (2014) points out,

Henry Ford believed, as did many other industrialists during this period, that “mass production could produce an abundance of good and a better life based on mass consumption; ‘increased production’ meant ‘increased prosperity for all’” (p. 265). One might say this was an attempt at winning hearts and minds through the grandeur of industrial production and its call for 30

efficiency, hard work, and homogeneity (similar to that of the “free-market” promises of our current Neoliberal Era). Ford produced propaganda including cartons, animation, and other media that, among other topics, taught the precepts of mass consumption and mass production that he believed could unite all workforces into one efficient, Americanized machine that would solve all social ills including class conflict (Greenstein, p. 265). Throughout World War 1 and its aftermath, anti-unionism and labor control were essential to the Americanization project in that they kept the workforce homogenous and subdued. To stamp out talk of labor organizing, Ford employed the infamous Service Department to conduct “anti-labor terror” (Greenstein, p. 270).

Russian and Eastern European migrant workers were the Service Department’s primary suspects of being potential sympathizes with radicals, communists, and labor unions in other U.S. cities.

The Service Department would do regular surveillance of the shop floor and employee houses looking for Bolsheviks. Once found, Ford had them removed from their positions, and in some cases they enlisted the federal government to have them deported from the country.

The factory was not the only space where Americanization was preached to Mexican migrant communities. The influence of the Catholic Church on the newly arrived Mexican workers should not be underestimated. The Church provided food, shelter, clothing, and financial aid for those that had migrated to Detroit. After World War 1, it became obvious that Mexican migrants also needed training for securing employment opportunities. Father Juan P. Alanis, among others, even led efforts to organize a Mexican parish in Detroit (Vargas, 1993). The parish offered Americanization programs for children to learn Spanish, English, as well as

American history. Such efforts were deemed essential for Mexicans to succeed economically and socially in their adopted city. Therefore, the Church stressed parishioner allegiance to the

Catholic faith and to the United States. Parishioners were encouraged to purchase war bonds 31

during the Great War as a public way to demonstrate their patriotism. The Catholic Church in

Detroit partnered with the Detroit Americanization Committee, which was comprised of representatives from the city’s corporate elite, to promote values such as the importance of an open shop, worker efficiency, and the progressive potential of mass production (Vargas). As in

Ford’s automobile plants, Farther Alanis emphasized the importance of being a good citizen and

Americanization:

My countrymen [and countrywomen] will prove among the most useful aliens drawn to Detroit in recent years. They came… with the expectations of becoming useful citizens . . .. I am confident that we can … teach them a sympathetic understanding of the laws and liberties of this Republic” (Vargas, p. 74).

Certainly these efforts to Americanize Mexican migrants were viewed positively by native

Detroiters and, to a limited degree, helped stem the racist tide against Mexicans in Detroit as well as helped Mexican communities ease into their new urban surroundings. Some Mexican workers began to equate Christian values with Americanization and mass production. But others were not as committed to the assimilationist project. Seasonal migration and return migrations made total cultural and social assimilation near impossible. Some Mexicans preferred to maintain their cultural identities and celebrate Mexican national and religious holidays despite the attempts by

Ford to silence these cultural expressions (Vargas). This deep desire to hold onto home created friction within some Mexican communities in Detroit between desires to Americanize and their

Mexican cultural sensibilities.

The Detroit Public Schools (DPS) were also used to Americanize both native-born

Americans and migrant adults and students. Beginning in 1904, migrant communities asked for what we might now refer to as adult education classes for learning English as a second language and ways to be a good citizen (Mirel, 1999). Throughout the early 20th century, the school 32

district channeled significant funds and other resources toward establishing a model

Americanization program for other school districts around the country. As Jeffrey Mirel explains in his seminal work on the history of DPS, two events stand out in this expansion of the program.

First, the district stopped hiring English instructors from within migrant communities. In the words of Superintendent Dr. Charles Chadsey, this shift in policy was designed “to place wide- awake, socially efficient American instructors in charge of these rooms” (Mirel, p. 18). Second, the Detroit Americanization Committee, which consisted of the Board of Commerce, business leaders, the mayor, and a few educators, was instrumental in shaping the curriculum content and pedagogical practices used in the Americanization program. Although these Americanization programs were not controversial early on, throughout the 1920s, they became embattled in the political controversies over the purpose of education. While some in the city argued for schools that challenged the status-quo, others, including the corporate elite, viewed schools as necessary places to strengthen the existing social order, and Americanization programs afforded the later interests a space to incorporate patriotic programs, reinvigorate commitment to American political institutions, and convince the public of the virtues of mass production and mass consumption (Mirel).

But Americanization programs are not the only example in which the economic, ideological, cultural, and political pressures in the city had a significant influence on the nature of schooling and educational institutions in DPS. For instance, struggles over DPS education policy in the 1900-1910s mirrored the Fordism doxa (Bourdieu, 1977) of the Progressive Era in the city. Specifically, whispers of Fordism could be heard in two key issues in the educational politics of the time. The first was over the character of education leaders, and the second was over school governance. Progressive reforms of the classroom were spearheaded by elite 33

socialites; the Detroit Municipal League, which was led by people like J. L. Hudson and Henry

Leland; the Detroit Federation of Women’s Clubs, particularly Laura Osborn; and Protestant ministers and leaders (Mirel, 1999). The Detroit Board of Commerce, the Detroit Civic

Association, and news media outlets such as Detroit Journal, Detroit Free Press, and Detroit

Times were all staunch supporters of the reformers. In 1916, the reformers convinced voters to replace the large ward-based system with a small at-large elected board that would be able to more efficiently educate their children and better provide for the needs of the schools in light of the increasing size of the student population and its diversity. The reformers also set their sights on replacing Superintendent Wales Martindale, who in 1907 had given the principalship of

Campbell Evening School to a well-off Polish bar owner. Highlighting the central role that religion and the temperance movement played in Progressive school reforms in Detroit, a Baptist minister summarized the battle cry of the reformers: “our political life will not be free until the saloon power is broken. The saloon must keep her dirty hands off the school system” (Mirel, p.

5). The underlying nativism in this comment resonates with the anxieties rhetorically embodied in the previously mentioned Americanization programs in the factories. Although there was not a significant emphasis on social engineering in the schools, the migrant threat to ideal American morality and citizenship was a powerful organizing force against Martindale. After the firing of

Martindale for a myriad of character flaws and political corruption, Dr. Chadsey took over DPS and continued several of the traditional progressive reforms that Martindale introduced such as standardized testing, curricula reform, student-centered instruction, teacher accountability, the use of IQ tests, and so on. Fordism provided managerial techniques and governance models to implement efficiently progressive school reforms throughout the 1910s and 1920s. The victory of the small board and the change in superintendent signified a new educational consensus that 34

included many in the business community, government officials, educators, and most of the public around the need for expansion and improvement of DPS. Now that the school board no longer consisted of elites and middle class politicians, the elite-controlled board could consolidate their power to ensure the survival of the Progressive consensus (Mirel).

The Progressive education policy consensus in DPS during the 1920s in many ways modeled the ironic ambivalence and hope embodied in the promises of Fordism. By referring to this coalition as a “consensus,” I am following the lead of Jeffrey Mirel and his history of DPS.

As Labaree (2005) details, the progressives can be split into two schools of thought on how to reform schools—the administrative and the pedagogical progressives. While administrative progressives such as Henry Ford pushed for school reforms that affirmed and efficiency, pedagogical progressives such as John Dewey took a more holistic approach to reform that emphasized the democratic potential of education and the curricular and teaching changes needed to unleash this potential (Labaree). This struggle between the administrative and pedagogical progressives foreshadows the tensions in the neoliberal social order between the technocrats and those like DPS students who seek school reforms that may be able to realize the democratic potential of education.

In Detroit, the small, but growing labor movement in the city supported the call to grow the school district because their constituents viewed public education as a space for potential class liberation. Other reasons for labor’s involvement in public education included their perceived role as watchdog to ensure that public education was kept free and their need to keep children out of the workforce. Business leaders and their associations also supported the advancement of public education because they understood the institution as a stabilizing influence on society, vocational and citizenship education created future workers, and because they supported their 35

ally, Superintendent Frank Cody and his vision for DPS (Mirel, 1999). So, although their class interests widely diverged, labor and the business elites comprised a fragile consensus that led to some positive results for public education including hiring an adequate amount of teachers.

Bucking national trends in the Progressive Era, the DPS school board also voted to increase funding for teacher salaries and allow married women to enter the educator ranks and pay them for their work though inequitably. These expenditures were largely paid for through relocation of funds and not through new tax levies (Mirel). However, building the necessary school buildings to accommodate migrant worker children required the board to convince the city to raise taxes and implement bond-purchasing programs. Here again the business elite-labor consensus supported, however for very different reasons, the plan to raise tax and bond revenue for new school buildings. This is not to minimize the tensions over implementation that existed between the different sets of interests, particularly over the argument that expensive platoon schools were being inequitably built in “foreign neighborhoods” (Mirel, p. 62). In fact, a few politicians in the mid to late-1920s used these class and racial antagonisms to win seats on the elected school board and other political offices. Despite setbacks in political and public support for education spending, the district impressively constructed roughly 44 elementary schools, 11 intermediate schools, and five high schools as well as conducted repairs and renovations to another 75 elementary schools, 12 intermediate schools, and 15 high schools through the course of the

1920s (Mirel).

Also by the 1920s, those Mexican families who had migrated to Detroit and worked in the automobile plants were beginning to internalize the values of mass consumption and its progenitor, mass production (Vargas, 1993). Job titles, salaries, and job location in the city determined social standing. Mexican families were beginning to use credit to purchase goods 36

including stoves, refrigerators, and automobiles. However, housing in the city was in short supply, and the available housing was often too expensive for migrant workers to purchase. Like other migrant families, Mexican families first settled in the poor communities surrounding the automobile plants on the east sides of Detroit, Highland Park, and Hamtramck. Some single

Mexican men and Mexican families lived on the west side in boxcar colonies near the Railroad

Depot on Michigan Avenue. These boxcar communities ebbed and flowed with the various economic downturns throughout the 1920s and had gained a negative reputation as disease-filled and miserable places to live (Vargas, 1993). But by 1925, Mexicans were beginning to live in

Southwest Detroit and the nearby towns of Springwells, Oakwood, River Rouge, Dearborn,

Lincoln Park, Ecorse, and Wyandotte to be close to the River Rouge Ford plant (Vargas, 1989).

Because of the lack of steady income and the circular migration necessary for locating consistent work, most Mexicans in Detroit would rent rooms instead of owning their own home.

Additionally, native-born Detroit's feared that these early Mexican settlers would lower home values in the area; consequently, housing segregation also determined where Mexican workers and families would live. The Church, Mexican mutual-aid societies, and fraternal organizations offered financial support to Mexican migrant families and spaces for participating in Mexican cultural celebrations and other opportunities for publicly performing their Mexican identities

(Vargas, 1993). Before the beginning of the Great Depression in 1929, 15,000 Mexicans lived in

Detroit making this Mexican colony the largest in the Midwest (Vargas, 1989).

The New Deal Era: The Contradictions of Rights-Based Liberalism (1929-1971)

Writing about the New Deal Era in Detroit is as if plagiarizing the opening paragraph from

Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. Although not nearly as tumultuous as ancien régime

Paris, Detroit during this historical period was full of contradictory moments of hope and 37

despair, prosperity and decline. In the twilight of the Progressive Era, Detroit was the one of the wealthiest cities and the fourth largest city in the United States (Sugrue, 1996). Automobile production and other service industries were attracting thousands seeking employment and higher wages. Housing developments, while limited, were beginning to spring up throughout the city, pushing outward the city limits. But along with this vast wealth accumulation were other emerging trends including break-neck industrialization, overproduction, over-reliance on credit, uneven economic growth, racial tensions, and inequitable distribution of wealth. In 1929, the top

1 percent controlled 19 percent of Detroit’s wealth while worker purchasing power, employment, and the length of the working day were all being slashed (Babson, 1986). This roiling economic boil eventually spilled over engendering the stock market free fall of October 1929 and the end of the Progressive Era in Detroit. In this section, I argue, along the lines of Thomas Sugrue’s work on postwar Detroit, that New Deal rights-based liberalism and the changes in the political economy of Detroit as a result of the Great Depression and World War 2 produced a racial and class politics that both motivated and undermined the New Deal Era. While some histories of the

New Deal in Detroit celebrate the liberal consensus that supposedly perished in the race riots of

1967, I agree with Sugrue that the race rebellions were a tragic result of the underlying and explicit racial and class tensions that were constitutive of, not opposed to, the liberal consensus during this era. This is worth emphasizing, I believe, because of the ramifications it has for the crafting of racial and class politics in our current Neoliberal Era. As Angus Burgin (2012) argues, it was this New Deal Era of depression, war, and state intervention to which Friedrich

Hayek and his market-centric colleagues in the Mont Pelerin Society were responding with what has become known, although twisted, as neoliberalism, which will be discussed later.

Without a doubt, the Great Depression hit Detroit the hardest and in ways from which it 38

would never fully recover. In 1929, Ford employed 128,000 workers, but in 1931, only 37,000 remained on the payroll. Similar cuts were made by other automakers. Detroit’s unemployment rate in 1933 was 46 percent (Babson, 1986). For those that were lucky enough to keep their jobs, which were mostly management, hours and wages were cut in half (Babson). The lack of jobs put substantial strain on public assistance. “Relief costs jumped from $305,300 in 1920 to

$1,958,300 in 1921. . . Detroit’s Department of Public Welfare (DPW) established an

Employment Bureau, which placed unemployed breadwinners in city jobs; however, work was found for only 17,175 of 40,270 applicants” (Vargas, 1993, p. 81). Without jobs, many mortgages and rents went unpaid forcing many Detroiters to move into multiple family units or move outside the city to find work. In Detroit, as in Bedford Falls, the two major banks—First

National Bank of Detroit and Union Guardian Trust Community— experienced a run that by

1933 meant the banks were losing from $2,500,000 to $3,000,000 each week (Awalt, 1969).

Although there were numerous attempts to stop the bleeding, the ensuing public alarm and eventual liquidation of the banks’ assets later that year sent tremors throughout the federal banking systems, from Cleveland to New York City. It was the Detroit banking crises that opened the door for drastic federal banking interventions, such as the New Deal bank bailouts distributed by the newly created Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) (Lumley, 2009).

Nativism was an unfortunate side effect of these far ranging economic crises. Angered over losing their employment and fearful of not receiving the financial assistance due them, white

Detroiters blamed Mexicans for stealing their jobs (a refrain that resurfaces in future economic crises). Once Americanized into efficient, productive, and patriotic workers, Mexicans were now

(again) foreigners and made a scapegoat for plummeting wages, the economic crisis, and limited job availability. Attempting to subdue these nativist fears, the Detroit City Council instituted a 39

restriction on foreign-born workers holding city jobs. The Office of Migration Service in Mexico and the U.S. Bureau of Immigration followed suit discouraging Mexican migrants from moving north to the economically devastated city (Vargas, 1993). New Deal financial assistance programs were often not an option for Mexican communities in Detroit because of discrimination in their distribution and citizenship requirements. The Diocese of Detroit helped the struggling Mexican community by opening soup kitchens, but such efforts were thwarted as the Diocese itself faced bankruptcy in 1933 (Vargas). Soon Mexican families and migrant workers were faced with a choice between picking up temporary jobs with little pay or volunteer for repatriation. To reduce the strain on public assistance and relief programs, the State of

Michigan and the City of Detroit agreed to participate in voluntary repatriation programs that would transport Mexicans back to their native country. One politician expressed the general nativist enthusiasm for the repatriation program in the city, “the elimination of such a large number of alien laborers and mechanics will work a tremendous benefit… and by their removal the openings in industry will be left for residents and citizens of the United States” (Vargas, p.

181). Perhaps surprisingly the program found unlikely supporters in the renowned artists, Diego

Rivera and Kahlo. While in Detroit on commission to paint the “Detroit Industry” , both traveled throughout Michigan arguing that repatriation offered Mexicans opportunities to use the knowledge and experiences that they had gained in Detroit factories to build farming and industrial communes in Mexico. But Rivera and Kahlo’s support for repatriation only continued to the extent that they believed it would help the poverty stricken Mexican communities of

Detroit. And it soon became clear, in about one month’s time, that the repatriation program had failed their compatriots. Not only were the first trains delayed and passengers had to stay on the trains overnight without light, heat, or food, the worker cooperatives in Mexico lacked irrigation 40

and financial assistance, tools, and other promised resources due to mismanagement, mass unemployment, and economic depression in the U.S. and Mexico. According to conservative estimates, 1,426 Mexicans repatriated to Mexico from Detroit, 1,500 undocumented Mexicans were forcefully deported by U.S. immigration officials, and many more left the city to find other means of living (Vargas). Of the 1,200 Mexicans still living in the city limits by 1936, family networks and fraternal organizations became the only sources of financial help to pay for rent, food, clothes, healthcare, and other necessities (Vargas).

The long reach of the Great Depression was also felt in DPS. Massive unemployment drew thousands of working teenagers back to school, leading to unreasonably crowded classrooms, and several communities argued that the district needed to build new schools, hire new teachers with higher salaries, and institute curricular reform. But school tax delinquencies and other financial shortcomings made these necessities near impossible (Mirel, 1999). One of the most significant changes in educational politics as a result of the Great Depression was the fracturing of the already fragile Progressive Era school reform consensus and the political realignment of class interests (Mirel). In the aftermath of the stock market crash, Ralph Stone, a prominent businessman in the city, fashioned a citizens committee composedly solely of business interests to advise the mayor and the common council on how to weather the crises. The committee, and specifically Stone, gained substantial political power and forcibly made the mayor, common council, and the board of education bend the knee to the golden calf of a balanced budget (a trend that plagues the school district to this day). Stone’s retrenchment positions required the slashing of teacher salaries and pay raises as well as the undoing of the “fads and frills” of

Progressive Era platoon schools. According to the Stone Committee, these difficult decisions were necessary to balance the municipal budget and keep DPS and the City of Detroit solvent 41

through an economically tumultuous period. In response to these retrenchment demands, a growing labor movement, teachers, and media outlets such as The Detroit News, argued that the human cost of such cutbacks would be intolerable (Mirel). Throughout the 1930-1950s, these class tensions underlying battles over education spending would eventually harden and pit the wealthy, business leaders, political conservatives, and financial leaders against organized labor, leftist activists, political liberals, and moderates (Mirel). In a speech delivered in 1931, DPS board president A. D. Jamieson called the accusations of the business community unjust, but more importantly, he put into words what at that point was obvious to everyone: the financial well-being of the city was directly linked to the fate of DPS.

The economic and political crises of the Great Depression including mass unemployment, intolerable working conditions, economic loss, bank closures, and challenges to public education were all instrumental in giving rise to organized labor in Detroit. In the 1920s, organizing in

Detroit was s slow and uneven process with very few successes due to the automotive companies’ use of rigid anti-collective bargaining policies and violent strikebreaking as well as the ambivalence and resistance of migrant communities to union values and political strategies.

But the economic woes of the early 1930s convinced many of the need to organize to secure employment and public assistance. The subsequent passage of the Wagner Act of 1935 in

Congress and the 1936 election of New Deal Democrat Frank Murphy as Governor of Michigan afforded workers the right to organize and forbade private employers from denying the right to collective bargaining and similar forms of good faith negotiation (Farley, Danziger, & Holzer,

2000). By 1936, the United Automobile Workers (UAW) used a series of work stoppage strategies including sit-down strikes to win recognition at Ford, GM, and Chrysler plants. One strategy in particular that had a lingering and substantial impact on the city’s racial politics was 42

the UAW leadership’s decision to integrate membership out of fear that management would replace striking white workers with the seemingly endless supply of Black and brown labor

(Farley, Danziger, & Holzer). As Vargas (1993) demonstrates, this opening of the ranks allowed the once-skeptical Mexican autoworkers to join UAW marches, demonstrations, and strikes, particularly at Ford’s River Rouge plant and Briggs Manufacturing. Mexican autoworkers overcame objections from some in the Catholic Diocese in Detroit, their own cultural values, the disdain for unions that they encountered from some in the Mexican community, and personal risk to join the union and seek relief from unemployment, low wages, and dangerous jobs at the plant (Vargas).

Teachers unions also began to organize in the city around 1930. The Board of Education, conservative politicians, and the business community frowned upon teacher political activism as a threat to students, but more importantly, their power (Mirel, 1999). This is the political context in which the Detroit Federation of Teachers (DFT) emerged in 1931. Because of retaliatory threats on teacher activism, the DFT had to influence educational politics as an underground organization. The DFT was actually successful in electing their candidate for the top seat in the

Detroit Teachers Association (DTA), but public fear of radicals within the union and a unionized teaching force precluded DFT efforts at unseating two retrenchment school board members in the general election of 1933. With the passage of the Warner Act and the growing membership, the DFT publicly announced itself and directly confronted business interests in a 1935 budget hearing claiming that retrenchment policies “brought severe suffering to the working class, who in spite of their poverty, continue to bear the greater part of the tax burden. The demands of reactionary groups are definitely hostile to the ideas of free democratic education” (Mirel, p.

118). Business leaders and organizations responded with red scare tactics that became 43

increasingly effective in the post-World War 2 era. In the face of these accusations and similar ones from the House Special Committee on Un-American Activists, liberal organizations and other labor unions joined with the teachers union to support increased education funding. Despite the board’s diverse politics and personal disagreements with unionizing, the school board chose to support the DFT realizing that this could be a powerful political coalition against those that were arguing for slashed education funding. Although there were constant private and public disagreements among liberal, leftist, and socialist/communist factions within the DFT, UAW, and other unions, for the most part this tactical movement by the board represents the beginning of what became a Black-liberal-labor coalition in educational politics that formed in response to postwar school budget battles.

By 1941, the City of Detroit was emerging from the Great Depression and becoming the great “arsenal of democracy.” Overcoming Henry Ford’s anti-war beliefs, his son, signed a contract worth $7 billion in today’s dollars to build the Willow Run plant, 800 airplanes, and 1,200 airplane frames. By the end of World War 2, Ford had rolled 9,000 B-24s off their assembly lines at Willow Run (Baime, 2014). The quick retooling of Detroit’s automobile factories to produce weapons, tanks, jeeps, and trucks for the war effort was impressive by any standard. The prominent labor activist and UAW President Walter Reuther summed up the faith, hope, and pride that the Allied leaders, from Franklin D. Roosevelt to , had in the productive capacities and manufacturing prowess of Detroit’s war factories: “England’s battles, it used to be said, were won on the playing fields of Eton. This plan is put forward in the belief that America’s can be won on the assembly lines of Detroit” (Baime, p. 75).

As with the installation of mass production that fostered in the Progressive Era, this change in production promoted a second large-scale migration of workers to Detroit and great wealth 44

accumulation. From 1940 to 1947, manufacturing jobs in the city increased by 40 percent and unemployment dropped from 135,000 to only 4,000 (Sugrue, 1996). As with the first Great

Migration, Southern Blacks and whites from Midwestern and Appalachian farms were attracted to the highest paying blue-collar jobs in the United States. For the first time, Mexican American,

Puerto Rican, Cuban, and Central and South American workers and families were also migrating to Detroit (Gordillo, 2010). From 1942 to the early 1950s, the infamous Bracero program, a series of agreements between the U.S. and Mexico where diplomatic relations were traded for

Mexican labor, supplied automaker management with cheap and mostly male labor (Gordillo). In addition to these changes in migration patterns, the racial and gender makeup of the shop floor also changed. With the tight labor market due to the War, union and civil rights protests, and

Black activist mobilization, Black men and white women were acquiring positions on the war production line. If there ever were economic boom years in Detroit, the World War 2 and postwar eras were certainly them. Labor movements were cementing their political power; the factories and other service industries were beginning to thrive even beyond their Progressive Era successes. Although the city’s class, racial, and political fractions rarely waned, on the surface people seemed united in the liberal consensus that promised every man, woman, and child a fair share of the New Deal promises. Daily demonstrations of patriotism and Americanism from native Detroiters and new migrant communities downplayed any racial and class tensions and welcomed an era of economic development and well-being, at least for most.

But concluding the analysis of postwar Detroit there neglects the racial and class tensions produced by the social relations embedded in the New Deal Era that soon came to undermine the liberal consensus and define the city for many by the 1970s. Federal and state New Deal programs such as the Public Works Administration, Civilian Conservation Corps, Works 45

Progress Administration, and the defense industry boom ushered in numerous job opportunities.

Pressure from labor unions, such as the American Federation of Labor (AFL), UAW, and

National Negro Labor Council (NNLC), precipitated these programs and ensured that government action was taken on the national, state, and local levels to guarantee that workers were afforded their “inalienable right to a job” (Sugrue, 1996, p. 158). But in practice, this right to a job, or at least the right to a quality and safe job with decent pay, seemed to be only guaranteed for white men. By 1945, Blacks made up 15 percent of autoworkers, and Latinos were quickly approaching pre-Great Depression levels (Sugrue; Gordillo, 2010). But the New

Deal labor market was structured in such a way that disproportionally forced Blacks and Latinos into low paying service industry jobs or subordinate jobs such as janitorial and unskilled assembly line work, which were more exposed to layoffs and replacement during the automation of the automotive plants (Sugrue). Firms had internal hiring policies that discouraged employment of Latino and Black workers. Newspaper job listings for automotive jobs contained the qualifiers of “white,” “colored,” “American,” and even “Protestant” (Sugrue, p. 95).

Management was also concerned with how racial-mixing on the shop floor would affect productivity; racial homogeneity was consequently prioritized in hiring decisions (Sugrue, 1996).

White workers who during the Progressive Era identified by their ethnic affiliations were increasingly locating their identities in their working class, masculine whiteness in response to the growing number of Black, Latina/o, and women workers (Sugrue, 1997). This working class whiteness sensibility was reinforced by workplace rules, culture, and attitudes. It also afforded solidarity among privileged workers to protect their lucrative jobs from racial encroachment.

When this racial hegemony was challenged, white workers would use hate strikes to reassert their control and corner the higher paying jobs. For instance, when three Black women were put 46

to work as drill press operators at the Packard Motor Company plant in 1943, white workers went on a hate strike to protect their jobs and to demonstrate their personal disdain for Black, brown, and women workers (Shantz, 2007). This put the UAW in a difficult space: on one hand the organization nationally promoted racial equality through its Fair Practices Department, but on the other hand, the UAW locals often let racial and gender discrimination go unchallenged.

To some degree, even the national leadership under Walter Reuther and others tended to lean away from challenging their white membership’s discriminatory practices as well as from including nondiscriminatory clauses in collective bargains agreements with the automakers

(Sugrue). Instead, the UAW concentrated its political and cultural capital on ensuring high wages and comprehensive benefits packages for those with seniority. In other industries, Blacks and

Latinos did not fair much better. Co-cultural workers were excluded from skilled jobs in the thriving steel, chemical, and building trade industries. Retailers did not want to employ Black or

Latinos out of fear that it may upset their wealthy, white clients. However, because of the efforts of Civil Rights activists, Blacks and Latinos did have greater employment opportunities as sanitation workers, city transportation workers, low-level clerical workers, and educators. By the late 1940s, about 187 Blacks, mostly women, were teachers in minority-majority elementary schools (Sugrue). But racial antagonisms were certainly brewing in the labor markets and on the shop floor over economic resources and the threat posed by the increasing size of the co-cultural workforce

Although appeals to rights-based liberalism constituted these racial tensions in the labor market, the racial and class divisions in the housing segregation and public housing debates more clearly illustrate the deeply-ingrained contradictions of New Deal rights-based liberalism. During

World War 2, Latina/os were widely dispersed throughout the city with most located in poor 47

rental housing communities around factories on the East and West Sides. But during the postwar years, foreign-born Latina/o residents, second-generation Latina/os, and newly arrived Latina/o migrant workers and families predominantly settled in an ill-defined area directly southwest of (Darden & Thomas, 2013). Unlike the Black neighborhoods of Paradise

Valley and Black Bottom on the Lower East Side, Latina/os were not the dominant ethnic or racial group in the barrio of Southwest Detroit. But as several scholars have argued, the relatively small size of the Latina/o communities of Southwest Detroit did not lessen the racial exclusion they experienced, particularly in housing (Skendzel, 1980; Vargas, 1993; Godillo,

2010). Sociologist Norman Daymond is one of the few scholars that have written about this postwar Latina/o community in Southwest Detroit. In his article on Mexican housing in Detroit, he wrote the following:

One segment of the Mexican population is found living in basement apartments which, in being lightless and airless, approximate the adobe huts of the peasant village. The likeness of this dwelling to that in Mexico accounts for the persistence with which it is retained by the least assimilate migrants. (Humphrey, 1946, p. 433)

This reductionist and individualistic analysis was paradigmatic of the era and ignores the structural constraints such as discriminatory federal housing policies, banking practices, and the actions of real estate agents, which all contributed to the fencing in of Latina/os and Blacks to certain impoverished and overpopulated neighborhoods (Goddillo; Sugrue, 1996). For instance, the Federal Home Loan Bank System, a regulatory outgrowth of 1930 New Deal building and loan reforms to make home mortgages more widely available, created Residential Security Maps and Surveys with local real estate agents to be used by bankers and other lenders to determine eligibility for mortgages and home loans (Sugrue). On the maps, each neighborhood was given a rating from A (green) to D (red) based on age and condition of the buildings; infrastructure and 48

amenities of the neighborhood; and lack of Blacks, Latina/os, and economically destitute, or to use the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation’s (HOLC) language, “a lower grade population”

(Sugrue, p. 44). Neighborhoods colored red rarely, if ever, received mortgages or home loans to improve their curb appeal, make much needed repairs, or purchase property in middle-class neighborhoods. Caught in a catch-22, Black and Latina/o areas such as Black Bottom, Paradise

Valley, and Southwest Detroit were rated by the Department of Housing and Urban

Development (HUD) as “hazardous” and “slums" despite the reality that these areas were flourishing hubs for co-cultural businesses, communities, and creative arts. Instead, they became opportune spaces for postwar urban redevelopment projects such as the construction of the

Chrysler, Edsel Ford, and John C. Lodge freeways, demolishing Black and Latina/o neighborhoods and any sense of community in their path.

On the flip-side, white neighborhoods with homeowner covenants restricting

“undesirables” were incentivized by redlining policies and loaning practices to maintain white- only neighborhoods (Sugrue, 1996). Even after the Supreme Court ruled in Shelly v. Kraemer

(1948) that racially restricted covenants were unconstitutional, real estate agents, housing developers, and white homeowners continued housing segregation practices through the formation of localized neighborhood improvement associations (Sugrue). It was good business practice for real estate agents and building developers to lead these homeowner associations, and the best way to attract homeowners and sell houses was through enforcing white-only, middle- class housing developments. Hence, real estate agents and building developers played crucial roles in ensuring the survival of housing segregation that kept white housing developments free from racial and class impurities.

Considering the failures of the private market to provide adequate housing for those who 49

lived in overcrowded, racially segregated neighborhoods, public housing seemed a reasonable solution. But the racial and class animosities and anxieties that had been underlying private housing segregation schemes moved to the front burner in the volatile political debates and demonstrations over public housing. As Sugrue (1996) argues, the violence that stemmed from the public housing debates can be explained in part as different interpretations of the rights-based liberalism of the New Deal promise. While the marginalized understood the New Deal as a promise that the government would intercede with welfare programs when the market failed, white homeowners thought that government would ensure their investments and deposits, including providing for financial market and housing stability. Racial animosity over economic resources materialized in white mothers walking with baby strollers in front of the Sojourner

Truth Housing project waiving American flags and asking those walking by, “Which side are you on” (Shantz, 2007). They claimed to be simply defending their homes. If Blacks moved in, then access to economic resources such as home loans and mortgages would be denied to whites who lived or wanted to live in that neighborhood. As was heard on these white picket lines,

“rights to protect, restrict, and improve our neighborhood” (Sugrue, p. 73). When Black residents eventually did move in on February 28, 1942, a riot broke out between white protestors and

Blacks residents and community members injuring about 40 people while 220 were arrested and

109 would face criminal charges (Sugrue). A complicated web of federal redlining policies, bank loaning practices, white grassroots homeowner associations, and real estate agents ensured that economic and political resources would be disproportionally availed to homeowners, and the few public housing developments that would be built would be racially segregated.

These racial animosities over housing protectionism and invasion had several consequences for the city. Racial violence broke out between white and Black teens on Belle Isle 50

in June 1943 leading to one of the most violent riots in the U.S. prior to 1960 (Shantz, 2007).

When federal troops finally subdued the violence after three days, 34 people were killed, 675 were injured, and 1,893 were arrested (Sugrue, 1996). In light of the 1943 race rebellion, whites realized that the threat of Black violence could be a persuasive rhetorical tactic in future segregationist endeavors to curb racial mixing. The public housing debates also changed the political and economic landscapes in Detroit. Public housing was the hinge-issue in the 1949 mayoral election pitting New Deal Democrat George Edwards against the Conservative Albert

Cobo who ran on a campaign against the “Negro invasions” (Sugrue, p. 82). Despite labor leadership’s backing of Edwards and Cobo’s staunch record of anti-union policies, the union membership overwhelmingly voted against Edwards. One political coordinator explained this paradox: “I think in these municipal elections we are dealing with people who have a middle class mentality. Even in our own UAW, the member is either buying a home, owns a home, or is going to by one” (Sugrue, p. 84). The election killed public housing in Detroit, resulted in the

UAW’s retreat from city politics, and made the housing shortage and racial segregation in the city worse. Cobo replaced the public housing commissioner with his cronies from private real estate and building sectors who turned resources away from public housing projects and focused instead on urban renewal projects, including what would become the Cobo Center, the Medical

Center, and apartment projects, all located in predominately Black areas of the city. Similar to the highway construction projects in the 1940s, these urban real estate projects were designed to clear slums, which was code for “Negro removal” (Sugrue, p. 50).

Deindustrialization also shaped racial and class politics in the waning of the New Deal era.

From 1950-1960, 34 percent of Detroit’s manufacturing jobs were lost, assessed valuation of the city dropped by $500 million, and for the first time since the Great Depression, the population of 51

the city fell from 1.85 million to 1.67 million (Angus & Mirel, 1993). Changing federal political strategies and decentralization of the defense industry resulted in a mass exodus of war production and a loss of 56,000 defense jobs in 1954 alone (Sugrue, 1996). Following suit, automobile manufactures began the process of decentralizing automobile production to Detroit’s suburbs and other Midwestern and Southern cities. According to Sugrue, the automakers claimed that limited land availability and high city taxes were the reasons for these moves. But in reality, decentralization of the automotive industry was allowed and encouraged by the social relations embedded in production. Advances in automation afforded management opportunities to reduce labor costs and undermine the advancement of labor unions. This cannot be overstated. As

Sugrue argues, the decentralization of automobile production was not the consequence of some

“invisible hand” of the free-market, but rather a very real and carefully planned and executed tactic by owners and management to finally overcome the control that unions had over them.

Although labor unions were still strong and politically active during the 1950s, leadership and most rank-and-file members were more concerned with securing unemployment benefits, pension plans, and increased wages than with directly dealing with the root causes of deindustrialization (Sugrue). For instance, in 1950, Walter Reuther signed the “Treaty of

Detroit” with GM, Ford, and Chrysler. Although it guaranteed union members higher wages and benefits, the terms also freed up the automakers to make decisions on plant relocations, investments, and product pricing without negotiating with the union (Boyle, 2001). Even attempts by city officials to stay the relocation of auto plans outside the city were conducive to the interests of the automakers. For instance, the city dramatically reduced property taxes for corporations, which were exaggerated by automaker management in the first place, and passed the tax burden off to individual taxpayers through an income tax increase in 1962 (Sugrue). 52

As with other changes in the social relations of automobile production, the brunt of these economic and job losses were born by Blacks and Latina/os. Their jobs were the most susceptible to layoffs and firings, discrimination kept them from other means of employment, and poverty and lack of financial assistance from drained New Deal slush funds kept most

Blacks and Latina/os from relocating. When the racially and economically marginalized would begin to object to deindustrialization, individual worker deficiencies were blamed.

Unemployment among Latina/os was blamed on their lack of English skills, lack of citizenship, and lack of real American values (Gordillo, 2010). Corporate values became synonymous with

American values, and subsequently, anyone, or any union, who attempted to bring attention to the role of capitalist forces in creating and sustaining inequity were accused of being “anti-

American” and were subject to McCarthy and his red-sniffing hounds. This sentiment forced the

Urban League, UAW, and the NAACP to purge radicals and leftists from its ranks, and take centrist positions in addressing deindustrialization and its effects on the racially and economically marginalized.

These class and racial tensions in the city reverberated throughout educational politics of the New Deal Era. In the 1940s, battles over teacher salaries, overcrowded classrooms, school finance, the moratoriums on school construction, and local vs. state funding of the school district were fought along similar class lines that had developed through the Great Depression and were now becoming institutionalized in the district (Mirel, 1999). In 1949, a game-changing state legislative bill passed granting DPS financial independence from the city. Instead of lobbying city officials for a larger piece of the municipal budget, the board of education could go directly to voters—who decided on millage increases and bond issues—to get much needed funding. No longer did education officials have to influence budget hearings, but rather educational politics 53

would be accomplished through building electoral collations that could persuade voters (Mirel).

This legislative change, the dramatic increase in the size of the Black population in the city, the growing Civil Rights Movement in Detroit, and the mounting, although inconsistent, support that liberals and labor gave Black communities opened spaces for Black educational interests, including racial integration and building new schools in Black neighborhoods (Mirel).

Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, the burgeoning Black-labor-liberal coalition successfully convinced voters to pass several vital millage proposals providing the school district financial stability during the early years of deindustrialization. In the 1950s, Black Detroiters were beginning to see the fruits of their labor. They successfully fought to increase the number of

Black teachers, administrators, and counselors; curtailed the policy of restricting Black teachers to predominantly Black schools; improved the curricular offerings at Black schools beyond simple vocational education; increased funding for school construction in Black-majority neighborhoods; and stopped administrative attempts at gerrymandering the districts to create segregated schools (Mirel). Despite the dawning of an economic downturn, it was as if Black communities were finally beginning to secure much needed recourses through the educational politics and political coalitions of the 1950s.

But these Black-labor-liberal political successes along with deindustrialization, the flight of capital from the city, and the growth of Black and Latina/o communities set the stage for grassroots defensive localism among white communities and racial violence in the city. The liberal school district began experimenting with busing and adjusting attendance boundaries to reduce racial segregation in the district. Many whites interpreted these actions with contempt claiming that the district was ruining their neighborhoods and their children by integrating the schools (Mirel, 1999). A millage increase proposal for the schools was soundly voted down on 54

racial grounds by white wards in the city and Black nationalists who insisted that the school board was doing too much and not enough to curb segregation in the school district. Despite growing Black and Latina/o populations in the city, middle-class whites still held onto most political and economic power in the city, and by 1965, Black schools were still segregated, void of much needed resources, and educational programs and standards were dismal in Black schools leading to student walkouts at Northern High School (Mirel). Although the New Deal was supposed to heal problems in housing, employment, and education, shortsighted implementation and lack of significant federal and state commitment and resources left the city polarized along class and racial lines.

These were the social and political conditions that gave rise to the notoriously violent events that began near a blind-pig, an illegal bar and place for gambling, on the Near West Side that eventually consumed the city for five days in July 1967. Although most accounts of the 1967 race rebellions focus on Black and white violence, Latina/os also took to the streets to vent their frustration over the lack of social services, unemployment, poverty, and housing segregation that plagued the barrio (Salas & Salas, 1974). If there was a bright spot in the aftermath of July 1967, it was the formation of Latina/o led grassroots organizations to address the structural inequities faced by Latina/os. Otherwise, July 1967 was largely tragic (Boyle, 2001). The violence quickened the geographical and ideological fracturing of the city that was always already at work in the New Deal liberal “consensus” (Sugrue, 1996). Once an amalgam of hopes, Detroit neighborhoods had become increasingly segmented and were now ideologically, economically, and geographically classified by perceived and real racial and class differences that would determine each neighborhood’s fate during the Neoliberal Era.

55

The Neoliberal Era: The Urban Donut and Corporate Sensibilities (1971- Present)

Deindustrialization, the rise of global capitalism, the oil crises of the 1970s, economic recessions in the 1970s and 1980s, decrease in vehicle demand, and state and federal policy changes that no longer prioritized urban municipalities in their economic development plans were taking their toll on the racial geography of the city and the distribution of resources in metropolitan Detroit (Trachte & Ross, 1985; Boyle, 2001). By the early 1970s, the metropolitan area was beginning to look like what Mike Davis (1993) calls an “‘urban donut’: Black in the deindustrialized centre, lily-white on the job-rich rim” (p. 17). Although the metaphor does not account for Latina/os in the city or middle-class Blacks in the suburbs, it does capture the stark divide between the city and suburban areas, or at least their racial and economic public images.

The statistics are well known, but deserve repeating. In 1960, there were roughly 700,000 jobs in the city, but from the mid-1960s to 1990, that number was cut in half with the city’s share of metropolitan Detroit employment down from 54 percent to 21 percent; only 20 percent of the manufacturing jobs that had been in the city during World War 2 were still there in 1992 (Farlye,

Danziger, & Holzer, 2000). By 1980, Detroit had lost one out of every six residents, and for those that stayed in the city, one-third lived below the poverty line in a city with the lowest home values of the seventy-seven most populous cities in the U.S (Farlye, Danziger, & Holzer). In

1990, the poverty rate in the city had reached 32 percent compared with the 6 percent poverty rate in the suburbs (Farlye, Danziger, & Holzer). The job and economic gaps between the city and its suburbs grew exponentially from 1970 to 2000. In terms of the racial divide between the city and its suburbs, 76 percent of the city’s population identified as Black while Blacks only accounted for six percent of the suburban population. From 1950 to 1980, the white population in the city fell by 85 percent while the Black population accounted for 82 percent of the 56

population in 2010, and the same year saw the growth of the Latina/o community to 6.8 percent, up from 2.4 percent in 1980. Homicide rates were up from 5 murders per 100,000 in 1950 to 50 per 100,000 by the mid-1970s, earning Detroit its infamous title of “murder capital of the world”

(Farlye, Danziger, & Holzer; Darden & Thomas, 2013)

I argue that the Neoliberal Era slowly emerged through an ebb and flow of complicated and contradictory public policy decisions, economic revitalization plans, and capitalist interests that reacted to economic and racial trends in the city. As in the New Deal Era, economic and racial crises are opportune moments for urban experimentation in the Neoliberal Era, and maybe one could argue that politicians, the budding nonprofit sector, and corporations are genuinely attempting to curb what they view as adverse trends that have lurked in the city since before

World War 2. Ironically, this era in the histories of Detroit and DPS has witnessed public distrust of “the government” and a recentralization under state control. This period also represents a shift toward reliance on public-private partnerships and nonprofits as well as the integration of corporate values and managerial practices in public policy. Perhaps Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop

(1987), with its critique of public reliance on private corporations to address crime, corruption, gentrification, financial crises, is an obvious, but fitting metaphor for the unfinished Neoliberal

Era in Detroit.

By no means was it obvious to everyone in the early 1970s that the writing was on the wall for the city. In fact, the 1970s were a period of hope particularly for Black communities in

Detroit whom were invigorated in part by the election of Detroit’s first Black mayor, Coleman

Young. In 1973, Young won the mayoral election with 92 percent of the Black vote while his white, “tough-on-crime” opponent Police Commissioner John Nicholas received 91 percent of the white vote (Teaford, 2006). The racially-polarized election was certainly a testament to the 57

ever present, deep racial divisions in the city, but it also represented what so many Black

Detroiters were beginning to feel—they had finally gotten their piece of the municipal pie. The three-day inaugural celebration, which featured entertainers such as Diana Ross and swearing in by both Black U.S. District Court Judge Damon Keith and white State Supreme Court Justice

John Sainson, symbolized a time of racial healing and justice. Finally issues important to both white and Black residents of Detroit would be addressed, including crime, police reform, and what would be the most significant obstacle and goal for Young until he left office in 1994, urban revitalization (Rich, 1999).

The significance of the economic development plans made during Young’s tenure cannot be overstated, and not necessarily because they accomplished their intended goals. But rather the ideologies, racial, and class interests underlying and undermining these revitalization plans and their implementation would largely shape the city’s development and characterize the Neoliberal

Era in Detroit by the 1990s. Regionally, Detroit was built on automotive innovation and industry, and it was (and is) difficult to re-imagine the city outside of that industrial historical framework.

Additionally, in response to the stagflation that plagued the country in the 1970s, urban municipalities were turning their collective attention to attracting private industry and monetarism to fight off declining economic growth and inflation (Jones, 2013). On the ground in

Detroit, the idea was that public officials would incentivize and steer public policy toward attracting brick and motor companies to urban centers, which would then ideally fill storefronts, increase employment, and improve the city’s position on the world stage—the shock that would bring Detroit back to life, if you will. This pro-growth ideology permeated urban development discourses in the city. Young and his administration viewed the attracting of capital to the downtown district as essential to turning around the city (Longo, 2006). 58

But the contradictions in this pro-growth approach to urban planning would produce uneven development and further alienate Detroit neighborhoods from much needed resources.

“Old Detroit” suffered a negative racialized public image that made capital investment in the city challenging to say the least. Mayor Young admitted this in a 1997 interview: “It was hard to attract white entrepreneurs and developers to Detroit because of the city’s large Black population and my administration being in charge” (Young, p. 37). In response to this stereotype of Detroit as a Black city and murder capital, Young funneled public monies into “image conscious projects” (Neill, 1995, p. 645). Important to urban revitalization in the neoliberal era is the economic prioritization of downtown core development and infrastructure over other economic concern or issue, and in Detroit, image conscious projects were almost entirely restricted to the downtown center of the city (Harvey, 2001). For instance, public monies were invested in beautification and infrastructure projects such as the People Mover ($55 million), a downtown trolley system ($1.9 million), Washington Boulevard Plaza ($4.4 million), the Riverfront ($23.5 million), Civic Center Plaza and Fountain ($20 million), and the Woodward Transitway and Mall

($10 million) (Longo). During a period of mass deindustrialization and climbing financial debt that disproportionally impacted periphery neighborhoods, Young and other policymakers narrowly invested public monies into the central business district and riverfront in order to attract service, entertainment, and financial sector investment as replacements for the whole left by manufactures. Despite that this approach to urban development left Detroit with some impressive buildings, Cobo Hall and the ultimately distracted from the structural economic crises that Detroit had been undergoing since the early 1950s (Thomas, 2013). Many

Detroiters celebrated Young’s impressive and highly visible revitalization accomplishments in the downtown and riverfront areas—the same developments that were leading to uneven 59

development (Ross & Mitchell, 2013). Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, uneven development in

Detroit meant precious economic resources were being invested in hopes to attract private corporations while human capital investments in housing, power grids, sewage systems, educational opportunities, alleviating poverty, and other local community projects were neglected (Neill).

The accompanying shift to increased dependence on the private sector, nonprofits, and private-public partnerships facilitated by pro-growth ideologies and structures also shaped the

Neoliberal Era in Detroit. Drawing from his personal friendships with President Carter and

Michigan Governor Milliken, Mayor Young was able to increase federal and state grant monies for urban revitalization in the early years of his tenure (Young, 1997). But declining property and corporate tax revenues, deindustrialization, and dwindling political support for state and federal grants for urban revitalization during the Reagan and Bush administrations forced the Young administration to rely increasingly on nonprofit fundraisers, such as New Detroit, Inc., and corporate sponsors, such as Henry Ford’s II private investment coalition Detroit Renaissance,

Inc., for its revitalization and blight removal programs (Thomas, 2013). As June Manning

Thomas argues, these shifts in urban funding symbolized a troubling public policy trend: public funds were being surrendered for the sake of private development. For instance, the city used tax increment financing and strategic reduction of corporate property taxes to lure and keep highly visible corporations in the city, and federal programs such as the Urban Development Action

Grants (UDAG) encouraged reliance on private business monies for urban development through its funding approach of matching private investment dollars (Thomas). Consequently, urban development became, what Thomas calls, a financing deal between public representatives and private entrepreneurs, which also opened a door for an increased role for nonprofits such as New 60

Detroit, Inc. in public policy decisions.

One example of community outrage over these private-public relationships was the building of Detroit/Hamtramck Assembly in Poletown. In the early 1980s, GM approached the

City of Detroit with a proposition: if the city cleared 500 to 600 acres of land that had rail and freeway access, the company would build a plant that would directly employ 6,000 workers and indirectly employ approximately 20,000 workers (Darden, Hill, Thomas, & Thomas, 1987).

Mayor Young and his administration identified a lot of land on the periphery of the city limits and Hamtramck that would be suitable for development considering the rundown houses and few industries in the area. But to clear the land for development would require moving approximately

996 families and 634 individuals (Darden, et al.). While some of the residents were elated that the city government was buying them out of their houses so that they were free to move, several other residents, including Polish, Filipinos, Albanians, and Yemenis, protested the private-public partnership that would destroy their homes and undermine their local community revitalization plans. Through a series of legal suits that resulted in Poletown Neighborhood Council v. Detroit

(1981), the Michigan Supreme Court ruled in favor of the city’s use of eminent domain to clear the Poletown neighborhood. While the city’s cost for clearing Poletown was $200 million, GM’s cost for the land was only $8 million. To raise the $200 million, the City of Detroit increased its loan debt and redirected monies that were originally earmarked for neighborhood development, further alienating public interests throughout the city. To offset this imbalance, GM promised the city a 4.5 percent property tax base increase over 12 years, and afterwards the cities of Detroit and Hamtramck would collect a net property tax revenue of about $21 million a year (Darden et al.). However, the Detroit/Hamtramck Assembly plant never achieved its promised employment numbers or its proposed tax revenue, which the city governments decided to slash in order to 61

keep the plant operating. Despite these striking shortfalls, the Young administration attempted to reproduce the Poletown plan to refurbish Chrysler’s Jefferson Avenue plant (Darden et al.). The lawyer who represented the Poletown Neighborhood Council against the city powerfully summarized what this case symbolized for the economic, political, and ideological reprioritization of the Neoliberal Era:

Cities and communities have to surrender their constitutions if necessary to get private development. In essence, private development is so essential [that] the only way the city can compete and make greener pastures is to keep giving the city away. It’s a nothing strategy. (Darden et al., p. 178)

This period of neoliberal urban revitalization and development was also a period of growth for Latina/o communities in Southwest Detroit. After the 1967 race rebellions, properties and rents in Southwest Detroit neighborhoods were cheap, and along with the racial segregation in housing practices and polices that kept residents in the area, family networks provided support for Latina/os that moved to the neighborhood (Goddillo, 2010). Many of the Latina/os who migrated to Detroit from the 1970s through the 1990s were undocumented and relied on the help of coyotaje networks to travel to the city (Goddillo). While manufacturing jobs afforded middle- class status to those Latina/os lucky enough to have one, by the 1970s most of those jobs were leaving the area; consequently, many Latina/os had to depend on family networks and social organizations to locate employment and weather the financial downturn (Ravuri, 2009). Unlike other racial and ethnic groups in the city, Latina/o communities responded to the 1967 rebellions and deindustrialization by forming grassroots political organizations that could assess and alleviate some of the social, political, and economic problems of the barrio (Salas & Salas,

1974). For instance, angered by continued poverty and structural inequity, Latina/o-led organizations such as The Latin Americans for Social and Economic Development (LA SED), 62

the Committee of Concerned Spanish-Americans (CCSSA), the Michigan chapter of La Raza

Unida, and Latin Americans United for Political Action (LAUPA) began working for social change in Detroit. These grassroots organizations had several obstacles not the least of which included gaining recognition for economic resources in a cash-strapped, Black majority-minority city. Political and cultural struggles for recognition included parades at Patton, Riverside, and

Clark parks; barrio murals; bilingual poetry and theatre; Spanish radio shows; the building and promoting Latina/o restaurants, markets, retailers, and other businesses on the expanding Verner strip (Alvadado & Alvadado, 2003). There was also a strong push from within the Latina/o communities to do education outreach through summer fiestas, sharing of tamales, and inviting white and Black neighbors to festivals (Salas & Salas).

During the 1970s and 1980s, the Latina/o community in Southwest Detroit did not have much influence in electoral politics because they were too spread out geographically to form a voting block. Other hurdles to mobilizing Latina/os for political office included poverty and language barriers (Alvadado & Alvadado, 2003). But Latina/o grassroots efforts were effective in gaining recognition in nonprofit organizations such as New Detroit, Inc., and after numerous attempts at petitioning the nonprofit, several leaders in the Latina/o community were invited to participate in leadership and committee positions within New Detroit and the Southwest Detroit

Business Association. Latina/o involvement in these nonprofits was instrumental in growing the viability and visibility of the Latina/o community, businesses in Mexicantown, and Latina/o cultural outreach (Lara, 2012).

Despite these political and economic gains, Latina/o communities were unable to solve many of the problems that still plagued their community, including high unemployment, crime, vacant lots, and burned down houses. Monies totaling about $7.75 million that had been initially 63

earmarked for community and housing development in the Delray neighborhood were being relocated to other pro-growth projects in the city, including the Poletown plant (Larsen,

Sherman, Cole, Karwat, Badiane, & Coseo, 2014). In DPS, Latina/o students experienced high dropout rates and were assigned to “mentally retarded” classes for speaking Spanish (Salas,

2014). Rubén Alfredo, the leader of the recently formed Concerned Citizens of Migrant Workers, argued that, “The Mexican child, who in many cases speaks only Spanish, is at a disadvantage in

[DPS]. Most of these children don’t drop—they are forced out” (Salas, 2014, p. 231). In the

1970s, these accusations of Latina/o student deficiency and subsequent dropouts functioned as galvanizing moments that mobilized organizations such as the La Raza Citizens’ Advisory

Committee and LA SED to file lawsuits and protest the structural inequalities and inequitable treatment of Latina/os in the schooling system (Salas).

The class and racial tensions that were shaping the urban geography of Detroit also gave rise to experimental educational politics and policies in DPS and at the state level. Although a bit reductionist, educational politics in the Neoliberal Era revolved around one broad issue: school governance. Although there had been rumblings throughout the city prior, in 1968 there was a strong push from both white and Black communities to decentralize the school district and thereby increase local community control over their schools. At a meeting of the NAACP, Rev.

W. C. Ardrey gave one of the many justifications for decentralization: “I am not going to let white educators tell me that our children can’t learn. I stand here as a member of a community that has the power to see to it that our children get a good education” (Mirel, p. 326). Racially motivated violence in schools, neglect of schools in poor and marginalized communities, alienation and powerlessness of teachers, terrible test scores in co-cultural-majority schools, and irrelevant curricula for the diverse needs among schools were some of the reasons given for 64

decentralization (Mirel). Through state legislative policy tinkering and intense board of education public meetings over the course of three years, there was a decentralization plan ready to be implemented. But some, including the liberal school board, argued that school integration should be prioritized over decentralization. School board President A. L. Zwerdling summarized the liberal argument:

So while we can understand and sympathize with what it is that compels some to call for segregation, or for some plan that insures black or white political control of our school systems, we cannot yield to it. We have heard the urging, loud and clear, for a return to a divided society, but we cannot in conscience go along with it. (Mirel, pp. 341-342).

The immediate political fallout from this first battle between proponents of desegregation and proponents of decentralization resulted in the recall of the liberal school board members and the eventual signing of Public Act 48, the decentralization legislation crafted by then-Representative

Coleman Young, into law on July 7, 1970.

But as Mirel (1999) demonstrates, both the decentralization and cross-district desegregation plans were unpopular in many Black communities in Detroit. In fact, survey data suggests that Black community members prioritized increasing teacher pay, smaller class sizes, additional resources for schools, and school safety over either plans (Mirel). Additionally, the fights over decentralization and desegregation from the end of the 1960s and throughout the

1970s overshadowed Latina/o demands for bilingual and bicultural education in DPS (Salas,

2014). Angered at the lack of school district concern over the poor performance of Latina/o students, many Latina/o communities wrote letters and protested the school board to increase the number of Spanish-language courses and lessons on Mexican history and culture. According to

Salas, “[Chicana/os] saw bilingual education as a means to cultural cohesion and the reinforcement of a separate, Spanish-speaking, non-white identity” (p. 236). Instead of shaming 65

Latina/o students into speaking English, Latina/o parents argued that their children should be encouraged to use “their language as an asset . . . their culture as a means of building confidence and pride in their greatness” (Salas, p. 238). Self-determination and differentiation of Latina/o student and community identities and interests from those of whites and Blacks was a vital first step toward addressing political, economic, and racial inequity in the barrio that often went unnoticed outside the barrio. In the far-reaching cross-district desegregation plan that resulted from Milliken v Bradley (1971), Latina/os were excluded as a “language minority,” and therefore would not see any relief from the racial desegregation plan.

The decisions made in Milliken v Bradley (1971) and Milliken v Bradley II (1977) had devastating consequences for the uneven racial geography of metropolitan Detroit and the financial state of DPS. For the sake of brevity, I will focus on the aftermath of Milliken v Bradley

II (1977). In 1974, the Supreme Court ruled the cross-district busing of black students to suburban white schools unconstitutional since racial segregation was not going on in suburban schools; it was only proven that racial segregation was the situation within Detroit. Therefore, the Detroit school board had to come up with an alternative desegregation plan that only applied to their district schools (Radelet, 1991). The Court ordered lower court supervision of the district’s desegregation plans and a series of reforms, which were to be financed by both the City of Detroit and the State of Michigan, since both were instrumental in crafting policies that had led to the school district’s segregation in the first place (Mirel, 1999). But the experimentation with cross-district busing did have two long-lasting effects. First, more white students left the district during the desegregation cases than in the immediate aftermath of the 1967 race rebellions, and secondly, financing the court battles and the desegregation of the district along with the cost of the DFT strike in 1973 over teacher accountability, declining property tax 66

revenues, and deindustrialization had all but drained the finances of the school district (Mirel).

Due to the dreadful financial state of the district, its poor educational quality, and the fallout from the desegregation cases, Detroiters voted overwhelmingly to recentralize the district in

1981. The great decentralization experiment had also failed. As Mirel argues “Ironically decentralization, which was designed to bring the schools closer to the community, shattered much of what remained of the relationship between educators, students, and parents” (p. 368).

It was from this milieu of heightened financial crises, poor educational quality, and feverish racial and class tensions in the aftermath of the desegregation and decentralization battles that a new school reform experiment was born that would eventually set the stage for school choice and the introduction of market values and corporate management tactics into DPS policy and practices. In 1988, a diverse group of reformers including blacks and whites, representatives from both major political parties, and corporate and labor interests took control of the DPS board. The HOPE coalition, as they called themselves, had the backing of very unlikely partners including the DFT, the UAW, the Chamber of Commerce, New Detroit, AFL-CIO, and

Republicans. HOPE had risen to power on the wings of Progressive Era-style reforms and promises including cleaning the school district of financial mismanagement and corruption, restoring public confidence in the school board, improving education outcomes and student learning, increasing efficiency in implementation and management of policies, and making meaningful ties to the business community. This agenda was relatively common among the

“New Progressives” of late-1980s urban school boards, and Mayor Young was against it preferring instead to centralize control of the school district within his office (Mirel, 1998).

Although the HOPE coalition candidates were initially elected on fiscal responsibly, the following three HOPE initiatives were the coalition’s major contributions to DPS educational 67

politics: public-private collaboration in the Detroit school compact, increasing the number of empowerment schools, and introducing schools of choice.

In 1988, the Detroit School compact brought together Detroit Renaissance, Inc., the

Michigan Department of Commerce, business support from around the city, and the HOPE coalition to supply DPS graduates with scholarship monies, job interviews, temporary summer work, and tutoring (Hula, Jelier, & Schauer, 1997). It represented the largest public-private intervention in U.S. public education at the time and signified the faith that nonprofits, private corporations, and state government had in HOPE’s ability to reform the district. The HOPE board members wasted no time in reforming the district. One of their early moves was to increase the number of empowerment schools in DPS. In their campaign pamphlets, HOPE defined empowerment schools as affording “greater decision-making authority” for individual school personnel to at least “have input” on solutions to school problems (Mirel, 1999, p. 253).

But as Jeffery Mirel argues:

Ultimately, this concept of empowered schools went beyond simply shifting authority from the central administration to local schools. Uniting ideas from corporate restructuring, site-based management, privatization, changes in union-management work rules in the auto industry, and the experiments in educational decentralization then underway in Chicago, Miami, and Rochester, the Detroit reformers fashioned one of the most dramatic plans for restructuring urban education in over a century. (p. 253)

The ideal role of the central administrative office would be to ensure that each school kept a balanced budget and met certain achievement standards, and individual schools could select their own vendors for the services they needed. In the eyes of the HOPE coalition, the business community, and the state government, the district bureaucracy was too big and inefficient. Thus the intention of the empowered schools initiative was to force the central administration into competition with private vendors, which in turn would have the desired effect of making the 68

central administration a lean and efficient system once again. Six percent of the district’s schools were part of the experimental first wave when it first rolled out in 1990.

This same wisdom that market competition solves all ills also motivated the HOPE board’s introduction of schools of choice into the DPS bureaucracy in the early 1990s. At this early stage, parents would be restricted to school options within the district. To expand the district’s offerings, the HOPE coalition expanded Comer school development program, African-centered schools, professional development schools, and themed schools that revolved around topics such as mathematics, science and technology, business education, allied health, performing arts, and foreign language (Hula, Jelier, & Schauer, 1997). Building and transforming public schools into these specialized schools required funneling economic and other resources away from certain public schools and investing those funds in the schools of choice campaign. While some parents supported schools of choice, other community members decried the siphoning of their school’s funding into small privileged pockets in other parts of the district. Many community members across the city preferred a “back-to-basics” approach, and viewed the HOPE reforms as elitist and limited in their scope (Hula, Jelier, & Schauer). In 1991, the empowerment schools initiative also drew heavy criticisms from labor unions over the HOPE reformer’s allowance of local schools to waive provisions of the union contract in order to change teacher salaries and hire their own teachers outside of union approval (Mirel, 1998). And in 1992, DFT teachers went on strike over concerns that empowerment schools were being used as a management tool for union- busting and privatization of school services. The strike eventually led to a new union contract with the HOPE school board, but the public image damage had been done, and in the next school board election, the HOPE coalition lacked the public, teacher, and labor union support it once had during its rise to power, and all HOPE candidates except one were voted out of office 69

(Mirel).

With the failures of the HOPE coalition and accumulated debt of the city, the political elites in Lansing began moving, with the cooperation of City Hall, to institute state control over the school district. In 1993, Governor John Engler signed Public Act 145 into law meaning that local property tax revenues would no longer fund local school districts. Instead, schooling in

Michigan would be funded through a rather complex foundation grant program, the expansion of charter schools, and inter-district school choice. Public schools were now receiving 80 percent of their operating funds from the state, and through Public Act 145, the state was able to control millage rates and aggressively push school choice (Addonizio & Kearney, 2012). But state intervention did not stop there. Public Act 25 initiated curricular reform that included new forms of student assessment, performance reports, a model core curriculum, and a small financial incentive was included in the package to make swallowing the pill a bit easier (Addonizio &

Kearney). Safely removed from the radical Mayor Young, in the late 1990s, Engler proposed mayoral control over the schools. The DPS board resisted the governor’s plans and argued that financial solvency could not be the real reason for the proposed mayoral takeover considering that DPS had balanced its books in the 1996-1997 school year and even grew operating finances nine percent over the next two years. Furthermore, Detroit students were outperforming other school districts in Michigan (Addonizio & Kearney). Although the state had a legal right to make these drastic changes in education funding and governance, it clearly had its sights set on reforming DPS governance structures and according to Elena Herrada (2015), taking “control

[of] the bond program, which still had $1.2 billion in 1999” (¶ 7).

These realities were made even more apparent when state legislators revised the governor’s mayoral takeover plans to apply only to school districts with over 100,000 students, which only 70

applied to DPS. According to Public Act 10 (1999), Mayor Dennis Archer would have to replace the school board with a “reform board” consisting of six appointed members and a seventh membership given to the state school superintendent, who would act as the governor’s representative and control the reform board’s decisions through absolute veto power. According to Addonizio and Kearney, public opinion of the mayoral takeover and state reform of school governance was split along racial lines with whites overwhelmingly approving and Black residents viewing the state’s takeover with deep suspicion. At the time of the takeover in 1999,

DPS showed a $93 million surplus and both student enrollment and test scores were on the rise

(Herrada, 2015). Despite these positive signs, the takeover moved forward, and in 2000, Kenneth

Burnley became the CEO of DPS. In November 2004, Burnley stated that the district faced a

$200 million deficit, and from 1999 to 2006, DPS student enrollment dropped from 162, 692 to

118, 392, which accounted for over a quarter of the total enrollment (Herrada). It was also during this initial state takeover that Burnley and Governor Jennifer Granholm (Engler’s successor) orchestrated a 15-year $210 million loan with a 50 percent finance charge to address the deficit that was generated during the time of the takeover (Herrada). In 2004, Detroiters overwhelmingly voted to return to an elected school board. But the experimentation with school choice, state and mayoral control, and mounting debt from a $1 billon bond construction of new buildings had already setup the conditions that would eventually lead to a declaration of financial emergency in the district and a second state takeover in 2008.

Conclusion

This chapter makes no claim to being a complete history of the City of Detroit and its education politics. It represents an attempt to chart the historical evolution of a few of the significant ideological, political, economic, and racial tensions within the urban space and its 71

public school system. As I read these histories, there are at least three general conclusions for the rhetorical analysis that follows. First, the social, racial, and class phenomena encountered in the city and its public school system are not novel. They have extensive histories, and to understand their present meanings and significance, we, as critics, also have to engage with those histories.

Second, a historical social relation exists between the City of Detroit and DPS, but it is not straightforward. This does not imply causation, nor does it reveal itself easily. It requires the careful historical interpretation, analysis, and evaluation of the rhetorical critic. And third, one policy implementation success or failure often begets another; thus critiquing neoliberal educational politics requires being mindful of the past, but also the potential impact of the present on the future of the schooling system and urban space.

This chapter primarily serves as a historical groundwork for the remaining chapters.

Beginning in the next chapter, I critique the rhetorical features of the ideological discourses that justified the decision to close Southwestern High School—a school that once served the Delray,

Springwells Village, and Boynton-Oakwood Heights neighborhoods of the city. Such rhetorical discourses are rooted in the histories of the urban space, its public school system, and the human beings whose experiences are implicated in both; consequently, throughout the remaining chapters, this history will either be directly referenced or at least serve as an ever-present and meaningful context for the rhetorical critique.

72

CHAPTER III: CRISIS IN DETROIT: THE KAIROS OF RACIALIZED ACCUMULATION

BY DISPOSESSION

As Chapter Two illustrated, crises, of one sort or another, have motivated and legitimized economic, social, and political changes in the histories of Detroit and Detroit Public Schools

(DPS). In 2015, the city and its public school system find themselves entangled in similar predicaments. On May 20, 2011, a special two-hour episode of Dan Rather Reports titled “A

National Disgrace” aired on HDNet. Its primary subject was the “failing” state of DPS. The investigative journalist and his team spent a year—in Rather’s own words—“documenting a school district in crisis and its students who were trapped in the system with no where else to go”

(theratherreports, 2012). Substantiating his claims with expert testimony, Rather cites an infamous interview that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan gave to Detroit Public Radio in

May 2009 in which Duncan claimed “you could make a pretty good case, unfortunately, that

Detroit is ‘ground zero’ education in this country.” The use of “ground zero” as a metaphor for

Detroit’s school system is telling and sets the tone for the topos of this chapter. First made popular by discourses surrounding the Manhattan Project, the term alluded to the place where the atomic bombs would detonate over Hiroshima and Nagasaki effectively ending World War 2 in the Pacific theatre (Laurence, 1946). Read in this context, Duncan’s metaphor seems to frame the city’s education system as an epicenter of schooling failures, and as such, must be destroyed and recreated. Although not violent in the objective sense of bombings, I argue in this chapter that the neoliberal logic of crisis with two key terms of underutilization and underperformance can be interpreted as subjective forms of violence that at least in the case of Southwestern High

School’s closure afford potential opportunities for destruction and recreation of the urban space in a way that aligns with situational neoliberal capitalist priorities. 73

In the documentary, Rather seems to agree with Duncan concluding that education in

Detroit is representative of systemic schooling problems across the country, including decades of neglect, public distrust of “honest accounting,” and an unwillingness to change the status quo.

Viewers might extrapolate from the documentary that Detroit and its public school system are suffering in part from what Jürgen Habermas (1975) calls a legitimation crisis. After all, we are led to believe that public confidence in the administrative abilities of the City of Detroit and its

Board of Education to address educational problems is nonexistent. Financial mismanagement, poor schooling performance, the disrepair of school buildings, and high dropout rates beg a change of approach, or even more drastically, these educational crises demand blowing up the status-quo and recreating the principles that organize public education in Detroit, as a model for public education across the country.

Already we can sense that educational crises contain an exigence. As rhetorical events, this means, for example, that the problem of poor student performance requires accountability, improvement of student outcomes, and even school closures. As I previewed in Chapter One, similar arguments were used to warrant the closure of Southwestern High School. In a letter to

“Parent or Guardian,” DPS Emergency Manager Roy Roberts (2012a) announced the closure of

Southwestern on the following grounds:

Your school -- Southwestern High School -- is among the schools that are a part of this transformation. While the program and building will close, students will be reassigned to either or Northwestern high schools, depending on the student’s address. Southwestern High School is ranked in the lowest 5 percent of state schools The program has lost more than 27 percent of its enrollment since 2009 and is expected to lose at least 31 percent over the next five years. Southwestern currently has only 583 students enrolled, who can be more efficiently accommodated at Western High School—with 800 empty seats—or Northwestern High School, which has 1,000 empty seats. This transition will improve student learning and reduce administrative and operational costs to the district. (¶ 7-8)

74

This letter seeks to persuade audiences that public school closures are a justified, if not an inevitable response to educational crises. Such responses, I suggest, are ideological, and thus invite critique. In Chapter Four, I critique those rhetorical responses and the criteria they rest on as thoroughly imbued in an instrumental rationality. But critiquing rhetorical responses alone leaves intact rhetorical constructions of educational crises, an imprudent move that leaves behind relevant power relations in which neoliberal education policies are ideologically mystified and legitimized. For instance, Pauline Lipman (2011) identifies a power relationship between education policies and neoliberal capitalist processes important to the present reshaping of urban geographical spaces. In cities such as Chicago, and Detroit for that matter, high-stakes testing and similar top-down accountability policies and practices have produced reprehensible consequences for the urban space, such as gentrification and displacement of poor, co-cultural communities (Lipman; Pedroni, 2011).

Rhetorical discourses such as school accountability and privatization are situated in explicit, yet complicated educational and urban conditions (Bitzer, 1968). By situated, Bitzer means that rhetoric is called into existence and made meaningful by the situation to which it responds. Although this rhetorical situation thesis has undergone numerous interpretations, the significance of the statement primarily lies in its admonition to critics to be attentive to relations between rhetorical discourses and their situatedness. Furthermore, the rhetorical situation can also be understood as leaning on the ancient Greek idea of kairos. As John Poulakos (1983) explains, “kairos dictates that what is said must be said at the right time” (p. 41). Kairos emphasizes the temporality and contingency of rhetoric.

In this chapter, I suggest that critical attention to urban and educational rhetorical situations and kairos is useful for ideological critique of the neoliberal logic of crisis that justified 75

Southwestern High School’s closure and for exposing its violent rhetorical role within the urban space. Crises are both symbolic and material. Jim Kuypers (1997) argues that crises are

“situationally bound as such delimited by context (the discursive and material surroundings) acting upon text, and text upon content, within a period of time” (p. 18). Moreover, neoliberal crises involve complicated webs of historical, cultural, political, economic, and ideological process and practices (Harvey, 2005). While the intricacies of such a web cannot be fully explored in this chapter, I focus on the rhetorical constructions of crises implicated in the closure of Southwestern High in relation to their situatedness within the neoliberal capitalist processes at work in the City of Detroit. This focus resonates with a historical materialist understanding of ideology broadly defined in rhetorical studies as individuals and communities socialized into forms of social control through persuasion (McGee, 1975). Taking McGee a step further, Cloud

(1994) calls for ideological criticism of rhetorical texts “in the context of relations of material power” and a critical awareness that ideologies serve political and economic interests (p. 146).

Adopting both this situational analysis and ideological criticism, I argue that the rhetorical features of crisis that legitimized and mystified Southwestern High’s closure are ideologically conditioned by the rhetorical situations in which they are positioned and through which they organize and motivate audiences to action.

In the case of Detroit and its public school system, the elements of the crisis situation include financial downturn, population decline, the need for economic growth and better neighborhoods, and berated governance. Drawing from the rhetorical texts that publicly justified

Southwestern High’s closure, I identify and critique the key terms of underutilization and underperformance that construct a neoliberal public vocabulary for understanding crisis as a fitting ideological response to the urban and educational rhetorical situations. I then conclude the 76

chapter contending that this neoliberal public vocabulary of crisis be interpreted as constructing kairotic moments for softening the urban terrain through a political and ideological process of racialized accumulation by dispossession. Accumulation by dispossession, according to Harvey

(2005), is a set of strategic neoliberal responses employed to restore capital accumulation and profit that ultimately result in a transfer of wealth and other resources from marginalized populations to those in dominant class positions in the urban space of Detroit and in the global marketplace. This is not to suggest that discourses are solely responsible for causing material changes in the urban landscape. But rather, rhetorical discourses are instrumental in conditioning the necessary temporal moments for rhetors to persuade audiences of the urgent need to rearrange public priorities thus allowing for the political prospect of restructuring urban spaces, according to the dictates of capital accumulation and class power.

The violence of underutilization and underperformance that together constitute

Southwestern High’s crisis is thus twofold. First, it stems from their ideological roles in mystifying the rhetorical situation and legitimizing dominant interpretations of the crisis.

Second, interpreted in light of documents pertaining to the New International Trade Crossing

(NITC), crisis produces kairotic moments for the dispossession of a Latina/o space in the pursuit of class objectives in the City of Detroit, specifically capital accumulation and the restoration of profit. By directing attention to the kairotic nature of neoliberal crises, I suggest that elites use political moments to achieve class objectives. Interpreted as violence draws attention to the harms produced and normalized by those persuasive moments. In the case of Southwestern

High’s closure, one harm is the destruction of community social relations to an urban space.

While this may seem pessimistic, it also suggests hope that neoliberal crises and their violent consequences are not all-encompassing, but rather contingent. 77

Rhetorical Situations and Rhetorical Crises

Before interpreting the urban and educational rhetorical situations implicated in the school closure, I need to further unpack my understandings of rhetorical situations and rhetorical crises.

The rhetorical situation rests on well-worn assumptions and arguments in rhetorical theory. One assumption holds that rhetorical discourses exist in relation to real situations from which those discourses inherit their significance, meaning, style, rhetorical character, function, and constraints (Bitzer, 1968). For Bitzer, rhetoric is both a response to something beyond itself and produces action that fits the invitation and need of the rhetorical situation. And as Bitzer points out, grasping the concepts of exigence, audience, and constraints is essential to defining the rhetorical situation. Exigencies are “imperfections marked by urgency; it is a defect, an obstacle, something waiting to be done, a thing which is other than it should be (p. 6). There may be more than one exigency in a rhetorical situation, but usually there will be at least one controlling exigence functioning as the organizing principle of the rhetorical situation, which can be modified by and affect rhetorical audiences. But how those rhetorical discourses influence rhetorical audiences or how rhetorical audiences can modify rhetorical discourses is determined by certain constraints imposed by the rhetor or ones that already operate within the rhetorical situation. These constraints include a “complex of persons, events, objects, and relations,” and

“they have the power to constrain decision and action needed to modify the exigence” (Bitzer, p.

8). Vatz (1973) argues that Bitzer has his order wrong that in fact it is the act of speaking that constitutes or gives meaning and significance to a situation as rhetorical. Barbara Biesecker

(1989) undermines altogether this battle over cause-and-effect. For Biesecker, Derrida’s différance invites critics to locate meaning in “the fold” between the situation and the author (p.

120). This perspective positions audiences as constantly “shifting and unstable” and rhetorical 78

situations then as “[producing and reproducing] the identities of subjects and constructs and reconstructs linkages between them” (p. 126).

Echoes of Biesecker’s (1989) poststructuralist destabilizing of rhetors and audiences can be heard reverberating within concepts such as rhetorical ecologies (Edbauer, 2005) and rhetorical circulation (Chaput, 2010). Chaput’s supplementing of “rhetorical circulation” to the “rhetorical situation,” in particular, is relevant for this chapter’s criticism of neoliberal logics in education and urban politics. Rhetorical circulation is grounded in Althusserian overdetermination,

Foucauldian neoliberalism, and Marx’s value theory. To perhaps oversimplify, Chaput is arguing against the sacrosanct rhetorical situation model with its discrete units of rhetor, audience, exigence, and situation and arguing for conceptualizing rhetoric as transsituational, transhistorical, shifting, and connective affective energies among persons. Exigence is relocated from urgent social problems to everyday situations, and audiences’ identities are constantly becoming constrained only by available affective connections rather than by ideology (Chaput).

Chaput (2010) is certainly to be commended on several fronts, including drawing rhetorical studies closer to issues of affective labor and affective experiences as well as problematizing linear analytical categories of rhetor, audience, text, and context to illustrate the fluctuating connections among them. But Chaput’s circulation model may be problematic as a critique of neoliberalism. According to Chaput, neoliberalism necessitates a shift in how critics theorize the rhetorical situation. Neoliberalism does not have obvious markers. Rather, its defining characteristic is that it blurs borders, spaces, time, and distinctions, and rhetorical circulation, as

Chaput describes it, accounts for these amorphic neoliberal affective energies and persuasive forces that maintain contemporary social life. But Chaput seems dismissive of any relationship between neoliberal affective energies and structural forces— such as finance capital, oil 79

resources, and urban geographies— when considering rhetorical potential or political agency. In

Chaput’s formulation, rhetorical potential is limited only to the extent of its affective connections, and the rhetorical critic no longer needs to worry about construing agency, but instead should work toward “[increasingly] communicative exchanges that circulate positive affects—to deliberate in such a way that we all become more open to the world’s creative potential” (p. 21).

But how can the rhetorical critic effectively deny structural and ideological forces in an era marked by financial crises, ecological disasters, free markets, privatization, and austerity political policies and practices? For rhetorical critics of neoliberalism, this is significant in that, as Cloud, Macek, and Aune (2006) have argued, immanentist positions, as the one voiced by

Chaput (2010), “disavow the need for rational analyses of political conjunctures and strategic judgments, the need for identification of real enemies and faithful allies, and the need for propaganda and organizing in the actual interests of ordinary people” (p. 79). Chaput’s ontological maneuvering seems to stunt rhetorical and political intervention into neoliberalism, diminish the epistemological and ethical bases for rhetorical critique of neoliberalism, and overshadow the important social relations between historically situated ideas and material structures that constitute neoliberal forms of capitalism.

Chaput does cite Harvey’s (2005) notion that capital accumulation for an economic elite is a result of neoliberalism, but her rhetorical circulation model does not seem to incorporate the structural, ideological, and class implications of Harvey’s argument. For instance, Harvey also urges critics to be attentive to “contextual conditions and institutional arrangements” that give rise to neoliberal forms of capital accumulation (p. 116), and for Harvey, class power is

“structural to the whole project” of neoliberalization (p. 16). Identifying and critiquing neoliberal 80

ideologies become crucial because along with state, corporate, and ideological state apparatuses they form what Marx calls an “ensemble of social relations” (Tucker, 1978, p. 109) that protects, contests, defends, and restores the dominance of capitalist class interests. But this does not mean that every social phenomenon is reducible to a class process or that class interests are fixed throughout history. Throughout his work on neoliberalism, Harvey devotes a considerable amount of paper to analyzing neoliberal power struggles, politics, ideologies, traditions, rhetoric, and geographical spaces. Harvey attempts to demonstrate that these phenomena are not self- containing or function independently of material class interests. The manifestation and character of class struggles are tied to “the complexities that arise out of race, gender, and ethnic distinctions that are closely interwoven with class identities” (Harvey, p. 202). And as Harvey concludes his history of neoliberalism, he clarifies “to point to the necessity and inevitability of class struggle is not to say that the way class is constituted is determined or even determinable in advance” (p. 202). Class struggles, as with other social processes, are constituted by complex, historically situated social relations the conditions of which are not of our own choosing, nor are they reducible to their parts, such as ideology, , culture, politics, and so on.

Consequently, analyses and critiques of neoliberalism cannot disregard the structural—nor ideological, cultural, or historical— situations to which neoliberalism responds and shapes, and at the same time, critics should also be aware of evolving class processes, struggles, and their various rhetorical and material manifestations within our neoliberal capitalist moment.

Rhetorical crises are closely related to this conception of rhetoric’s situatedness. The emphasis on kairos that underlies Bitzer’s (1968) conceptualization of rhetoric and the rhetorical situation also gets at the heart of rhetorical crises. According to Kinneavy (1986), the term kairos in Aristotle’s Rhetoric should be read as the “right or opportune time to do something, or right 81

measure in doing something” (p. 80). Smith (1986) describes kairotic time as “a season when something appropriately happens that cannot happen just ‘anytime’… a time that marks an opportunity which may not recur” (p. 4). Rhetorical crises, understood as a form of kairos, entail the existence of limited, opportune, and historically-specific moments for the rhetor to form an appropriate response that addresses the crisis situation. Additionally, the rhetor must craft her response in a way that can persuade her audiences to take some sort of action. This understanding forefronts important relationships among history, urgency, thought, and action.

Rhetorical scholars, particularly in presidential rhetoric, have taken up another implied relationship in rhetorical crises that of the relationship between objective crisis situations and rhetorical constructions of crisis. For instance, Kuypers (1997) suggests that “a crisis—except in cases of military attacks--is initiated when the president chooses to address a situation as a crisis” (p. 18). But responses or situations alone do not account for the success of crisis formation and resolution. Kuypers goes on to argue that factors such as a president's rhetorical biography (Medhurst, 1994) and presidential style (Pratt, 1970) also have roles to play. This eventually leads Kuypers to argue that presidential crisis rhetorics should be studied “by examining the interplay of various texts and contexts that act to alter the situation and public perception of the situation. Thus, critics of presidential crisis rhetoric should be a blend of discursive and material conditions” (p. 28).

While I think that Kuypers (1997) is correct in pointing out the need for criticism that incorporates the relationship between discursive and material conditions, how does the critic account for objective processes, such as capital accumulation, that constrain or serve as a potential resource for rhetor's construction of crisis and rhetorical action? Perhaps this invites a return to consider Bitzer’s (1968) assertion of objectivity that exists in the rhetorical situation. 82

Bitzer (1968) writes, “to say the situation is objective, publicly observable, and historic means that it is real or genuine—that our critical examination will certify its existence” (p. 11).

Suggesting that there may be objective or real processes at work in the rhetorical situation does not diminish the role of rhetorical constructions of crisis. But rather, the critic’s attention is drawn to relationships between ideological constructions of crisis and objective processes that exist in crisis moments. In a subsequent essay, Bitzer (1978) writes that rhetorical situations include relationships between objective exigencies and their perceived urgencies, which are mediated by rhetor and audience interests. I suggest that critiquing ideological constructions of crisis in relation to objective neoliberal capitalist processes, such as capital accumulation, may allow the critic to better understand how crisis is rhetorically constituted and instrumental in fostering kairotic moments, or denying kairotic moments, for rhetor and audience action. This chapter can then be read as an attempt to tease out these ideological and material relationships as they are exhibited in the neoliberal crises in the City of Detroit and Detroit Public Schools

(DPS).

To do so, I first delineate the exigencies and constraints at work in the urban and educational crisis situations. Pairing situational analysis with ideological criticism, I critique the rhetorical constructions of Southwestern High’s crisis with its key terms of underutilization and underperformance. In this section, I pay particular attention to how urban and educational crises call into existence a public vocabulary for understanding school crises. I argue that positioning

Southwestern High’s crisis in its urban and educational situations suggests its ideological roles of mediating neoliberal crises and contributing to a racialized accumulation by dispossession of the urban space, which will be addressed in the last section of this chapter.

83

A Rhetorical Situation of Crisis in Detroit and Detroit Public Schools

In December 2010, Governor-elect Rick Snyder gave a rather telling and understated interview with Michigan Cable Telecommunications during his inaugural celebration. Sitting next to his spouse on what looks like a typical Midwestern living room couch, the governor-elect is asked to outline his plans for the State of Michigan. He responds with the following:

It’s time to start a new era. It’s time for the era of innovation. We’ve had two other eras in our history. We’ve had the natural resources era in the 1800s. We had the industrial era in the 1900s, and it’s time to bring that spirit and fire that created those two fabulous eras back, and start the era of innovation and focus on innovation and entrepreneurship again in our state….it’s both what we’re going to work on and the tone we do it with…. But the tone piece I want to bring is: I want to bring an attitude of crisis. We’ve been in a crisis so long in this state we don’t act like it’s a crisis. We are in a crisis: an economic crisis and a crisis of government being challenged. And it’s time to have an approach to say it is time to make real things happen. So when I call it crisis, I don’t want it to be a crisis of panic. It’s a crisis of determination. To say it’s time for us to stand up and to make real results for real people (The Michigan Inaugural, 2010).

This short interaction is tightly packed with meaningful symbols that the rhetorical critic could unpack in many ways. But for the purposes of this critique, I want to use it only as an entry point into interrogating a relationship between material and discursive crisis conditions that exist in

Detroit and DPS, or to use Snyder’s rhetorical choices, a relationship between the crisis we are in and a tone of crisis. Although he is broadly referring to the State of Michigan in this interview snippet, Snyder could as well be addressing the City of Detroit. The claim that Detroit is in a situation of crisis is clearly visible to both rhetor and audiences. Whether mediated by pictures, personal stories, documentaries, political speeches, or news broadcasts, a situation of crisis exists in Detroit. We point to Detroit neighborhoods, the lack of access to clean water for all residents, nonfunctioning streetlights, and, to use Bitzer's (1968) language, observe that a factual defect of crisis is clearly identifiable and in need of some fix. Such urgent problems require rhetoric for their alleviation, and in the case of Detroit and its public school system, those exigencies are 84

marked as fiscal and governance crises. But how those exigencies are understood by the rhetor and audiences and then acted upon are processes conditioned by interests that exist in Detroit and its public school system. In his refinement of the rhetorical situation, Bitzer (1980) argues that both factual conditions and interests constitute rhetorical exigencies, so that rhetors “are motivated to create messages when they perceive factual conditions related to [their] felt interests” (p. 28). Snyder admits as much in the above interview. He recognizes the relationship between the factual state of crisis and the need for some sort of symbolic inducement of crisis to motivate his audiences to action and change the exigent conditions in a way that aligns with his interests, or his ideal view of Detroit. I suggest this implies the entrenchment of a relation among an objective crisis, rhetor interests, and ideological constraints in the rhetorical situation of the

City of Detroit and DPS.

Financial decline plays a significant role in the crisis rhetorical situation that exists in the

City of Detroit and DPS. The story of the financial problems of the city and its public school system is complicated and contested, to say the least. As illustrated in Chapter Two, factors such deindustrialization, globalization, school busing policies, housing segregation, drop in vehicle demand after the oil crisis of the early 1970s, racial and class violence, suburbanization, and disinvestment all contributed in interrelated ways to the city’s economic decline. And as the city’s finances got worse, so did the finances of the school district (of course, with the help of state school reform experimentation and takeovers). A shrinking tax base, rising schooling costs, dwindling federal and state resources for education, and changes in state revenue sharing among other factors left their marks on DPS. In fact, the downward financial trend can be interpreted as the apparent organizing principle of the crisis in Detroit and DPS. According to the city’s

Comprehensive Annual Financial Report filed with the Mayor’s Office on December 22, 2011, 85

cash flow problems are identified as one of the constraints on overcoming the financial crisis. In the context of the report, cash flow refers to the difference between revenues and expenditures.

The same report also demonstrates that the city’s expenditures have been outpaced by revenues resulting in growing deficits in the General Fund Balance. Liabilities—including payments to pensions, employee and retiree healthcare, and other city employee benefit costs—also contributed to the growing deficit. Similar financial problems were reported by DPS in their

2011 Comprehensive Annual Financial Report. According to the report, “The School District began the 2010-2011 school year with a General Fund deficit of $327 million and ended the fiscal year with a deficit of $284 million” (City of Detroit, 2011, p. v.). The report identifies

“factors as declining student enrollment, and increased employee health and benefit costs” (City of Detroit, p. v.) as the determining factors of the deficit.

Of course, the degree to which these trends have shifted downward and their causes have been widely debated. For instance, one heavily circulated report from the nonprofit group Demos conducted an assessment of Detroit’s fiscal problems, and made a few differing claims from that of the reports filed by the city and the school system. According to the Demos report, focus on the city’s long-term debt as a way to explain its insolvency—inability to pay its debts—-is wrong and misleading (Turbeville, 2013). Instead, cash flow problems should be addressed, and to do so requires coming to terms with what caused the cash flow problems, including the impact of depopulation and long-term unemployment on dwindling income and property tax revenues

(Turbeville). The report also highlights two issues that it claims substantially altered Detroit’s revenue: deep cuts in state revenue sharing and expansion of corporate subsidies. Through a series of policy changes in the 1990s, the State of Michigan worsened Detroit’s financial problems by cutting Detroit’s allocated share of state revenues and restricting ways in which the 86

city can raise revenues to offset those losses (Turbeville). Further compounding the revenue problems are the corporate subsidies in the form of tax cuts that the city has used to attract businesses and development in the Downtown district (a popular political choice since the

Coleman Young administration). This move also places additional burden on individual taxpayers who have to now shoulder the tax load with very little in return. The last issue that the report examines is the expense or debt question. After close examination, Turbeville concludes that the driving force of the city’s expenses is not operating expenses (current worker pay and benefits, buildings, etc.) or healthcare and pension benefit costs per se, but rather the financial deals—including complicated variable interest rate swaps and associated risks—that the city entered into with Wall Street Banks, such as Bank of America.

This disagreement between causes of the financial exigence in the crisis situation could be interpreted as constraints that must be overcome to address the financial downturn of the city and its public school system. These constraints contain historical, ideological, and material aspects.

In addition to the constraints imposed by the rhetor herself, Bitzer (1968) anticipates the possibility of constraints existing in the rhetorical situation itself noting that constraints "have the power to constrain decision and action needed to modify the exigence. Standard sources of constraint include beliefs, attitudes, documents, facts, traditions, images, interests, motives and the like” (p. 8). As I have mentioned, one potential constraint on modifying the financial exigence includes class processes of capital accumulation. To put it simply, capital accumulation, according to Marx’s Capital Vol. 1, is a process of using the surplus value generated by labor power, usually in the form of money, to locate more surplus value, in the form of profits (Tucker, 1978). The process assumes that capitalism has historically functioned and continues to survive by sustaining profit-making and reproduction of capitalist class power 87

even as its rhetorical and material manifestations are different in each historical and situational moment (Tucker, p. 430). In Detroit, the transition from the Progressive Era reliance on Fordism to growing reliance on war production is one example of this process. Individuals and groups benefit or not from this accumulation process depending on the particular class positions they occupy, personify, and act in the class process (Resnick & Wolff, 1987). According to Harvey

(2010), this accumulation process necessarily requires ideological and political means through which those in dominant class positions can manage crisis situations and restore profitability.

For instance, through a series of political and ideological moves during the 1970s and

1980s, finance and an accompanying globalization of capital emerged as means to restore the declining rate of profit from the brink of the late 1960s. Financial institutions were largely able to manage the crises so that their class interests were sustained, and opponents were dismissed or even silenced (Duménil & Lévy, 2004). Bankers were able to convince publics that financial innovations were necessary to get over barriers to profit-making, which then empowered the positions of bankers and their political and social influence (Harvey, 2005). The rise in the rate of profit during the 1990s seemed to justify this situation, and the manufacturing sector took a backseat to appease the financial sector and sustain the upward trend in profits (Harvey). But with this profit-making expanse of the financial sector and the globalization of capital came increased governmental and household debt, increased reliance on credit, massive increases in consumption, and the onset of derivative markets eventually culminating in the structural crisis we call the Great Recession (2007), and in the case of Detroit, an exacerbation of financial woes

(Duménil & Lévy, 2011). Perhaps these social relations among historical capitalist situations, class processes, ideologies, and politics in the neoliberal moment could be understood, in part, as forming what Bitzer (1978) later refers to as a public. According to Bitzer: 88

A public is a community of persons who share conceptions, principles, interests, and values, and who are significantly inter-dependent. This community may be characterized further by institutions such as offices, schools, laws, tribunals; by a duration sufficient to the development of these institutions; by a commitment to the well-being of members; and by a power of authorization through which some truths and values are accredited. (p. 68)

Extrapolating from Bitzer, we could say that rhetors—such as politicians and other legislators— generally address financial crisis exigencies as they are authorized to do so by the public

“wisdom” (p. 91) of neoliberalism. This public wisdom is constrained by relationships among histories, material processes, ideologies, and political antagonisms of the moment.

As Deirdre McCloskey (1985/1998) has argued among others, economic vocabulary—such as “accumulation,” “value,” and so on in the example above— is argumentative and persuasive in constraining actions. Constraints do not stand outside of critique even as they also reflect material and objective processes. Financial crises are consequently potent rhetorical resources for constructing urgency and directing audience action based on their real and perceived consequences. On November 16, 2011, Mayor Dave Bing interrupted regularly scheduled primetime television in the metro-Detroit viewing area to deliver a speech on the city’s finances.

Bing began by declaring, “Simply put, our city is in a financial crisis and city government is broken. That’s not new. That’s not an opinion. That is a fact” (WXYZ-TV Detroit | Channel 7,

2011). Raising the stakes, he continues, “The reality we’re facing is simple. If we continue down the same path, we will lose the ability to control our own destiny” (WXYZ-TV Detroit | Channel

7). Bing goes on to list some of the key issues that led to his determination that “a financial crisis” exists in the City of Detroit, including the following ultimatum: “Without change, the

City could run out of cash by April with a potential cash short-fall of $45 million dollars by the end of the fiscal year” (WXYZ-TV Detroit | Channel 7). Laying bare some of the constraints of 89

the situation and proposing actions needed to address the financial crisis, Bing states “City government has to work within a budget. And like you, we've tightened our belts, cut our spending and tried to do more with less. But with the bills continuing to pile up and core services suffering, it is clear that we have to do more” (WXYZ-TV Detroit | Channel 7). Later in the speech, Bing clarifies what ramifications these fiscal issues will have for his Detroit audiences and their public servants: “with less revenue coming in and service demands higher than ever, we have to shift our fiscal priorities and fundamentally restructure how city government operates”

(WXYZ-TV Detroit | Channel 7).

Bing’s speech is one example that not only illustrates the complexity and demands of

Detroit’s crisis situation before going under Emergency Management in March 2013. It is also an example of an attempt to persuade audiences to adopt certain social and political changes to alleviate the crisis exigence. For instance, he argues that financial crises will require spending cuts, elimination of some city positions, union concessions, and other “sacrifices that won’t be easy” (WXYZ-TV Detroit | Channel 7, 2011). A similar condition can be observed in DPS. For instance, in the 2011 DPS Comprehensive Annual Financial Report, DPS reported, “the School

District began the 2010-2011 school year with a General Fund deficit of $327 million and ended the fiscal year with a deficit of $284 million” (City of Detroit, 2011, p. v). Required by Michigan

State law, DPS had to revise its Deficit Elimination Plan to demonstrate how the district was doing to reduce their deficit. The report outlines several key steps including “staff reductions in alignment with declining enrollment, reductions in general fund discretionary spending, school closures, union concessions, and increasing revenue thru pupil retention initiatives” (City of

Detroit, p. 10).

The city’s declining population gives additional urgency to the financial exigence in the 90

crisis rhetorical situation. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the population in Detroit in

2011 had dropped to 706,640 compared with 713,777 in 2010 and 951,848 in 2000 (AlHajal,

2012). To provide an often-repeated point of reference in political discourses surrounding the population decline, the city’s population at its height in 1950 was 1,849,568 residents (AlHajal).

The population decline in the city was also reported as a loss of students in the DPS district.

According to the 2011 DPS Comprehensive Annual Financial Report, DPS enrollment for the

2001-2002 school year was 159,694, and in the 2010-2011 school year, that enrollment had dropped to 75,035 (Detroit Public Schools, 2011). But a straight causal line cannot be drawn between population loss in the city and its school district (although many, including Emergency

Manager Roy Roberts, have tried). According to the DPS Comprehensive Annual Financial

Report, the decline in school enrollment was caused by several factors including depopulation, decline birth rate, the increase in charter and private schools, and movement of students to other public education districts in the metropolitan area. But the declining urban population constrains the city’s ability to alleviate the financial crisis exigence. For instance, the City of Detroit’s 2011

Comprehensive Annual Financial Report states, “as documented in the 2010 Census, the City’s population continues to decline, which contributes to the declining property and income tax base” (City of Detroit, 2011, p. 30).

Further constraining the financial crisis exigence is the two-fold need for economic growth and better neighborhoods. In his 2012 State of the City address, Mayor Bing argued, “Our city’s economic revitalization is key to my administration’s financial restructuring in our neighborhoods and in downtown Detroit” (WXYZ-TV Detroit | Channel 7, 2012). Essential to that economic revitalization, according to Bing, is “a new neighborhood initiative to reduce blight in our neighborhoods” as well as “making our city more business friendly is equally as 91

important as improving our neighborhoods” (WXYZ-TV Detroit | Channel 7). In 2010, the

Detroit Works Project Long Term Planning team was organized by Mayor Dave Bing to address ways in which to improve its services to citizens (Solomon, 2014). In July 2011, a “short-term intervention strategy” was released that began in a small but important way the process of rightsizing the city. According to Bing, “We can’t continue to do business the same way we have. We must be smarter about how we align out resources. Our entire city will benefit from this new market approach of service delivery” (Solomon, p. 53). The report divided the city into three neighborhood types based on analyses of residential physical condition and market value, and each was given a label of “steady,” “transitional,” or “distressed.” Depending on their market ratings, areas were then given uneven levels of funding for issues such as street light repairs, road repairs, and so on (Solomon). Reminiscent of federal redlining policies (this time by class), this allowed city officials to target areas of blight, abandoned structures, illegal dumping on vacant land that had become obstacles to urban development and building up the city and its population. The plan rolled out in three broad sections of the city: Hubbard Farms/Southwest,

Bagley/Detroit Golf Club///Sherwood Forest/University District, and

Boston-Edison/North End/Virginia Park. Considering that this is a “data-gathering” phase, results are slim. But out of the short-term intervention strategy, a long-term strategy was developed and rebranded as “Detroit Future City.” The highly praised report was released in

January 2013 and expands on the short-term report’s identification of urban development crises and resolutions (Solomon). In lieu of any citywide master plan for urban development, this short- term plan (2011) and Detroit Future City (2013) have function as the de facto Master Plan for the

City of Detroit.

Returning to Snyder’s speech that began this section of the chapter, he describes not only a 92

financial crisis, but also a “crisis of government.” This governance crisis is evident in the declaration of finical emergency and institution of an emergency manager over DPS. In 2008,

State Superintendent Michael Flanagan and Governor Jennifer Granholm determined that the school system was in a state of financial emergency. As Addonizio and Kearney (2012) note, a combination of factors including insinuated school board mismanagement of district finances, the overall ambiguous financial status of the district, and the lack of public confidence in the district’s governance abilities were instrumental in the financial emergency declaration. In

January 2009, Flanagan and Granholm appointed Robert Bobb as the Emergency Financial

Manager of DPS, under Public Act 72 (Addonizio & Kearney). A press release from Granholm's office quotes the governor as saying “Robert has the ability to get the Detroit Public Schools' fiscal house in order so the district can devote its attention to ensuring that every student receives a quality education” (Brown, 2009, ¶ 2). The press release goes on to detail Bobb’s new authority: “Bobb will assume all financial authority in DPS, which includes balancing the district's budget, managing spending, and establishing strong and reliable financial systems that support sound academic decisions for the students of Detroit” (Brown, ¶ 3). Neoliberalism encourages such shifts in governance from elected state and local officials to quasi-state employees, with extensive political powers. As Harvey (2005) argues, neoliberalism entails a strong distrust of citizen participation in everyday governance even as its proponents publically voice a need for greater transparency and citizen involvement in decision-making. In other words, neoliberalism values efficiency in governance, and this emphasis erects seemingly impenetrable bureaucratic structures and conditions wherein experts and elites can carry out governance behind closed doors away from potentially disruptive public opposition.

But, as is exemplified in the rhetorical situation of DPS, this does not mean that 93

governance crisis exigencies go away. Local state officials, particularly the school board, as well as reluctant and combative community members still present a constraint that must be alleviated through rhetorical means. Bobb’s successes at reforming the school district’s finances and academics are highly questionable (Addonizio & Kearney, 2012). In an interview with Time,

Bobb was asked, “how do you strike the balance between trimming the budget without cutting into the academic core?” (“A Talk with Robert Bobb,” 2009). Bobb responded with, “by reducing our healthcare costs, by driving of efficiencies within our organization, all those things help us to put money back into the classroom and still seek to find that balance between the financial operations and the academic programs” (“A Talk with Robert Bobb"). Represented in this interview, these responses to governance crises resulted in heightened confrontation with the school board that had been brewing since the 1999 state takeover of the district (Addonizio &

Kearney). Additionally, community members protested Bobb’s proposed means of balancing finances and academics. The protests surrounding the privatization of Catherine Ferguson

Academy for pregnant girls and teen mothers is only one example (Heron, 2011). In an April 19,

2010 press release from Granholm’s office, the governor singled out this “ongoing dispute over governance in the Detroit Public School District. The governor said Emergency Financial

Manager Robert Bobb needs to be allowed to assert his authority over both the district's finances and academics, given the two are inextricably bound” (Boyd, 2010, ¶ 10).

Partly to address the governance crisis in DPS and in other municipalities around the state,

Michigan Public Act 4 (2011) was signed into law and extended by Public Act 423 (2012).

According to the Benton Harbor Emergency Manager Joe Harris, these public acts meant that

“emergency managers could “now strip locally elected officials of their power and they can renegotiate, alter, or void union contracts before they expire…. effectively [removing] power 94

from local, elected officials once an EM is appointed” (Michigan Radio Newsroom, 2011, ¶ 12-

13). It is within this consolidation of emergency manager power that Governor Snyder (who succeeded Granholm in 2011) appointed Roy Roberts to the emergency manager position over

DPS. A former GM vice president, Roberts wrote a letter to school staff on his “first day on the job” acknowledging that “I understand there is a feeling of uncertainty, and changes will surely be necessary. I soon will be taking a deep dive into all areas of this organization to determine cost efficiencies and organizational needs” (Detroit Public Schools, Office of the Emergency

Manager, 2011, ¶ 6). As if warning school staff of the ominous changes to come, Roberts writes later in the letter “we will continue with several initiatives currently under way, including the rigorous goals and tenets of our five-year academic plan and the school consolidation process.

To make immediate changes would harm students, and I will not do that” (Detroit Public

Schools, Office of the Emergency Manager, ¶ 7). In less than one year, the announcement of

Southwestern High School’s imminent closure was made and preparation for the school closure started.

The rhetorical situations of crisis in the City of Detroit and DPS invite certain rhetorical responses. These responses are constrained by the material and discursive conditions that exist in the city and its school district. As I have analyzed the rhetorical situation, financial and governance crisis exigencies operate in the situation constrained by historical capitalist processes of accumulation, neoliberal ideologies, and political policies and practices. It should also be clear that any rhetor who responds to these exigencies does not do so in a mechanical, predetermined, or fatalistic way. The rhetor brings her own style, character, perceptions, set of constraints, interests, and ability to modify the exigence into the speaking situation, and is therefore morally responsible for her rhetorical creativity (Patton, 1979). At the same time, rhetors do not speak 95

from nothing. To some degree, their rhetoric inherits the ideological character, interests, and style from the historical development of the exigencies and constraints in rhetorical situation. We can then judge such rhetorics as fitting or non-fitting to the rhetorical situation, which calls them forth, and interpret the interests and actions to which they attempt to persuade their audiences.

Consequently, in the next section I critique the neoliberal logics of crisis that justified

Southwestern High’s closing as fitting rhetorical reactions to the exigencies and constraints operating in the urban space.

Underutilization and Underperformance: Constructions of Southwestern High School’s

Crisis

School closures are not inevitable. They may be constructed as inevitable in light of some situation, whether it be the decay of the building, health and safety concerns, cost savings, or demographic shifts. But closures are not inevitable in of themselves. Crises must be interpreted as significant enough to warrant closure, and an audience has to be persuaded that the school is worthy of being closed. Implied then is the importance of rhetoric in the process of school closures. To adopt Bitzer’s (1968) language, rhetoric is necessary to mediate thought—the school is in crisis—and action—the hanging up of a for sale sign. Hence, school closures are rhetorical in that they must be made to appear to audiences as necessary or urgent. But not any old rhetoric will do. The rhetor must also consider the available means of persuasion, including discursive and material constraints and exigencies, that exist in the rhetorical situation. In the case of Southwestern High School’s closure, Emergency Manager Roy Roberts and other rhetors are constrained to constructing rhetorical justifications for the closure based on their perceptions of financial and governance crises that actually exist in the city and in its public school system.

But more than situated, these rhetorical choices are ideological. They interact, mystify, and 96

legitimate the capitalist processes and neoliberal logics that are alive and well in Detroit's education politics landscape. In the case of Southwestern High’s closure, I submit that underutilization and underperformance constitute a public vocabulary for understanding crisis that is a fitting response to the dictates of the urban and education rhetorical situations, and accordingly, it inherits its urgent and ideological character from the relation between the rhetorical situation and the rhetor’s perception of the crises. To critique how this public vocabulary of crisis constitutes a fitting response and to interpret the interests it serves requires further ideological critique of its implicit prioritization of values, beliefs, and meanings. As

Philip Wander (1983) argues, ideological critique “reflects the existence of crisis, acknowledges the influence of established interests and the reality of alternative world-views, and commends rhetorical analysis not only of the actions implied but also of the interests represented” (p. 18).

Certainly bureaucratic soldiers serving at the bidding of the head of the State of Michigan can recognize the existence and utility of crises to further some desired political and economic end.

And therefore their rhetorical responses to conditions of crisis demands critic interrogation, especially considering what those responses mean for the making of “real results for real people,” to use Governor Snyder’s phrase from earlier in this chapter.

In this section, I critique these key terms of underutilization and underperformance attending to their relationships to the situational exigencies and constraints as well as unpacking the “actions implied” and “the interests represented” in the rhetor’s invention of the public vocabulary of crisis. I primarily draw from four texts: 1) Notes from Roy Roberts’ “Presentation to Detroit Legislative Delegation” and his “Detroit Public Schools Facility Consolidations,

Closures and Program Relocations for 2012-2013” presentation, 2) The DPS “Closure

Recommendation Key Indicators” document, 3) The letter notifying parents/guardians that 97

Southwestern was to be closed, and 4) the “DPS Transformation” Speech delivered by Roy

Roberts in February 2012. Each of these rhetorical texts appeared in early February 2012 and form what Bitzer (1968) might call a rhetorical event. In these textual fragments, Roy Roberts rhetorically constructs Southwestern High’s crisis using the key terms of underutilization and underperformance, and so I turn my critical attention to their rhetorical uses and unpack their ideological character in light of the crisis exigencies and constraints in the City of Detroit and its public school system. I argue that Southwestern High’s crisis is politically legitimized by its appeal to and reaffirmation of neoliberalism, with all its social, institutional, historical, and ideological trappings.

On February 3, 2012, Roy Roberts delivered a presentation to the students, parents/guardians, teachers, and principle of Southwestern High School titled “Detroit Public

Schools Facility Consolidations, Closures and Program Relocations for 2012-2013.” In the presentation, he publicly announced for the first time what had been rumored and discussed behind closed doors: “The Southwestern High School and program will close. Students will be reassigned to either Western or Northwestern high schools, depending on the student’s address”

(Roberts, 2012b, p. 11). The presentation began outlining some of the “City of Detroit

Population Losses,” including “Housing Vacancy Rate for Detroit and Edge Suburbs” (Rogers, p. 3-4). Roberts then moved into a section labeled “DPS Enrollment” (p. 5). He presented the enrollment data in two rhetorical forms. The first is a bar graph showing that in FY 2004-2005

DPS enrollment was 145,509 and in FY 2011-2012 enrollment had dropped to 69,616. Raising the stakes, the second slide compares “School Capacity vs. Enrollment” with a simple formulation: “110,660 DPS Capacity- 69,616 students = 41,044 empty seats” (Roberts, p. 7).

Before he gets to the individualized rational for Southwestern’s closure, Roberts articulates the 98

DPS “Financial Crisis” as primarily driven by “Annual payments of $53 million to repay loans to cover prior deficits. As a result 13% of annual per pupil revenues must be used to pay debt instead of educate children” (p. 9). He also states that the “Accumulated legacy deficit [is] $83.9 million” (Roberts, p. 9). Directing the significance of this data to his immediate audience at

Southwestern High, Roberts flips to a slide that gives his “rationale” for why these statistics translate into closing the school (p. 12). Roberts argues that “Demographics” was one of the reasons for closing Southwestern (p. 12). By this, he means, “Southwestern High School has lost over 27% of its enrollment since 2009 and is expected to lose 31% over the next five years”

(Roberts, p. 12). The next line down on the same slide gives another reason: “Efficiency:

Southwestern has nearly 600 empty seats. The 583 students at Southwestern can be accommodated at Western (800 empty seats) or Northwestern (1,000 empty seats) (Roberts, p.

12).

Instead of offering a radical reinterpretation of the history of school district’s crises that may require audiences to fit that explanation with their own preconceived histories, Roberts offers a reinterpretation of history through the use of oversimplification (Dionisopoulos &

Goldzwig, 1992). The almost matter-of-fact explanation of DPS’s crisis as a result of the city’s depopulation is made palatable by the ultimate of neoliberal persuasive tools, bar graphs and official state financial reviews. But perhaps even more persuasive, such historical interpretations do not seem to be interpretations at all because media and popular discourses on Detroit, as the one mentioned in the opening vignette of this chapter, have already curated an environment that has visually and discursively equated Detroit’s crisis with depopulation, empty houses, abandoned neighborhoods, and so on. Roberts is simply offering a rhetorically reductive history arguing that the city’s depopulation led to low DPS enrollment and then extending that historical 99

explanation to fit the specific case of Southwestern High arguing that depopulation ultimately resulted in empty seats at Southwestern. But as I illustrated in Chapter Two, this does not fully square with the history of Southwest Detroit. The closure of the nearby Clark Street Cadillac plant in the 1980s did result in a significant decline of school-age children in the area that continued throughout the 1990s. But declining public school enrollment in Southwest Detroit, as in other parts of the city, was also encouraged by the district’s ideological choices to implement empowerment schools in the late 1980s and to expand open enrollment policies and charter schools in the district, forcing some students to leave for surrounding school districts. This begs several critical questions, not the least of which includes why only emphasize depopulation, and why does Southwestern High have to pay for the administrative decisions of the district by closing its doors? Other schools such as Western International and Northwestern, schools that former Southwestern students will be transferred to, are within relatively close geographical proximity and should also be implicated in this empty seat crisis. Roberts’ oversimplified and reductive historical construction of the crisis and its causes obscures audience appraisal of his historical claims and instead encourages audiences to focus on the urgency of the solution

(Dionisopoulos & Goldzwig). And Roberts has in mind a specific solution that he perceives has long been due: better utilization of limited resources.

This, I suggest, signifies the selective use of the key term of underutilization in constructing Southwestern High’s crisis. One can gather from the text that underutilization implies a rhetorical judgment of inefficient resource use, particularly economic resources. From the beginning of the presentation, he interprets lowering tax revenues (a consequence of high rates of housing vacancies), increasing legacy costs, and growing deficits as clear and indisputable demands for “school closures/consolidations and relocations” (Roberts, 2012b, p. 100

10). It is particularly useful to note that Roberts’ perception of the financial downturn exigence is narrowly conceived to mean debt caused by legacy costs (i.e., employee and former employee healthcare and pension payments). This rhetorical selectivity of the exigence ideologically functions to blame certain individuals and groups for the district’s financial problems thus allowing the rhetor to escape guilt and making it more likely that the audience will identify with the rhetor and his interpretation of the financial exigence over any alternative explanation. This rhetorical maneuvering should not be underestimated, particularly in the case of closing a neighborhood school. In this moment, Roberts has to overcome communal affinity for

Southwestern High without inviting blame for the closure. And Roberts rhetorically uses the moment to direct public blame toward those he suggests are guilty of this underutilization who have forced the current administration to incur high legacy costs and debt repayments, namely teachers unions and the DPS school board. Thereby Roberts’ rhetorical maneuvering invites his audiences to reconsider their affinity for the school and the “status quo” it represents in the district. In other words, this rhetorical maneuvering could be interpreted as an attempt at fractional scapegoating wherein the school employees and the school board, representing the school itself, are vilified, and audience members are encouraged to turn away from the villain thus becoming heroes by fighting on the side of the rhetor (Burke, 1945).

The ideological function of underutilization—which it inherits from the financial crisis situation— also stems in part from its masking of the politics figured into the determination of

Southwestern High’s crisis. Of course, rhetoric has the potential for deception, or to use Burke’s

(1950) phrase, rhetorical invention contains “a special kind” of mystification (p. 179). Rhetoric can symbolically cover up or conceal something that it purportedly describes. Take the economic calculations at the center of Robert’s rhetorical invention of Southwestern High’s crisis in the 101

preceding texts as an example. They supposedly and clearly demonstrate that DPS is in a state of financial crisis, schools in Detroit are not filled to capacity, Southwestern High is not filled to capacity, and therefore the school has to be closed in order to alleviate or modify the financial crisis for the district as a whole. But this deceptively simple utility calculus that supposedly describes the essential facts of the case also deflects audience attention away from both considering the calculus as an argument and publically critiquing that argument. Rhetorically inventing the crisis in terms of underutilization, represented in this context as a simplified mathematical calculus, affords the rhetor a degree of detached objectivity from the decision to close a neighborhood school, a decision that has very personal affects for certain audiences.

Arguing for Southwestern High’s crisis by any other rhetorical means may open Roberts and his arguments to additional political challenges, whether from his immediate audience or in the press conferences that follow. In this speaking situation, it is in Roberts’ interest to make his announcement, present the rationale, and inform of the next steps as quickly and politically painlessly as possible. Political detachment presents a way to negotiate the demands of the situation with his perception of audience interests and his own immediate and long-term interests. But his political detachment denies the political interests that are modifying the crisis exigence. As Bitzer (1980) argues, “a rhetorical exigence consists of a factual condition plus a relation to some interest” (p. 28). Following and refining Bitzer, Britton (1981) argues that rhetor and audience interests have a role in modifying the factual exigence. Thus, Roberts’ rhetorical use of underutilization should not be read as a detached or nonpartisan statement that the coffers are drying up, the city’s population continues to decline, and we must now all accept the inevitable closure of Southwestern High, but ideologically in that his interpretation of the rhetorical exigence has the potential to be both functionally and genetically false (Cloud & 102

Gunn, 2011).

In addition to the interests that the rhetor brings into the speaking situation such as a desire for crowd control or crafting a positive political image, Roberts’ (2012b) ideological use of underutilization also represents interests already embedded in the rhetorical situation, such as the dominance of finance in political policy decisions. For Roberts, the primary issue in this moment is justifying why schools, such as Southwestern High, should continue to be financially resourced by the district. This could also be referred to as a judgment of worthiness. Roberts’ declaration of Southwestern’s worthiness (or perhaps, unworthiness) is situated within the fiscal exigencies and ideological constraints of the crisis rhetorical situation in the City of Detroit.

According to Roberts, the district has limited financial resources, and it needs to ensure that those resources are being used to their maximum potential. Financial utility thus has a determining role in establishing the worthiness of a school. The University of London economist

John Weeks (2014) defines economics as “the study of the cases of the underutilization of resources in a market society, and the policies to eliminate that resource waste for the general welfare” (p. 202). Certainly, financial decisions are one necessary responsibility of political decision makers, and simply because economic concerns enter into political discourse does not necessarily imply a rhetorical marker of neoliberalism, or an ideological move for that matter.

But in this case, as in others, Roberts’ rhetorical use of underutilization to construct a public vocabulary for understanding Southwestern High’s crisis legitimizes the normative preference afforded to maximizing financial utility within the value judgment of a school’s worthiness. For

Roberts, utilizing to its maximum potential means that the school needs to produce something financially profitable for the school district as a whole, and therefore justified in the amount of public monies it receives. To be financially profitable for the district, in Roberts’ rhetorical 103

formulation, simply means filling the school to capacity. But because of declining population in the surrounding area and lowering enrollment in the school, Southwestern cannot meet that standard of capacity. Considering the financial crisis in DPS that he outlines beforehand, the logical implication would be that he has no choice but to cut what has been deemed as wasteful spending to do what is necessary, save money to pay off the district’s debts. Then the judgment is made, as Roberts does in his speech, that Southwestern is in a crisis of being underutilized, and consequently not worth the district’s limited financial resources.

Underutilization is an effective rhetorical appeal—particularly during moments of financial crises—to persuade audiences that cost-savings should be elevated over any other interests that may exist in the public discourse. But this is a rather paradoxical rhetorical valuation considering the important role that waste plays in other segments of neoliberal society. For instance, as

Brummett (2008) points out, waste, or perhaps the ability to waste, is highly valued in U.S. over- consumptive society as a sign of one’s accumulated capital. But in crisis moments, the accusation of being wasteful can be rhetorically weaponized to both assert one’s interpretive dominance over a situation and then reallocate funds toward what is rhetorically constructed or perceived as useful. As I have previously mentioned, financial usefulness within neoliberal capitalism is largely determined by the ability of investments to produce profits. To fully grasp the significance of rhetorical accusations of underutilization, along with rhetorical constructions of financial cost-savings and waste, within school closure discourses requires understanding crisis within its rhetorical situations and social relations to capital accumulation processes

(Cloud, 1999).

In addition to this discursive prioritization of cost-savings and financial utility, an emphasis on efficiency also underlies this key term of underutilization as illustrated in a document titled 104

“Closure Recommendation Key Indicators Closing School: Southwestern HS Receiving School:

Western HS, Northwestern HS.” This single-paged document gives an “executive summary” of

Southwestern’s crises that justify its closure. James Aune (2001) argues that the rhetorical form of the executive summary already signifies an emphasis on communicative efficiency, the heightened value of executives’ time (or in this case, political leaders), and a prioritization of clarity over critical interrogation. “Truth” is no longer (if ever) something arrived at through carful consideration and deliberation. The truths upon which judgments are based can be clearly identified by a rhetor on a spreadsheet (or a bulleted list) and absorbed by an audience in a quick flash of obviousness.

For instance, the “Closure Recommendation Key Indicators,” simply compares

Southwestern, Western, and Northwestern high schools according to predetermined “factors”: academics, demographics, facility condition, utilization, and financial. According to the document, the test scores on the Michigan Educational Assessment Program (MEAP)—the mandatory standardized test for all public elementary, middle/junior high school, and high school students—are awash between Southwestern and Northwestern while Western’s scores are significantly better. But the main difference between the schools is found in the conditions of their facilities. According to the document, Southwestern has $5.868 Million in infrastructure needs (heating, fire safety, electrical, flooring) while Western only has $2.5 million (heating) and

Northwestern only has $1.9 million (heating, windows). Then the document singles out

Southwestern under the utilization and financial factors noting that Southwestern’s “enrollment of 583 vs. capacity of 1,106” meaning that the “building utilization is less than 55%.” According to the district’s financial assessment, administrative, operation, and maintenance costs for

Southwestern would total $1,586,620 or $2,721 in fixed costs per student. In the end, the district 105

will be able to achieve the goal of the financial crisis exigence in DPS and save money by closing Southwestern High. Among other functions, the rhetorical form of the data presentation inhibits rhetorical deliberation or any invitation for audience participation in the decision-making process. Instead, economic productivity and organizational efficiency are prized. The role of the audience in decision-making is forcibly and even violently cheapened, and any say in the running of the district and its decisions is deferred to the expertise of those who know better.

Underutilization (discursively marked by the normative preference of maximization of financial utility, cost-savings, and political and organizational efficiencies) seems pervasive and commonly adhered to in school closure discourses in part because it is authorized by the public wisdom of the neoliberal social order. Marilyn J. Young’s (2001) reading of the Declaration of

Independence is helpful in further understanding Bitzer’s (1980) concept of “public authorization.” Those publics who authorized the Declaration of Independence are those “who understood and assented to the arguments embedded in that document” (p. 294). Public authorization is not the same as the direct and intentional consent given by the delegates at the

Continental Congress, but rather it can be understood as a general agreement the thirteen colonies had with the sentiments—such as democratic liberalism— embedded in the document.

People, institutions, and loosely defined organizations authorize ideas and actions because it serves their subjective interests and their interests as determined by their ever-shifting positions in class processes. In a way, the public authorization of neoliberalism functions as what

McKerrow (1989), borrowing from Pierre Bourdieu, calls doxa, in that it is the common belief or opinion of the moment that individuals accept without knowing and which authorizes and legitimizes what can and cannot be said by individuals and groups. But—and this highlights a difference between doxa and ideology—neoliberalism as a set of ideologies can be 106

unintentionally and intentionally mobilized to achieve subjective and objective goals. Rhetors and audiences may use underutilization without realizing the full weight of their statement, but that does not erase the violent nature of the public vocabulary of crisis to achieve economic profit, exercise control over the interpretation of a situation, or further one’s own political interests. The instrumentality of underutilization may explain, in part, why it surfaces and resurfaces in multiple situations to close schools, fire public workers, increase productivity, efficiency, and so on. Underutilization is authorized by neoliberalism that in turn finds it a useful rhetorical device for achieving various interests. Further, this public authorization process of neoliberalism has spurred underutilization to become both a common public attitude and means of managing financial crises in the City of Detroit.

Southwestern High’s underutilization is fully realized in Roy Roberts’ speech on February

8, 2012, only days after his presentation at Southwestern. Following up on his announcement at

Southwestern High, Roberts gave a press conference outlining his “DPS Transition” plan. He began the speech by emphasizing the importance of the moment. “Let me be clear: This is a critically important time in the history of DPS and for our city. I have stated frequently that DPS must not only be a part of Detroit’s comeback, it must lead it” (Roberts, 2012c). He added, “We have been using an outdated educational model that we must discard. We must embark on a bold and ambitious journey that I believe will return this City to its rightful place as world class leader in public education” (Roberts, 2012c). The crisis conditions in the city and the education system—in addition to his construction of the “critically important time”—present the necessary kairotic moment to do away with “an outdated model” and “embark on a bold and ambitious journey.” As Poulakos (1983) argues, “rhetoric is the art which seeks to capture in opportune moments that which is appropriate and attempts to suggest that which is possible” (p. 36). 107

Roberts’ rhetorical articulation of the moment is tempered by prepon (the appropriateness) of the situation as he attempts to motivate his audiences toward dynaton (the possible) (Poulakos). In other words, Roberts acknowledges the urgency of the moment and the desires of his audience for something different that then allows him to confront the exigencies of the situation. It is this relationship between the actual and constructed crises—which he collapses— that lends some legitimacy to the need of, to use his rather opaque term, a “transition.”

Roberts (2012c) latter clarifies in this speech what he intends by a “transition”: “Detroit

Public Schools has announced a comprehensive transformation plan aimed at improving academics and creating a more efficient system of high-performing schools for all DPS students.” In listing his rationales for closing Southwestern High and other DPS schools, Roberts states that “rather than continue to support buildings that are far under-utilized, we will close, consolidate and merge schools, allowing us to drive additional resources to a smaller group of higher-quality facilities and to our students in those buildings.” Later in the same announcement,

Dr. Karen Ridgeway, the Assistant Superintendent of the Office of Research, Evaluation,

Assessment and Accountability, followed Robert’s comments with “our transformation plan allows us to drive more resources and dollars into our existing schools so that we can lend greater support to both our achieving schools and our struggling schools.”

Perhaps the ideological rhetorical use of underutilization to construct a public vocabulary for understanding Southwestern High’s crisis can also be understood by critiquing the implied financial portfolio metaphor that seems to be at the crux of the arguments made by Roberts and

Ridgeway. For instance, they (and others) view DPS monolithically as a broker would see her financial portfolio. Schools, such as Southwestern High, are metaphorically positioned as stock options, bonds, or some other asset. Stock managers, or emergency managers in this case, 108

determine from the overall value of their portfolios that a crisis exists indicated by a downward trend in the overall valuation of the portfolio. The broker then drills down to the individual assets that are not performing well in comparison with other assets, reallocates the resources once held in that asset to more profitable assets, and thereby purges that bad asset to increase the overall valuation of her financial portfolio. This financial portfolio metaphor is indeed a fitting ideological response to financial and governance crises of our neoliberal moment. It also goes to illustrate the depths to which the dominance of finance has taken root within the neoliberal public, and may also suggest why the root is so difficult to remove from the ground of our public consciousness, particularly in moments of crisis.

Additionally, this key term also hints at the rhetorical violence implicated in labeling a school as underutilized. Treating the district as a whole rhetorically subsumes differences among neighborhood schools. In the rhetorical situation of the City of Detroit, emergency managers acting like brokers can then relocate resources as they deem appropriate according to their blanket mandate to reduce district spending. Their financial considerations and calculations mask alternative valuations of the school. Consequently, “the difficult decision,” to use Roberts’

(2012c) phrase, has to be made according to what serves the best financial interests of the district as a whole while downplaying the role of alternative valuations, public deliberation, and so on in preference of bureaucratic efficiency.

The “DPS Transition” speech also illustrates that underutilization is closely interwoven with another key term used to construct Southwestern High’s crisis. That term is underperformance, and it emerges several times throughout each of the texts mentioned in this section. For instance, in Roberts’(2012c) “DPS Transition” speech, the transition plan is “aimed at improving academics and creating a more efficient system of high-performing schools for all 109

DPS students.” This relationship between “high-performing schools” and economic and operational efficiency is further teased out and its relevance to Southwestern is made apparent in

Roberts’ (2012a) letter sent to Parent or Guardian of Southwestern students. In the letter, he writes, “Southwestern High School is ranked in the lowest 5 percent of state schools…. This transition will improve learning and reduce administrative and operational costs to the district”

(Roberts, 2012a, p. 2). In the conclusion of the same letter, Roberts (2012a) continues, “Most importantly, through this transition plan, we are doing everything possible to ensure that all children in Detroit Public Schools have the opportunity to succeed at the highest levels and direct resources where they are needed most” (p. 2). Southwestern is in a state of crisis because as

Roberts (2012a) tells an audience at Southwestern High, “Southwestern is in the lowest performing 5% of state schools.”

Roberts’ rhetorical use of underperformance in these texts implies a comparison among schools. In other words, the determination of a crisis of underperformance is made based on an argument by comparison (McCormick, 2014). As was illustrated in the “Closure

Recommendation Key Indicators” document, DPS schools are compared to each other in terms of their scores on a state standardized test, the MEAP. But what is measured and reasons for selecting certain criteria for measurement is obscured by the overriding weight of labeling a school as underperforming. Education policies such as No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the 2001 congressional legislation that expanded standards-based education reform, assume that a school’s

“output” can be equalized in the rhetorical form of test scores. Individual schools and the quality of the education they deliver are then judged based on this homogenized output. But such output is inherently deceptive because it assumes the mantra of “all else being equal,” and it conceals the employment of a comparison between unlike schools, students, and education models. As 110

McCormick has illustrated, arguments by comparison are frequently deceptive, particularly in their rhetorical use as an assessment tool. This deception is oriented toward aligning schools and education with neoliberal prerogatives, such as producing measurable indicators of efficiency and productivity. While in of themselves such prerogatives may not be construed as ideological, these deceptive assessment tools take an ideological turn by functioning to conceal alternative means of valuing the school building, the services it provides, or the learning that happens inside and outside its walls. In the eyes of Roberts, valuation of Southwestern is only rhetorically legitimate if it is conducive to what is measurable and worthy as determined by the general neoliberal public. Of course, this approach to evaluating U.S. schooling is reinforced by the expansion of NCLB, competitive school funding practices on the federal and state levels, and hegemonic conceptions of quality education and its product (see Ravitch, 2013). These dominant

U.S. education policies and practices strengthen the neoliberal normative preferences to be used rhetorically to construct whole schools through a vocabulary of crisis and thereby legitimating their closure based on those elevated ideological preferences.

The use of underperformance to construct Southwestern’s crisis can also be interpreted as an ideological response to DPS’ governance situational crises. In other words, Roberts’ emphasis on performance creates the necessary discursive conditions for centralized accountability of neighborhood schools. As I discussed in Chapter One, high-stakes testing is a critical component of what Michael Apple (2005b) refers to as the “audit culture” in education. Neoliberalism demands constant proof that education processes are being done “‘efficiently’ and in the

‘correct’ way” (Apple, p. 383). Accountability allows DPS, to use Robert’s (2012c) words from his “DPS Transition” speech, to “drive additional resources to a smaller group of higher-quality facilities and to our students in those buildings.” Legitimated by the crisis situation in DPS, 111

Roberts has to take rhetorical action in choosing where limited resources should be invested.

Tests scores efficiently produce evidence to district administrators that allow them to assess the value of the school, or to use the neoliberal metaphor of the financial portfolio, underperformance ideologically functions to assess asset values. And the rhetorical determination that Southwestern High is underperforming, according to test scores, suggests to audiences that it is not fulfilling its academic responsibilities, and thus deserves to be closed.

The rhetorical and ideological maneuvering in these texts illustrates continued attempts at removing real local control from neighborhood schools and shoring up centralized governance over all aspects of education, even schools such as Southwestern High School. Such rhetorical choices can be read within the contradictory historical developments of DPS school governance policies and practices extending from the failures of busing desegregation, debates over decentralization, school reforms enacted by the HOPE coalition, and the 1999 state takeover of the district. Critique of Southwestern school closure texts suggests that neoliberal public vocabulary of crisis, constructed using the key terms of underutilization and underperformance, plays important rhetorical roles in fixating school closure decisions on responding to financial and governance exigencies. In the case of Southwestern High’s closure, rhetorical tactics ideologically mystify and legitimize interests embedded in the existing social relations between situational crises, dominant interpretations of those crises, and rhetor constructions of the school’s crisis.

Rhetorical Constructions of Crisis and the Dispossession of a Latina/o Urban Space

The neoliberal public vocabulary of crisis that justified Southwestern High’s closure is not only a fitting response to the fiscal and governance situational crises in the City of Detroit and

DPS. It also contains a kairotic potential to convince audiences of the necessity and urgency of 112

certain ideological actions. In other words, the rhetorical construction of crisis in terms of underutilization and underperformance presents a kairotic moment for persuading audiences of the need to rearrange public priorities according to present situational necessities. In this case,

“necessities” include capital accumulation, which in turn has the potential to dispossess Latina/o communities in Southwest Detroit of a communal resource. As I suggested earlier, the rhetorical term kairos connotes several meanings, including opportune moment, decisive action, appropriateness, the right time, and probability (Sutton, 2001). Mindful of audience appropriateness and the opportunities afforded by the situation, kairos, at least in this Sophistic understanding, is that fleeting and fitting moment ripe for the persuasiveness of interests suggesting what is probable for the rhetor to say and do at a specific time (Smith, 2012). Such rhetorical moments can have violent effects. Vivian (2013) makes the argument that “executive authorities exercise unprecedented forms of violence both within and without national borders by citing as justification allegedly temporary episodes of state emergency” (p. 209). Although he specifically references issues of historical memory and public forgetting, perhaps his insights into the rhetorical use of time as violence can be mingled with this Sophistic understanding of kairos to argue that rhetoric not only fosters temporal moments for fracturing the status quo of a school district. But by rhetorically privileging neoliberal ideologies and capital accumulation as more appropriate at that moment, crisis can also be interpreted as having a violent role in the partial restructuring of the urban space through a school closure.

Borrowing from David Harvey (2005), I refer to this violent process as racialized accumulation by dispossession, and I suggest it signifies a neoliberal style of managing crises that has the potential to dislodge co-cultural social relations from a space and potentially soften the urban terrain for restoring profitability and capital accumulation for those in dominant class 113

positions in the City of Detroit. As I have argued in this chapter, the relationships between urban and educational crises are at once structural and ideological mediated by rhetorical invention, creativity, and perceptions. One of the reoccurring structural problems in capitalism, as Harvey

(2003) sees it, is over-accumulation, which he defines as “a condition where surpluses of capital

(perhaps accompanied by surpluses of labour) lie idle with no profitable outlets in sight” (p.

149). Eventually capital runs out of markets into which it can be invested to create more profit

(or surplus values), and this blockage to capital accumulation processes must somehow be overcome; otherwise, crises, such as the 2007 subprime mortgage crisis, occur. This is also one of the ongoing structural problems in the city of Detroit (Harvey, 2014). But as Duménil and

Lévy (2004) argue, “capitalism does not founder in ever-deeper and longer-lasting crises-rather, it goes into structural crisis, transforms itself, and recovers” (p. 206), and often through violent means. In our neoliberal moment, one such mean is the process of accumulation by dispossession, and manipulation and management of crises represents one political and ideological strategy of accumulation by dispossession (Harvey, 2005). Crises are moments for restoring capital accumulation and the profit rate through the stealing of income, wealth, land, and other resources from vulnerable populations (Harvey, 2013). Managing the aftershocks of crises is a potential problem, and as Harvey (2005) argues, the role of the state becomes containing the crisis to prevent a general market collapse or popular revolt. Labeling this process

“racialized” accumulation by dispossession is to draw attention to the reality that in Detroit, such neoliberal capitalist processes are targeted at co-cultural communities, such as the Latina/o community in Southwest Detroit.

Often overlooked in analyses of accumulation by dispossession is its reliance on rhetorical discourses that instrumentally function to foster temporal moments for realizing their intended 114

purposes. Drawing critical attention to the role of rhetorical texts in oppressive processes is important, as Cloud (1994) argues, “the project of ideology critique, modernist as it may be, is the only critical stance that suggests discourse may justify oppression and exploitation, but texts do not themselves constitute the oppression” (p. 157). While not wholly constitutive of oppression, I argue that rhetorical constructs of crisis do have instrumental and even violent roles in furthering marginalizing processes, and ideology criticism provides one critical tool for critiquing these social relations.

To illustrate, I turn to documents from the Detroit River International Crossing Study

(DRICS). Initiated in 2000, the DRICS laid the urban planning groundwork for the construction of the New International Trade Crossing (NITC). The massive, multi-year study was designed to

“identify solutions that support the region, state, provincial, and national economies while addressing civil and national defense and homeland security needs of this trade corridor between the United States and Canada” (Conceptual Engineering Report, 2008, p. 1). In its assessment of the urban landscape for the proposed bridge and customs plaza, the report analyzes the meaning of Southwestern High School for the local community in relation to the urban development project. I argue the report rhetorically constructs Southwestern High School as a contested cultural space. Mary Jane Collier (2014) contends that “places can become spaces of enacted connection, performance of rituals, engagement of traditions, and sites of cultural advocacy…. spaces in which cultures emerge also include spaces of struggle and contested spaces of relation”

(p. 9). Collier illustrates the weaving of multiple political and ideological struggles over spaces and places as they intersect with cultural representations of communities and forms of neoliberalism. Interpreted though this critical lens, DRICS documents convey ideological, political, economic, and cultural struggles over the meanings of Southwestern High School as a 115

significant site for Latina/o communities and urban development economic and political interests. I then interpret Southwestern High’s crisis in relation to the construction of the school as a contested cultural space arguing that Roberts’ rhetorical use of crisis to justify his planned

“transition” of the school district suggests the importance of the moment, the appropriate ideological priorities for that moment, and therefore providing an opportune moment for racialized accumulation by dispossession of the urban space.

The Detroit River International Crossing Study (DRICS) was conducted by an international partnership of multiple federal and state authorities, including the U.S. Federal Highway

Administration, the Michigan Department of Transportation, Transport Canada, and the Ontario

Ministry of Transportation, and by 2005, the team had identified Delay in Southwest Detroit as the host community for the trade crossing and land adjacent to Southwestern High School as the site for the new U.S. customs plaza. According to the Community Inventory Technical Report

(2007), Latina/os make up the largest “minority group” affected by the proposed bridge and customs plaza (p. 22). In a letter to the Public Involvement and Hearings Officer in charge of organizing public comments about the NITC, Dolores Leonard, a member of the Environmental

Justice Committee that assessed the issue of fair treatment of people of color in the proposed building area of Delray, writes the following:

The Southwestern High School student population, while diverse, is primarily a classic environmental justice population - low income and people of color. [The discussion of Southwestern in the report] does not tell the human side of the school. It does not say schools and churches are the ‘glue' that hold communities together. SWHS is the only remaining public school remaining in the Delray community…. The Build Alternative is projected to relocate 324-414 households (This equates to how many people? How many of these are senior citizens? How many are students who attend Southwestern High School?), relocate 685-920 jobs from the Delray area. (Leonard, personal communication, April 29, 2008)

As part of the Community Inventory, the DRICS also conducted a series of interviews 116

with organizations representing “population groups.” Considering the degree to which the

Latina/o community in Delray would be impacted by the proposed trade crossing, many of the interviewed organizations represented Latina/o communities and interests in the region. For instance, the Community Health and Social Services (CHSS), which is “the only local clinic that provides services to the area’s Hispanic community” expressed concern about the effect of poor air quality and loss of housing on the Latina/o communities surrounding Southwestern High. The

Latino Family Services organization voiced its concerns about “negative environmental impacts” including that “Southwestern High School will be impacted [and] the school must be taken into consideration” (p. 85). The Southwest Detroit Community Benefits Coalition voiced a fear that the Latina/o community would lose their neighborhood school due to further declines in the area’s population brought on by the new construction. These comments are representative of numerous other handwritten and transcribed comments from organizations and individuals that serve Latina/os in the Delray community that asserted concern about the environmental impacts of increased traffic flows near the school, idling vehicles at the customs plaza, noise pollution, and construction activities on Southwestern students.

But the rhetorical construction of Southwestern High in the DRICS report suggests that it occupies a culturally contested space as both economic development obstacle and community asset. For instance, in the Value Planning section of the report, several of the stakeholders’ needs, desires, and constraints are listed, and under the constraints category is listed, “Maintain access to Southwestern HS during construction” (Value Planning, 2007, p. 29). According to the

Value Planning section, the fact that Southwestern High is adjacent to the proposed building site of the customs plaza would require additional and costly construction, including fly ramps and elaborate interchanges. The Environmental section of the final report additionally argues that 117

because of the increase in traffic nearby the school grounds “noise levels would warrant consideration of walls” (p. 135). And as a “sensitive receptor,” Southwestern High would require customs plaza construction be done during non-school hours, control emissions during construction, control air pollution caused by the increase traffic, and the construction of

“stormwater detention area was placed to separate the plaza operations from the school”

(Executive Summary, 2008, p. 27). Considering the cash-strapped state of the city, these modifications to the customs plaza area would cost the city additional investment in the area, and these documents from the DRICS report seem to rhetorically position the school as an additional financial burden on the project. And what is more, the financial and logistical strain that the

Southwestern building puts on the project is rhetorically juxtaposed with the development and financial needs that required the NITC project in the first place.

At the same time, the DRICS report rhetorically situates the Southwestern High School building as a community asset. For instance, the report recommends that Southwestern “is eligible for inclusion” in the National Historic Recognition Program (Above Ground Resources,

2008, p. 13). The report goes on to claim that “the school is significant for its association with the educational history of Southwest Detroit [and] is significant for its architectural design, as a good example of the Collegiate Gothic style” (p. 13). According to the report, the school’s meaning for the area is grounded in its relation to the historical development of Southwest

Detroit and the unique collegiate gothic architectural style of its facade.

But while these elements may be significant reasons for being eligible to be listed as an

NRHP, the official valuation of the school in the report does not respond to or incorporate public comments from those claiming the school should be recognized as vital to co-cultural interests, and particularly Latina/o communities, in the area. Public comment from groups representing 118

Latina/o communities could be interpreted as serving a tokenism rhetorical function (Cloud,

1996). According to Cloud, the rhetoric of tokenism implies that “texts authorize people whose difference if politicized and collectively articulated might pose a threat to a dominant order in which some groups are kept subordinate to others” (p. 122). She continues, “A token is the cultural construction of a successful persona who metonymically represents a larger cultural group…. Tokenism glories the exception in order to obscure the rules of the game of success in capitalist societies” (Cloud, p. 122). Certainly, a successful listing of the school on the NRHP might prevent the school’s closure or at least guarantee the school building’s survival, but the argumentative grounds for doing so are void of co-cultural markers—any meaningful symbol that reveals or connects the school’s significance to a particular community, specifically the

Latina/o community. Hence cultural meanings of the school for those who live in Delray and send their children to the school are obfuscated. The obfuscation of culture by rhetorically treating Latina/o community group comments as a token prevents the politicization of the school’s meaning and serves dominant interests in the class process. Instead, the DRICS report rhetorically produces a dehumanized understanding of the school building’s significance rather than emphasizing the significance as communal “glue.” Within the report, this dehumanized reading of the school building is then placed in a false dichotomy with the school as obstacle to much needed urban development. Southwestern High as a depoliticized and de-cultured obstacle is easier to overcome in actual and perceived moments of crisis.

In his “DPS Transformation” speech and letter to Southwestern Parents and Guardians,

Roy Roberts’ construction of Southwestern High School’s crisis in the terms of underutilization and underperformance intervenes in this cultural struggle over the high school’s meaning.

Although perhaps unwittingly, the image of Southwestern High that he constructs also implicitly 119

prescribes an appropriate ideological prioritization for audiences that fits the crisis moment.

Primarily drawing from Bitzer (1978), I referred earlier in this chapter to the public wisdom of neoliberalism, which addresses crises constrained by interrelated histories, material capitalist processes, and legitimating ideologies. This neoliberal public wisdom also provides what

Kuypers (1997) might call a crisis frame through which rhetors, such as Roberts, can motivate audiences to action and prescribe limits on that action. For instance, Roberts’ construction of a neoliberal public vocabulary of crisis using the terms underperformance and underutilization contains an implicit prioritization that Roberts persuades his audiences into accepting. In the speech, Roberts argues that realizing the necessity and urgency of the crisis moment requires prioritizing cost-savings, efficiency of resource allocation, profitability, and other neoliberal logics over any other means of assessing school’s quality of education or use of the building.

Moreover, this also suggests that audiences shift their own educational values. As Roberts

(2012a) notes in his letter to Southwestern Parents and Guardians, “this transition [the closing of

Southwestern’s program and building] will improve student learning and reduce administrative and operational costs to the district” (p. 2). The transition is necessitated by an appeal to neoliberal educational prerogatives and the public wisdom of neoliberalism is reinforced through

Roberts’ framing of the crisis. In this sense, Roberts constructs the school itself as actually harmful to the students it serves in that it does them the disservice of providing a disadvantages education, or in other words, an education that does not fit with the dominant understanding of education in the city. Appealing to the public wisdom of neoliberalism, the rhetorical reorganization of audience’s valuation of the school and implicit positioning of the school as harmful affords a kairotic moment for overcoming audiences’ perceived significance of

Southwestern High marking an opportunity for its closure. Additionally, the school is harmful to 120

the Southwestern neighborhood in which it is embedded because it holds back what ought to be normatively prioritized in the urban space at moments of crises: better utilization of economic resources. Highlighting the interconnectedness of Detroit and its public school system, Roberts

(2012a) writes the following phrase in his closure letter and speaks it in the “DPS

Transformation” speech:

This is a critically important time in the Public Schools and for our city. I have stated frequently that Detroit Public Schools must not only be a part of Detroit’s comeback, it must lead it. We have been using an outdated educational model that we must discard. We must embark on a bold and ambitious journey that I believe will return this City to its rightful place as the world class leader in public education, a position it once held. (p. 1)

If Roberts’ neoliberal construction of crisis contains an implicit ideological ordering and he is arguing for DPS to lead “Detroit’s comeback,” the logical takeaway from this statement could be interpreted as an argument for a similar prioritizing in all political decisions having to do with urban spaces in the city. And his assertion of the “critically important time in the history of

Detroit Public Schools and for our city” is that perceived crisis moment that legitimates the reprioritization to align with situational prerogatives.

Interpreted in light of Southwestern High as a culturally contested space, it is not that underutilization and underperformance fatalistically or in some explicitly sinister way caused the clearing of land by way of a school closure to make way for the NITC and a customs plaza. But rather that the urban crisis exigencies and the public vocabulary of present an opportune moment and the necessary discursive conditions for persuading audiences of more imperative needs and prioritizing the fulfillment of those needs at this particular moment. So, in order to alleviate the financial and governance crisis exigencies that exist in the City of Detroit, there is a need to shift public priorities and see other uses of spaces as more “efficiently” and “productively” able to 121

accomplish the alleviation of the crisis. Interpreted as part of a capital accumulation process, framing the crisis in neoliberal terms of underperformance and underutilization allows for crisis manipulation that aligns with dominant interests in the class process, such as “free trade.” In

2014, Detroit ranked as the third largest metropolitan port complex in the U.S., with $175.8 billon in international goods moving between Detroit and Canada alone (Tomer & Kane, 2015).

Expanding this trade corridor and being able to control it as a “public” alternative to the privately owned Ambassador Bridge capitalizes on these revenues, and thus Governor Rick Snyder as well as other political and business elites rhetorically position the NITC as an economic benefit for everyone. But the promises of “free trade” constitute little more than a neoliberal fantasy that realizes the needs of dominant class objectives in the global market more so than social and economic needs of local communities (Dean, 2009). Even so, at the local level, commercial activity, temporary jobs, and “investment” become politically and rhetorically prioritized over environmental impacts, geographical and cultural affects on neighborhoods, and long-term economic sustainability. Crisis moments afford favorable opportunities for such “needed” reshuffling of public priorities, as is illustrated in the case of Southwestern High’s closure.

In addition to serving an ideological role in the accumulation process, this reprioritization of Southwestern High School’s value functions as racialized dispossession. Latina/o communication scholars have drawn attention to ways in which Latina/o communities have been dispossessed of land, possessions, and even identity through means of political legislation and media discourses (Cisneros, 2008; Demo, 2005; Fernandez & Jensen, 1995; Mehan, 1997). In this case, urban crisis exigencies and a public vocabulary of crisis are forged and legitimized by the public wisdom of neoliberalism to persuade audiences of the prioritization of more urgent economic values over Latina/o communal sensibilities allowing rhetors to ignore or at least 122

minimize the reality that Southwestern High School is, to use the phrase from Dolores Leonard’s letter, “the ‘glue' that hold communities together.” In this sense, underutilization and underperformance authorize audiences to act according to the illusion embedded in the alternative set of priorities. In other words, audiences may know that closing Southwestern will disenfranchise, or at least have a significant effect on the communities that the school serves, but rhetors and audiences act as if the closure is warranted based on the urgency and necessities of the urban situation as well as the rhetorically proposed set of ideological priorities embedded in crisis. This illustrates the role of rhetoric in the ideological socialization of audiences in the service of dominant political and economic interests (McGee, 1975; Cloud, 1994). Of course,

Roy Roberts, like most rhetors, is ultimately unsuccessful at convincing each of his audiences of his ideological construction of Southwestern High’s crisis, as illustrated in the student walkouts and freedom school that responded to his announcement of the school closure (this is addressed in Chapter Five). But situating the school’s crisis within the urban crisis may suggest that management of educational crises is one important way to contain those protests while softening the urban terrain for vital capital accumulation processes, which in turn could dispossess co- cultural communities of important urban resources.

Conclusion

These complicated discursive and material relations underlie and motivate the conditions for racialized accumulation by dispossession in Southwest Detroit. At the same time, they are perceived as natural phenomena that are called for by the situation of a city in crisis. This illustrates the violence of neoliberalization in both constructing a public vocabulary of crisis that dispossess a community of their school and in the act of normalizing and legitimating such actions. Perhaps this violent proclivity of neoliberal crises could be understood as an example of 123

what Stuart Hall (1981) calls inferential racism. “By inferential racism I mean those apparently naturalized representations of events and situations relating to race, whether ‘factual’ or

‘fictional,’ which have racist premises and propositions inscribed in them as a set of unquestioned assumptions” (Hall, p. 36). Additionally, it is important to stress the opportune and probable nature of kairos. It is not that neoliberal crisis and its key terms of underutilization and underperformance caused the re-appropriation of land on which Southwestern High stood for the construction of the NITC. Rather, kairos draws attention to crises as opportune moments for the persuasiveness of rhetoric to motive audiences toward probable actions, or in this case, for softening the urban landscape for alternative uses of culturally contested spaces that can alleviate the financial and governance crises in the Detroit, which translates into maximizing capital accumulation and state control over those revenues. Indeed, these ideological processes also mystify other uses of urban space marginalized by the perceived importance and ideological nature of the historical moment, the rhetor’s creativity and constraints they bring to the situation, and the objective processes at work in the situation. As the case of the school closure illustrates, the meaning of a school as a resource for Latina/o communities can be obfuscated by prioritizing the values of neoliberal capital accumulation when the moment calls for, or maybe more appropriately, is instrumentally constructed to call for it.

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CHAPTER IV: INSTRUMENTAL RATIONALITY: RHETORICAL SPECTERS OF THE

MARKET AND WHITENESS IN SCHOOL CLOSING CRITERIA

Public arguments for the closure of Southwestern High School in Detroit are not only ideologically compelled and confounded by their situatedness in a complex interplay of discursive and material forms of urban and educational crises. They are also based on a set of seemingly inculpable reasons. As Roy Roberts (2012a) wrote in his letter to Southwestern

“Parents and Guardians,” the school and the program will close based on dwindling enrollment numbers, low academic performance, and thus an unjustifiable cost to the district. From an argumentation perspective, such reasons or claims rest on both data and warrants. Stephen

Toulmin (1958) has problematized the relationship between data and claim explaining that this relation is mediated by warrants. In Toulmin’s formulation, the claim is the “conclusion whose merits we are seeking to establish,” and the data consists of “the facts we appeal to as a foundation for the claim” (p. 90). Warrants, according to Toulmin, are those assumed, generalized principles, values, and beliefs that legitimize or prove that an argumentative claim is reasonable. Warrants are seldom explicitly spoken by the rhetor, but in the argumentative process, rhetors need to justify the warrant, acknowledge some degree of certainty in the conclusion through the use of argumentative qualifiers, and decide to engage or disengage with opposing arguments or objections if it will strengthen her argument in light of the argumentative conditions.

This implicit nature of warrants makes them susceptible to ideological influence

(Crowley, 1992). There is the possibility of what cultural theorists as diverse as Slavoj Žižek

(1989) and Clifford Geertz (1973) refer to as ideological distortion and ideological oversimplification, respectively. In other words, choosing certain warrants to prove one’s 125

argumentative claims can reflect a privileging of realities, values, and interests that do not fully capture the complexity of humanity or dismiss altogether alternative claims and ways of living.

Of course, arguments cannot be made or sound conclusions reached without the rhetorical use of warrants. Therefore, one of the tasks of ideological criticism is to uncover this implicit and compulsory prioritization of beliefs, values, and norms that are embedded in argumentative warrants asking who benefits from these warrants and the conclusions they justify. In part, this is what Wander (1983) hints at when he writes that “criticism takes an ideological turn when it recognizes the existence of powerful vested interests benefiting from and consistently urging polices and technology that threaten life on this planet, when it realizes that we search for alternatives” (p. 18). In the case of Southwestern High School’s closure, data that demonstrates low academic performance or low enrollment does not inherently necessitate Roberts’ claim that the school must be closed. According to Toulmin’s (1958) argumentative model, rhetors must appeal, at least tacitly, to warrants that justify causal relationships, even between claims that may be structured as “obvious” such as the relation between low enrollment and school closures. In this chapter, I interpret this operative argumentative warrant as a neoliberal form of instrumental rationality that in seeking to improve education rhetorically reproduces colorblind and market abstractions in school closure decisions.

Of course, Toulmin’s (1958) general argumentation model has invited numerous interventions and elaborations in rhetorical studies. For instance, Toulmin’s description of the warrant as bridge between claim and evidence is useful in understanding the structure of the enthymematic form (Trent, 1968). Scott (1976) used Toulmin’s distinction between “warrant- using” (deduction from established warrants) and “warrant-establishing” (induction to create new warrants) in the rhetoric as epistemic debate to justify Scott’s particular relativistic approach to 126

standards (Toulmin, p. 120). But perhaps Toulmin’s most significant influence on rhetorical studies has been his proposal of argument fields. Early in his work, Toulmin used the term

“field” to suggest that an argument’s claims could only be verified by those within that argument’s discipline who had the necessary training to examine critically its warrants. But as

Zarefsky (2012) points out, Toulmin later used the term to define specific “argument communities” (p. 211). Although the term implicates some theoretical fuzziness, such fuzziness served as a point of departure for the concept of spheres of argument (Goodnight, 1982/1999).

According to Goodnight, spheres are “the grounds upon which arguments are built and the authorities to which arguers appeal” (p. 253). He identifies three spheres of argument: the personal, the technical, and the public. Because of the casual nature of private conversations, only informal types of claims, evidence, and language are necessary in the personal sphere whereas arguments in the technical sphere require more systematic rules for arguing that are generally based on expert judgment and more firmly established standards. The public sphere transcends the private and technical spheres when argumentative disputes have a general significance for those beyond mere private or technical conversations. Each sphere consists of its own means of addressing argumentative disagreements, required (or lack of required) linguistic forms, bases of judgment, and so on. But Goodnight also emphasizes the relational aspect among spheres claiming that rhetors can ground their arguments in any of the respective spheres. Thus, by offering these argumentative spheres, Goodnight is not suggesting “a taxonomical scheme” for organizing arguments but rather a way to think about how argumentative deliberation about uncertainties can be done and “the direction in which the dispute is to be developed” (p. 256).

The point of drawing critic attention to argument spheres is to raise awareness of and advance conditions for the flourishing of deliberative democratic practices. 127

Considered in this realm of public argument, I suggest that the significance and rhetorical violence of the instrumental rationality that underlies arguments for Southwestern High School’s closure begins to become more visible. The democratic potential for public argument in the City of Detroit at the current moment seems bleak, particularly regarding school closures. Goodnight

(1982/1999) concludes his essay with an apt, almost prophetic description of the current state of education policy decision-making in Detroit: “Issues of significant public consequence, what should present live possibilities for argumentation and public choice, disappear into the government technocracy or private hands….because of the intricate rules, procedures, and terminologies of the specialized forums” (p. 259). Critical attention to the technical arguments for the closure of Southwestern High seems to buttress Goodnight’s observations. For instance, in Southwestern High School’s Annual Education Report (AER) Cover Letter (2011-2012),

Karen Ridgeway, Superintendent of Academics, writes the following:

Southwestern High School was also named a Priority School because the school’s performance is in the bottom 5% of the State based on student achievement, achievement gaps and student growth over time in the tested subjects (mathematics, reading, science, social studies and writing; as appropriate for the school grade levels tested). Information used to rank schools is based on the development of the Top to Bottom list of schools and their performance. Our school will close during the 2012-2013 school year. (Detroit Public Schools, 2012, p. 2)

Undoubtedly, such argumentative claims for Southwestern High’s closure are inescapably grounded in technical spheres that involve complex rules and regulations from multiple levels of education policymaking, including the U.S. Department of Education, Michigan Department of

Education, Detroit Public Schools, the Offices of the Governor and Mayor, Emergency

Managers, and so on. Collectively, unelected decision-makers in these state bureaucracies form what might be referred to as an educational technocracy, that is a governance system that

“generally entails the rule by experts, technological determinism, and the belief that 128

technological considerations render politics obsolete” (Mizuno, 2008, p. 20). Drawing from their extensive knowledge and the authority of social science methodologies, technocrats formulate educational standards and measurements to help school districts pursue educational quality. The naming of Southwestern High as a “priority school” based on “student achievement” and

“student growth” implies complicated statistical analyses of student performance on standardized tests and accompanying technical language and rules for making those determinations based on the authority of social science methodologies and technocratic expertise.

But one problem, as James Aune (2001) argues, is that these technocratic arguments are not even recognized as arguments. Drawing from Beer and Hariman (1996), Aune critiques what he calls economic correctness, or arguments for the free market, as sustained by a realist political style. The use of the realist political style in the case of Southwestern High’s closure will be further analyzed later in the chapter, but for the moment, it is sufficient to note that it seeks to remove rhetoric as mediator between text and nature constituting the condition as just existing in of itself. For example, in a July 22, 2013 interview on NPR’s All Things Considered, Emergency

Manager Kevyn Orr made the following comment in regards to his managerial approach to

Detroit’s debt: “I sort of have to divorce myself from any preconceived notion. I mean, it’s just a question of the math and dealing with the realities of where they are now” (Peralta, 2013). This comment encapsulates the realist political style. Emphasizing the “it’s just a question of math” and deemphasizing “any preconceived notion” suggests a simple observation of reality that denies reliance on language—and thus the possibility of ideology—to interpret phenomena or convince audiences of that interpretation. Math just is, and Orr and his economist form of governance are then portrayed as being above critique.

Similarly, in the case of Ridgeway’s statement on Southwestern High’s closing, this 129

realist political style is suggested in her simple, matter-of-fact tone in the recounting of the technical rationality for the school’s closure. But what is more, Ridgeway’s technical argument suggests a legitimized escape from having to seriously consider vernacular arguments in the decision to close Southwestern High. In Detroit, neighborhood schools, like Southwestern, historically have provided several public goods such as places for political assemblies, spaces for community cohesion, and obviously, student and adult education (Mirel, 1999). Therefore, arguments concerning the future of the school deserve engaged, meaningful public debate among citizens and those in elected (and non-elected) political offices. But the cultural meanings of the school and any invitation for actual public argument over its future are eclipsed by what

Goodnight (1982/1999) critiqued as the encroachment of technical arguments in the public argumentative sphere. Perhaps Ridgeway hints at such a process in her terse assertion that

“information used to rank schools is based on the development of the Top to Bottom list of schools and their performance.” Criteria, or “information used to rank schools,” are often viewed as stable, objective, and rational standards used to make calculations and deductions that inherit similarly objective qualities from the standards. Such criteria are developed and established by the authority and expertise of an educational technocracy to improve the overall quality of education in Detroit. And so, the reasoning goes, the use of objective, technical criteria to measure a school’s indicators of student success will certainly lead to impartial administrative judgments to determine if the school should stay open or close.

But as Scott (1967) has contended, the critic should treat such resolute rhetorical claims to certainty with deep epistemological suspicion. Moreover, ideological criticism draws attention to the argumentative ground of school closing criteria and their underlying rationalities to bring to light the privileging of certain interests over others. With this in mind, I argue in this chapter that 130

ideological critique of Southwestern High School’s closure criteria reveals a rhetorical mobilization of instrumental rationality (Horkheimer 1947/2013; Horkheimer & Adorno,

1947/2002). Relentlessly reaching to remedy perceived systemic public education failures, the neoliberal form of instrumental rationality that underlies the closure criteria ideologically functions to reduce school closure public argument to a market abstraction and reinforce an argumentative standard of whiteness (Nakayama & Krizek, 1995; Crenshaw, 1997). Technocrats devise accountability tools such as standards, performative measurements, facility and academic plans, school ranking systems, and other criteria to fix educational problems. Critical attention to the rhetoric of such criteria, whether realized as arguments or not, reveals not only the instrumental rationality in which they are grounded, but also that such instrumental rationality legitimizes marketization of the decision-making process and exclusion of cultural experiences from consideration in public arguments over school closures. Driven by an entelechial force, instrumental criteria and technical arguments thereby secure a hegemonic arrangement of public school closure decision-making and also rhetorically legitimize a technocratic domination over decision-making. By hegemonic, I mean “the process by which a social order remains stable by generating consent to its parameters through the production and distribution of ideological texts that define social reality for the majority of the people” (Cloud, 1996, p. 117). Thus, I suggest that in the case of Southwestern High’s closure another ideological way in which neoliberalism functions is through technical arguments grounded in an instrumental rationality and guided by market and colorblind abstractions that restrict what argumentative reasons and styles are warranted in the school closure public discourse. In this ideological process, vernacular arguments and co-cultural communities are rendered irrelevant and invisible. Hence, this chapter illustrates the interplay of market and racialized logics through ideological critique of the 131

rhetorical forms of neoliberal instrumental rationality used to construct Southwestern’s closure criteria. The purpose of this chapter resonates with Holling and Moon’s (2015) encouragement for continued rhetorical critiques of colorblindness and whiteness within the neoliberal social order.

I do not mean to infer that all technical arguments in education policymaking discourses have ideological functions. As Asen, Gurke, Solomon, Conners, and Gumm (2011) argue, one of the responsibilities of education policymakers is to balance technical and deliberative spheres of reasoning. But as Broome and Collier (2012) illustrate, dominant institutions and their normalizing and continual affirmation of neoliberal assumptions in policies and practices can hinder inclusive forms of decision-making. Wendy Brown (2006) also contends that neoliberalism has “de-democratizing effects” including the “devaluation of political liberty, equality, substantive citizenship, and the rule of law in favor of governance according to market criteria on the one side, and valorization of state power for putatively moral ends on the other (p.

690). Similarly, as illustrated in this rhetorical critique of school closing criteria, technical arguments in education policymaking have the potential to limit democratic deliberation and reinforce technocratic desires to maintain control over education policymaking processes.

Neoliberal instrumental rationality, as represented in school closing criteria, fulfills these ideological functions by rhetorically arranging public argument in a way that rationalizes the exclusion of Others from the decision to close Southwestern High School. Johan Galtung (1969) reminds that structural or indirect violence often manifests in unequal power relationships between those who have a voice and resources and those who do not. Neoliberal instrumental rationality rhetorically negates Latina/o voices, histories, and cultural sensibilities from deliberative consideration in Southwestern’s closure and should be interpreted as a rhetorical act 132

of violence. Philip Wander’s (1984) concept of the third persona likewise emphasizes that rhetoric can function ideologically by silencing specific audiences. In rhetorical theory, the first persona refers to the self-image that the rhetor projects to an audience, and the second persona then refers to the idealized audience(s) implied by the rhetoric and to which the rhetor invites her audience to become, be like, and so on (Black, 1970/1999). In addition to the “I” and the “you,” rhetorical discourse contains “the silhouette of a Third Persona—the ‘it’ that is not present, that is objectified in a way that ‘you’ and ‘I’ are not” (Wander, p. 192). This is a rhetorical process with which Latina/os who are deemed as “animals,” “parasites,” and “economic units” are all too familiar (Santa Ana, 2002; Inda, 2000; Ono & Sloop, 2002). I argue that school closure criteria represent another public argumentative sphere in which Latina/os in Southwest Detroit are denied a voice. Although Wander explicitly denies the third persona as a method, the ideological critique that follows is carried out with critical attention to what audiences are left unmentioned, but gestured to in public arguments for school closure criteria. Such ideological texts allow for the advancement of a neoliberal social order in DPS that rhetorically reinforces racial and class exploitation in the name of educational progress. Hence, this chapter is in keeping with Broome and Collier’s (2012) recommendation that “scholar/practitioners need to examine what different ideologies and assumptions produce in the way of social positioning and conditions on the ground, and who benefits from the different ideological frames” (p. 262).

To make these arguments, I first elaborate on the concept of instrumental rationality in relation to the field of rhetorical studies. I then turn to critique the argumentative criteria that justified Southwestern High’s closure illustrating the mystifying and legitimizing functions of marketization and colorblind whiteness. I then conclude the chapter with a critique of school

“report cards” that rhetorically privilege the market-oriented criteria and colorblind logics of 133

neoliberal instrumental rationality positioning Latina/o audiences as third persona in public arguments over Southwestern High’s closure.

Instrumental Rationality and Rhetoric

The philosopher David van Mill (2001) claims that the term “instrumental rationality,” or at least how we understand it today, can be traced back at least to Thomas Hobbes and his writings on the “‘economically rational [human being]’” (p. 75). For a provocative discussion of the evolving nature of the critique of instrumental reason, see Darrow Schecter’s (2010) The critique of instrumental reason from Weber to Habermas. Although the historical twists and turns in usage may be interesting to explore, fortunately this chapter primarily focuses on the use of the term by critical theorists from the Frankfurt School. Most notably, the concept was reenergized by Dialectic of Enlightenment (Horkheimer & Adorno, 1947/2002) and Eclipse of

Reason (Horkheimer 1947/2013), and the claim could legitimately be made, and it has been, that the concept was a guiding and unifying light for the Frankfurt School (Schecter). For instance,

Horkheimer and Adorno’s revival of critical interest in instrumental reason was also taken up by

Herbert Marcuse (1964/2012) and his concept of “technological rationality” (p. 2), and in the later theoretical work of Jürgen Habermas (1984) in his articulation of communicative action.

Drawing from Horkheimer and Adorno (1947/2002), I understand instrumental rationality as the paradoxical use of reason for achieving social progress through maximizing efficiencies and calculative mastery over all aspects of society. As the title of their work suggests, the enlightenment project, or modernity in general, contains a dialectical form of rationality. “Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity” (Horkheimer & Adorono, p. 1). In the 134

rational quest to reduce epistemological uncertainty and fear of unpredictability, those holding to an enlightened rationality attempt to organize all of social life into meaningful units through the use of efficient technologies and hierarchies, but these acts of progressive restructuring and advancement are also predisposed to a potentially destructive transformation of social life.

The field of education is an excellent example of this phenomenon. The continual emphasis on technical expansion to obtain and process student data and the insistence on increasing administrative bureaucracies represent a rational response to addressing the operations of learning institutions and school districts. But this instrumental reason, which affords necessary opportunities for overcoming everyday educational problems, also objectifies, or makes into objects, learning (“student output”) and students (“tuition paying units”). As Horkheimer and

Adorno (1947/2002) rather dramatically and somewhat fatalistically argue, “what human beings seek to learn from nature is how to use it to dominate wholly both it and human beings. Nothing else counts” (p. 2). When reason becomes instrumentalized, its emphasis becomes domination or mastery over life in general pushing critical reflection or thought to the periphery and centering self-preservation and the preservation of one’s power as ultimate objectives of reason. This is illustrated in the current obsession with assessment. Instrumental reason means producing data over and over to prove the value of an institution’s existence by means and logics established for a school by those in power (i.e., Pearson Education, emergency managers, nonprofit organizations, and so on), and in the process of data collection, processing, and process refinement, total attention and policy talk is devoted to ensuring a specific kind of educational improvement (and even institutional survival) that little discursive space can be afforded to alternatives let alone critical tasks such as undermining those very means and logics that guide educator and administrator behaviors. Thus, these means and logics continue to be reproduced 135

through educator and administrator behavior and language sustaining, I suggest, a neoliberal instrumental rationality that subtly forces school closure public deliberation towards the fulfillment of its implied market and colorblind terminology.

Horkheimer (1947/2013) provides a fuller theoretical treatment of instrumental rationality by distinguishing objective and subjective forms of rationality. According to Horkheimer, objective rationality is concerned with “the idea of the greatest good, on the problem of human destiny, and on the way of realization of ultimate goals” (p. 5). Objective rationality is thus ultimately concerned with establishing, comparing, and judging end goals and actions that will be necessary to determine and achieve ultimate ends. These ends are also related to some sort of objective truth, which for Horkheimer is “the adequation of name and thing” and “the correspondence of language to reality” (p. 180). Considering the historical moment of self- censorship and the physical location of his writing in the strange land of McCarthyism

California, Horkheimer’s language choices seem to be gesturing toward some sort of historical materialist understanding of truth, language, and reality as forming a totality (Cloud, 1999). The dialectic then to objective reason is subjective reason. Horkheimer defines subjective reason as

“the ability to calculate probabilities and thereby to co-ordinate the right means with a given end” (p. 5). Both subjective and objective forms of reason, or the unification of means and ends, are necessary for individuals and communities to operate and reason through social life.

But in the process of positivist (i.e., engineers, mathematicians, etc.) and Platonist (i.e., philosophers, academics, etc.) tinkering to address social problems such as poverty, hunger, joblessness, lack of education opportunities, subjective rationality has almost altogether replaced objective forms of reason and thereby transformed rationality itself into an instrument of capitalist market domination (Horkheimer, 1947/2013). For Horkheimer and Adorno 136

(1947/2002), the paradoxical relation between enlightenment as social progress and social destruction can be explained by attending to the conditions of late capitalism and critiquing the pervasiveness of commodity exchange throughout all levels of social life. Horkheimer and

Adorno’s critical starting point is the role of the commodity within market economies. Although commodities have a host of incompatible uses, money flattens those use values into a somewhat singular exchange value. Commodities are thereby made equivalent by the abstraction of money and participating in exchange process in market economies through the purchasing of goods and services eventually translates those false equivalencies between objects into public thinking.

As capitalism has undergone dynamic historical transformations, this principle of commodity exchange and the representations it produces are no longer restrained to the economic sphere but have increasingly become organizing principles for institutions, human relationships, and various aspects of social life. Lukács (1971) refers to this extension of the commodity exchange process as reification, and it implies that “a relation between people takes on the character of a thing and thus acquires ‘phantom objectivity’, an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and all-embracing as to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature: the relation between people” (p. 83). To put it simply, Horkheimer and Adorno (1947/2002) argue that within late capitalism this commodity fetishism and the phantom objectivity it produces have become so deeply engrained into human psyches that it has developed into a habit determining one’s interactions with substances, other human beings, and even for understanding one’s self. In other words, “the economic apparatus…equips commodities with the values which decide human behavior” (Horkheimer & Adorno, p. 28). Horkheimer and Adorono take the culture industry as their primarily text for critiquing this social phenomenon arguing that culture has become increasingly subject to this mode of thinking and relating. The value of art and aesthetics in 137

general are increasingly reduced to their marketability and similar commodity-market values, and as a result, are homogenized through industrialization and standardization into products that create through a mass identification with the product a sense of pseudo-individuality among consumers that ultimately distracts from realizing the totality of reason (Horkheimer &

Adorono). This, in part, is what Horkheimer & Adorono mean by “under the leveling rule of abstraction…the liberated finally themselves become the ‘herd’” (p. 9).

Consequently, according to Horkheimer and Adorono (1947/2002), the instrumental drive to make nature and social life calculable and formalized is related to conditions and abstractions curated by market logics and functions as domination of others. Through instrumentalization, as

Horkheimer (1947/2013) argued, reason has become “heteronomous,” or aligned with subjective goals and desires rather than as a part of the totality of truth (p. 21). The rationality of a decision is judged based on its utility, and utility is judged based on self-preservation (Horkheimer,

1947/2013). Language, in Horkheimer’s formulation, “has been reduced to just another tool in the gigantic apparatus of production in modern society. Every sentence that is not equivalent to an operation in that apparatus appears to the layman just as meaningless” (p. 22). In other words, language and other means of expressing ideas and motivating to action are flattened and only meaningful according to their social relation to utility, which is defined by dominant abstractions in the prevailing mode of production. Other ways of living, speaking, and thinking can be made meaningless— void of meaning or whose meaning is violently dismissed or replaced—by the instrumentalizing of rationality in the pursuit of mastery over all aspects of human existence

(Horkhiemer).

While this violent suppression of divergent linguistic symbols and meanings can be intentionally mobilized to preserve one’s own power, the unacknowledged violence of 138

instrumental rationality rhetoric is also entailed in its unintentionality. Wander (1984) writes,

“Ideology, [Corcoran (1984)] observes, is all the more effective for not being recognized as such.

I would only add that ideology, even when intentional, is sometimes possible only when those in power do not or cannot identify it as such” (p. 194). In the case of Southwestern High’s closure, technocrats cannot identify school closure criteria as serving an ideological function in part because cultural symbols and meanings that do not square with their criteria do not demand their consideration and therefore can be unconsciously shelved in the school closure decision processes, particularly in the pursuit of efficiency and productivity in problem-solving. It follows then that regardless of intentionality, the domination of instrumental rationality is legitimized by abstractions and social conditions that have become habituated in part by historical transformations in the mode of production and by the production of discursive activity necessary to address public problems, such as education “failures.” This institutional form of discursive domination is similar to what McKerrow (1989) had in mind when he wrote the following:

Restrictions are more than socially derived regulators of discourse; they are institutionalized rules accepted and used by the dominant class to control the discursive actions of the dominated. The ruling class does not need to resort to overt censorship of opposing ideas, as these rules effectively contain inflammatory rhetoric within socially approved bounds—bounds accepted by the people who form the community. (p. 93)

Certainly, the work of Adorno and Horkheimer (1947/2013) on instrumental rationality is open for critique and many have offered several objections. To take up only one set of objections for the moment, Habermas (1998) agrees with his mentors on the need to take up a critique of instrumental rationality, but he argues that they have collapsed modernity and reason into instrumental rationality with no way out. He also points out that Adorno and Horkheimer, like

Foucault and Derrida on the other end of the modernism-postmodernism continuum (if there is one), are guilty of performative contradiction, or undermining the rational and critical 139

foundations from which they argue (Habermas). Furthermore, Adorno and Horkheimer are both exceptionally pessimistic about the potential for escape from instrumental rationality. But when leveling this critique, we should also be mindful of the historical moment at which they wrote, which included World War 2, the Nazi invasion of their homeland, and the growing might of postwar industrial capitalism (historical periods not too distant from our own war-torn, neoliberal capitalist moment).

Even with these legitimate criticisms in mind, their critiques of instrumental rationality are useful for understanding and critiquing the violence of rhetoric in our neoliberal condition at “the end of history” (Fukuyama, 1992/2006). Their contribution could be summed up in that they draw critical attention to the dialectical tension between social progress and social destruction that resides within rhetorical features of instrumental rationality, and the full extent of their ideological mystification cannot be realized without attending to their relations to the social conditions and dominant abstractions in the prevailing mode of production. Our liberal democratic sensibilities and individualist ethos obstinately refuse to be pessimistic about our political agency, but we generally act and think pessimistically about the potentiality of escaping neoliberal logics. For instance, we may be able to envision different education policies—changes to class sizes, the length of the school day, academic tracking, greater resourcing of public education, and so on—but it is much more difficult to envision a radically different education system that is removed from standardized assessment and based on community activism or some other axiological foundation. This is what Galtung (1969) means by violence when he writes,

“violence is here defined as the cause of the difference between the potential and the actual, between what could have been and what is” (p. 168, italics retained). Violence is that which stands in the way of achieving that which is within the grasp of achieving. 140

A contemporary of Horkheimer and Adorno who shares many of their social and political anxieties concerning the potential destruction of social progress, Kenneth Burke (1966) locates this violent social phenomenon in rhetoric. According to Burke (1966), “[Humanity] is the symbol-using (symbol-making, symbol-misusing) animal inventor of the negative (or moralized by the negative) separated from his natural condition by instruments of his own making goaded by the spirit of hierarchy (or moved by the sense of order) and rotten with perfection” (p. 16).

Burke writes that this human, and ultimately destructive, motivation for perfection is contained within rhetoric itself, which he refers to using the Aristotelian notion of entelechy. For Burke

(1950) entelechy “classifies a thing by conceiving of its kind according to the perfection (that is finishedness) of which that kind of thing is capable” (p. 14) and implies “a kind of ‘terministic compulsion’ to carry out the implications of one’s terminology” (p. 19). Language and our incessant symbolic tinkering and refinement not only make manifest (and hence available for critique) this internal human motive for perfection, but also briefly reveal those ideological abstractions and referent social conditions that guide and dominate human behavior. As Hubbard

(1998) argues, “entelechial force disciplines social actors within a particular frame to stay the course and carries actors through to the end implicit within their rhetorical frame,” (p. 376) even though that course of action is one of the most horrific acts of the twentieth century, the annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The principle of entelechy can then be said to illustrate how rhetoric functions ideologically “like a spirit taking up its abode in a body: it makes that body hop in certain ways; and that same body would have hopped around in different ways had a different ideology happened to inhabit it” (Burke, 1966, p. 6). But importantly, Stan Lindsay (1999) argues that entelechy implies free will in that humans actively choose terminologies, but “subject themselves 141

to near-deterministic compulsions supplied by their own terminologies” (p. 282). Thus for

Lindsay, entelechy can be defined as “the process of changing from what something is into what something should become, which process is directed by an internal principle of change which allows the thing to possess internally the final form toward which the thing is changing” (p. 270, italics retained).

This is particularly relevant to the rhetorical construction of school closing criteria in the case of Southwestern High School. Argumentative styles and reasons seem to have become instrumentalized to the point where arguments for closing or keeping a school open are only legitimate or warranted to the degree they are subservient to neoliberal forms of instrumental rationality. In the case of Southwestern High’s closure, this instrumentalization of reason manifests rhetorically in a citywide education plan and master facilities plan as a standard of school excellence and a politically realist market calculation. Additionally, the neoliberal form of instrumental rationality that underlies these criteria also reifies whiteness. Raka Shome (2014) has recently argued that the proclivity of whiteness toward absorbing and erasing cultural differences is reinforced and heightened under the neoliberal social order. With individual cultural differences and contradictions glossed over, neoliberal markets can more efficiently produce profitable goods and services, but in the process, racial and cultural inequities are also rhetorically reproduced (Shome). Along these lines, this chapter suggests that critique of neoliberal instrumental rationality reveals a reliance on a colorblind meritocracy that not only prescribes standards for student and school academic performance, but also reproduces whiteness as a colorblind standard in the school closure public discourse.

If Burke (1950) is correct, applying these criteria—the standard of school excellence, a market calculation, and a colorblind meritocracy—to judge the worthiness of a school closure 142

entails a possible “terministic compulsion” to carry out the implications of those market and whiteness logics. Prodded by a symbolic proclivity to perfection and hierarchy, technocrats use instrumentally rationalized criteria to design school-ranking systems in the form of school report cards that are key in determining the fate of schools such as Southwestern High. As a public representation of the school and a justification for its closure, such school report cards also symbolically reproduce the ideological ends implicit in the instrumental rationality rhetorical frame. Thereby the instrumental rationality embedded in argumentative reasons for school closure criteria violently suppresses argumentative reasons for keeping Southwestern open that do not conform to its guiding logics, precluding possibilities for inclusive public deliberation about the decision to close the school. Hence, as I suggest, Latina/o community and student values that do not conform to neoliberal market and colorblind abstractions are mystified or obscured as third persona from the public arguments that ultimately justify Southwestern’s closure.

It may be helpful here to briefly overview the texts that I use to interpret the ideological character of neoliberal instrumental rationality that is implicated in the argumentative criteria that justified Southwestern High’s closing. The decision to use the following texts resulted from a close reading of the documents that contain references to justifications for Southwestern’s closing, including the short paragraph from Karen Ridgeway that was mentioned earlier in this chapter. Accordingly, this rhetorical critique primarily focuses on the following texts: the

Excellent Schools Detroit “Taking Ownership: Our Pledge to Educate All of Detroit’s Children”

(2010), the DPS Master Facilities Plan (2010-2015), the DPS Academic Plan (2010) and

Addendum (2012), the Ed Yes! Report Card for Southwestern High School (2010-2011), the

Mackinac Center for Public Policy: The Michigan Public High School Context and Performance 143

Report Card (2012), and the Excellent Schools Detroit 2011 School Report Card: The Best and

Worst Results for Detroit Students.

Instrumental Rationality: A Rhetorical Pretext for the Entelechial Advancement of the

Market

Before my examination of the rhetoric of instrumental rationality underlying school closing criteria, I need to make a cursory, yet what seems an important theoretical distinction between rhetoric as practical reason and instrumental forms of rationality. According to

Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, rhetoric as a means of practical reason involves phronesis, or good reasons (Farrell, 1995). This conceptualization of rhetoric as practical reason forefronts virtuous judgment with an eye toward contingent application of ethical principles, audience discovery and deliberation, and interrogation of consequences and values of reason, actions, and goals (Farrell). Both rhetorical reasoning and instrumental rationality are interested in practical forms of rationality, or the use of reason to determine how best to act in the world, and consequently, in the relationship between the means and ends of reason. But instrumental rationality has become narrowly concerned with locating and reasoning about the potential and ability of technical tasks, calculations, and tools to produce predetermined, market-oriented ends

(Horkheimer & Adorno, 1947/2002). In education policymaking, this instrumentalization adopts as “instruments” endless data, best testing measures, and business best practices and rules for achieving high academic performance. Audiences conform to instrumental forms of reason to achieve some sort of goal, but audiences are never truly engaged or encouraged to reflect on ultimate questions or the value of those goals. Instead, through their instrumental use of reason, audiences become conditioned into thinking processes and ways of talking that are largely governed by abstractions and logics located in the dominant mode of production (Horkheimer & 144

Adorno). In contrast, rhetoric as practical reason, rooted in phronēsis, mandates audience engagement in interrogating not only the means of decision-making but also in determining the goodness of reasons and ultimate ends. In particular, Farrell’s discussion of phronēsis emphasizes the humanistic or audience-centric understanding of practical reason that presents opportunities for doing the necessary work of thinking through both means and ends, reasoning together about ethical values, and doing so in a broad and inclusive way.

But while I have separated the two forms of practical reasoning for the purposes of this analysis, everyday living and talking is necessary influenced in some way by neoliberal capitalism. Thus this division is not always so stark. Rhetorical reasoning is regularly undermined by the symbolic encroachment of instrumental rationality in education policymaking that focuses audience attention on topoi such as technology use in the classroom, the implementation of a standardized curriculum, school leadership, and so on. Of course, these issues are not ideological in and of themselves, but from a rhetorical perspective, they have the potential to function ideologically in that they can prescribe argumentative styles, reasons, and structures that are favorable to already established institutional forms of power and class objectives, such as preserving technocratic power over decision-making processes. Forums for public deliberation are scarce in Detroit and where they do exist, individual voices appear superseded by technical arguments put forth by those in power. This section of the chapter draws critical attention to how argumentative style ideologically reproduces instrumental reason and an entelechial market abstraction that restricts arguments for Southwestern’s closure.

In a letter dated May 3, 2010, Emergency Financial Manager Robert Bobb publicly unveiled the DPS Master Facilities Plan (2010-2015). The letter and attached plan “detail the plans for facilities and academics to support” the goal of “transforming our schools into centers 145

for 21st Century Teaching and Learning” (p. 1). In other words, this document lays out a comprehensive, “multi-year approach” for the district’s buildings, resource allocation, and academics, including the “core principles that guided our discussions,” the “criteria” used to identify schools for closure, the school closure process, and the “neighborhood investment and action steps” (p. 2). The facilities plan goes on to briefly discuss the closure of Southwestern

High School and narrowly construct the neighborhood of Southwest Detroit.

But it is worth pausing on the introductory letter to remark upon the political style of the

Master Facilities Plan as, what I argue, indicative of the instrumentalized nature of the technical reasons offered for closing Southwestern High. Robert Hariman (1995) defines political style as

“a coherent repertoire of rhetorical conventions depending on aesthetic reactions for political effect” (p. 4, italics retained). Although Hariman evades the commitments of ideological criticism as too entangled in “questions of ontological status, authenticity, and representation,” one can certainly picture political styles performing ideological roles within neoliberal education policies (p. 220). For instance, in the example of the DPS Master Plan, Bobb uses a political style that is not only appropriate for the intent of his message but also one that selects meanings and realities that reflect his ideas about education and means of dealing with what he perceives as important. His stylistic selection is therefore guided by his own experience, interest, and history with the DPS education system, his perception of what should be valued at this moment, and the persuasive means available to him in the social system of the City and its school system.

Carter and Nash (1990) posit similar relationships when they write that “stylistic choices are not innocent value-free selections from a system; they work to conceal and reveal certain realities rather than others, establishing or reinforcing ideologies in the process and reacting (as opposed to reflecting) particular points of view” (Carter & Nash, 1990, p. 24). 146

The DPS Master Facilities Plan exemplifies a realist political style. According to

Hariman (1995), the realist political style constructs “the political realm as a state of nature and the political actor as someone either rationally calculating vectors of interest and power or foolishly believing in such verbal illusions as laws or ethical ideals” (p. 4). In other words, the realist political style attempts to remove all appearances of techne from language, or as James

Aune (2001) phrases it, “antirhetorical rhetoric that favors the plain style and avoids verbal ornament” (p. 41). In the DPS Master Facilities Plan, this realist political style is illustrated by the stylistic emphasis on efficiency of information presentation. For instance, the Master

Facilities Plan is presented in a PowerPoint slide format with brief, bulleted sentences, phrases, and words that suggest a linear argument. There is a streamlined movement in the text as it moves through the enumerated main points of academic rebirth, facility renewal, fiscal responsibility, neighborhood focus, and safety and security. Too difficult to discern their specific meanings, possibly overwhelming technical phrases such as “operating costs,” “obsolete facilities,” “leverage technology,” and “community partnership” are made flat and ideologically unassuming by the rhetorical steamroller of the realist political style. The realist political style also operates by pointing out the rhetorical (or “biased”) nature of opponents’ argumentative style (Hariman). For instance, Bobb writes in his introductory letter to the DPS Master Plan,

“Last week we prepared an overview and comprehensive documents to share in a public setting”

(DPS, Office of the Emergency Manager, 2010, p. 1). He continues, “Regrettably, we were blocked from doing so by those who, instead, sought to create a circus-like atmosphere and one in which we cannot possibly have the important discussions around these critical issues” (DPS,

Office of the Emergency Manager, p. 1). Bobb’s use of meiosis rhetorically enhances his arguments as objective facts contra his opponents’ “circus-like” rhetorical decorum. Denying his 147

own reliance on rhetoric by pointing out his opponents’ rhetoricity supposedly illustrates their lack of concern for “the children” while supposedly bolstering Bobb’s claim that “we are completely and totally focused on the children” (DPS, Office of the Emergency Manager, p. 1).

The “circus-like” metaphor conjures up an image of absurd and chaotic entertainment. As entertainment, it can be enjoyed, but it has its time and place, which is apart from the serious issues of life as it really is and not as one would simply hope. Signifying the on-going conflicts over DPS governance, Bobb distances himself and his plan from that of the Board of Education and their harmful circus-like decorum. “We want you to know that we will also redouble our efforts to communicate directly with you, our parents, especially in light of …the ongoing legal challenges and other efforts to stop our forward progress” (DPS, Office of the Emergency

Manager, 2010, p. 1). He continues, “It has never, ever been clearer that defenders of the status quo will continue to be relentless in their own efforts to block the momentum toward transforming our schools” (DPS, Office of the Emergency Manager, p. 1). Among other minor lawsuits, Bobb is specifically referring to DPS Board of Education v. Robert Bobb (2010). The

Board filed the lawsuit arguing that Bobb exceeded his powers as Emergency Financial Manager by instituting his own academic and facilities plan for the district without input from the Board

(Brush & Guerra, 2010). Bobb positions the lawsuit in his letter that introduces the very subject of the lawsuit, the Master Facilities Plan, as a “relentless” barrier to the “momentum” he needs to transform the district. Certainly, Bobb is attempting to persuade his audiences of his view of the lawsuit, but in the midst of these two opposing entelechial forces, Bobb’s realist political style also advocates his particular objective standard of decorum as preferable to that of the Board’s barbaristic or primitive rhetorical style (Kennedy, 1994). As Burke (1984) argues, “style is ingratiation. It is an attempt to gain favor by the hypnotic or suggestive process of ‘saying the 148

right thing’” (p. 50). And in this sense, Bobb’s realist political style illustrates this ingratiation function of style in that it invites his audiences to identify with him and the argumentative position he is setting up as sincere, transparent, and seemingly objective.

This also suggests a crucial ideological function for Bobb’s realist political style. It reinforces the legitimacy of technocratic authority over the establishment of school closure criteria to the discursive exclusion of those that do not adhere to the realist political style norm.

In his introductory letter to the DPS Master Plan, Bobb writes, “And for the last year, my team and I have worked passionately and given every ounce of energy to create centers of excellence for every student, every day at every school in every neighborhood throughout Detroit” (DPS,

Office of the Emergency Manager, 2010, p. 1). Bobb uses this top-down stylistic language throughout the DPS Master Plan. For instance, he iterates “our team goes about work making tough decisions,” and “I would like to share with you directly,” emphasizing a unidirectional, top-down hierarchical mode of communication (DPS, Office of the Emergency Manager, 2010, p. 1). Taken in stride with his stylistic stress on communicative efficiency and critique of the

Board’s barbaristic rhetorical style, the hierarchical mode of communication suggests his realist political style as the only acceptable norm for policymaking discourse concerning school closures. Harriman (1995) argues that political style provides “a set of rules for speech and conduct guiding the alignment of signs and situations, or texts and acts, or behavior and place...

[and determines] individual identity, providing social cohesion, and distributing power” (p. 187).

Similarly, Bobb’s realist political style projects an identity of sincerity and transparency and provides a discursive cohesiveness around his objectivist rhetorical style, which function together to maintain his agentive power to make “tough decisions.” Furthermore, Aune (2001) argues that the realist political style affords opportunities for discursively prioritizing market- 149

oriented aspects of human behavior over any consideration of political and social dimensions.

Such realist political styles are also incidentally indicative of arguments made by classical and neo-classical liberal economists, such as Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Milton

Friedman, whose work loosely inspired neoliberal economics and politics (Aune). Dawned in a similar realist political style, instrumental rationality seems to be at its ideological work in the

DPS Master Facilities Plan depoliticizing school closing criteria through exclusive claims to the position of objectivity and presenting a narrow view of communication and humanity as consumed with efficiency of exchange. The potential political harm is that this reductionist view stunts democratic flourishing and nearly all possibility for critique. Tentatively, Bobb’s political realist style in the DPS Master Facilities Plan text can be referred to as wooing audiences through sincerity, transparency, and an appearance of objectivity while subduing argumentative opponents through an instrumental view of communication exchange that leaves no obvious footing to launch a critique and thereby maintains technocratic authority and desired outcomes in the school closure criteria setting process.

This realist political style then sets an ideologically unassuming stage for the technical arguments for school closing criteria. “Closing schools is not a decision that I take lightly. It is difficult for the students who attend those schools and it is difficult for the impacted communities” (DPS Master Facilities Plan, 2010, p. 1). But considering the crisis situations of population decline and financial decline that was critiqued in Chapter Three, Bobb and his team drafted a Master Facilities Plan that “would save the district $31 million annually” (DPS Master

Facilities Plan, p. 1). The following “seven core principles” guided discussions regarding school closures and facilities management:

1. Designing schools based on how students learn and teachers teach 21st century 150

education; 2. Building flexible, adaptable and sustainable learning environments; 3. Supporting smaller learning environments; 4. Developing multi-use facilities that support community use and partnerships; 5. Incorporating non-traditional spaces within schools to broaden curriculum opportunities and make education more relevant; 6. Creating an educational marketplace where all schools provide students with high quality core curriculum and value added learning experiences that meet current and future college and workforce readiness demands; and 7. Creating healthy safe and energy efficient schools to support the learning environment. (p. 2)

From these guiding principles, the following school closing criteria were extrapolated:

Our criteria included the cost of operations, educational and program performance, demographic trends, facility condition and facility investment needs. We also looked at the utilization rate for each facility, proximity to alternative locations, and consistency with our academic plan for 21st century teaching and learning, potential community partnerships, neighborhood assessments and access to neighborhood resources. (Bobb, p. 2).

The forthright disclosure of these guiding principles and school closure criteria certainly communicates a desire for public transparency of the school closure decision-making process.

But the argumentative efficiency that technical jargon— “non-traditional spaces,”

“performance,” and “neighborhood assessments”—provides also erects a wall between those who can judge the argument and its rationality and those whom cannot based in part on their expertise. As Walter Fisher (1984/1999) argues, “the presence of ‘experts’ in public moral arguments makes it difficult, if not impossible, for the public of ‘untrained thinkers’ to win an argument or even judge them well—given, again, the rational world paradigm” (pp. 276). “High quality core curriculum” may be appealing to parents in general because it perhaps suggests an insurance of a good, quality education for their children. But education professionals, particularly teachers, administrators, and researchers, might read that phrase as specifically referencing Common Core curriculum and state standards. The latter reading may be justified by 151

the DPS Academic Plan (2010), which closely relates “high quality education” with developing

“standards and curriculum based on the Common Core Standards to ensure higher levels of achievement for everyone by 2015” (p. 5). However, an accurate sense of the term as used by

Bobb in the DPS Master Facilities Plan—like his use of other terms in the guiding principles and school closing criteria—is ambiguous. As Woodward (1975) argues, ambiguity can be a powerful rhetorical strategy for hiding rhetor’s interests, motivations, and ideas under the guise of reasonable arguments and already established understanding of the term. In education policy discourses, technical jargon such as “partnerships” and “educational marketplace,” have become naturalized, and such ubiquity works to mystify their meanings and the interests at stake in such decision-making (Ravitch, 2013).

But at least one critical observation can be gleaned from this excerpt from the DPS Master

Facilities Plan. Technical education jargon obscures the instrumental shift in reason on which the school closing criteria rests. In other words, technical jargon rhetorically functions to justify the instrumental calculation that argumentatively leads to Southwestern’s closure. Notice in the excerpt from Bobb’s letter that there is a singular set of core principles and one set of criteria upon which the decision was calculated to close not only Southwestern High but also several additional DPS schools. According to the DPS Master Plan text, this singular school closure process proceeded according to the following calculation: the district conducted “data gathering”

(p. 14) according to the pre-determined closing criteria; then the data were “evaluated,” which consisted of “evaluate every school for possible closure against guiding principles and closure criteria” (p. 15); and then there was a period of “public engagement” (p. 16) before the final decision was made. As a result of this school closing process, a neighborhood investment and action steps plan was developed. This section of the Master Plan consists of a slide of the 152

“Existing Neighborhoods” followed by a slide and details of what was needed to transform each neighborhood schools into the “New Neighborhoods.” According to the Master Plan, the neighborhood of Southwestern would be subsumed into the New (and much larger) Western

Neighborhood. As part of this change in neighborhood schools, “in 2010, Southwestern High

School will be utilized as a 6-12 school” (p. 70). The next bullet point reads, “Southwestern High

School will be closed in 2011 and students may enroll in Western International and elsewhere.

The school building is 95 years old and is operating at less than 50 percent of capacity (p. 70).

The closure of Southwestern, along with the other proposed changes to the neighborhood school system, would result in “Total Capital Investment: $102.9 Million” (p. 70).

The argumentative structure of the closure justification from transparent yet elusive technical guiding principles to a pseudo-scientific application of school closure criteria reflects a market calculative argument for technocratic governance over school closings. Richard Harvey

Brown (1990) writes “in contemporary positivist approaches to planning and governance, for example, scientific calculation is thought to be the only possible form of applied reason” (p.

190). The justification for Southwestern’s closure certainly has the rhetorical hallmarks of this positivist approach to planning and governance. School closure criteria are constituted as data that must be gathered and evaluated against already established principles and criteria. Such an objective decision-making process supposedly ensures the progress of the school district. But what is left out, or goes unnoticed, in the equation is the active selection and prioritization of realities in determining which schools to close and which to keep open. Reasons for such determinations are warranted according to their measurability in market terms, such as

“utilization rate for each facility,” “facility investment needs,” “the cost of operations,”

“performance,” and “demographic trends.” Scholarship on the rhetoric of economics has laid 153

bare that statistical proofs and their positivist approaches to the study of modern economics are not only based on argumentative reasoning, but also have the ability to distort (McCloskey,

1985/1998). Pushing the argument further suggests, as does Brown, that the increasing use of pseudo-scientific and market calculations in our public reasoning has instrumentalized reasoning itself and allowed for increased technocratic predictability and control over public decision- making processes, such as school closures. This domination through calculative argumentative distortion and market measurability—if you will—gives additional credence to what has been referred to in debates over high-stakes standardized testing as Campbell’s law: the “more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor” (Campbell, 1976, p. 49).

But the use of market-oriented criteria in DPS education policymaking is not a new phenomenon. For instance, as I mentioned in Chapter Two, in response to numerous urban and education conditions including bureaucratic bloat and accusations of “mismanagement,” HOPE reformers in the late 1980s and early 1990s advocated the incorporation of operational efficiency, cost-savings, performance measurement, and other corporate best practices into district governance. These initiatives resulted in targeted changes to the district constrained to public-private school compacts, empowerment schools, and schools of choice. Although universalization of these market-oriented incentives and priorities was never the intention of the

HOPE reformers, such universalization seems to have now been realized as is evidenced by the application of market-oriented criteria to judge all DPS schools. Wendy Brown (2006) argues that this treatment of markets as already “achieved and normative” and all “political and social spheres both as appropriately dominated by market concerns and as themselves organized by 154

market rationality” as political markers of neoliberal rationality (p. 694). Ironically, in the neoliberal moment, universalization of market-oriented criteria often functions to centralize control over education practices and the futures of schools, as illustrated in the history of DPS education policy since the early 1990s. Of course, such historical trajectories and discursive responses to depopulation, racial segregation, and deindustrialization in the city were not inevitable. They were also propped up by complicated, historical, and global developments in neoliberalism as a hegemonic form of governance (Foucault, 2004).

This neoliberal instrumental rationality and its impulse to universalize market-oriented criteria are reflected in the calculative argument that justifies Southwestern High’s closure. In other words, the calculative argument becomes a terministic screen through which market- oriented logics become the normative basis for judging the future of Southwestern High and all other DPS schools. According to Burke (1966), terministic screens are a collection of terms that act as a lens through which individuals and communities use to make meaning out of the social world. Burke suggests that such terministic screens have potentially ideological effects in that “if any given terminology is a reflection of reality, by its very nature as a terminology it must be a selection of reality; and to this extent it must function also as a deflection of reality” (p. 45, italics retained). The ideological nature of the market calculation as a terministic screen is revealed in the implicit cost-benefit estimate in the DPS Master Plan. In the argumentative act of weighing a school’s fate, the plan could be read as inserting individual schools into an already formed cost-benefit analysis that discursively shapes the school’s fate. For instance, the benefits

(for an unnamed audience) of the DPS Master Facilities Plan include flexible, smaller, multi-use learning environments; high academic performance and a quality curriculum; and healthy, safe, and energy efficient schools. On the other hand, cost of the school’s operations, downward 155

demographic trends in the surrounding area, facility condition and investment needs, proximity to alternative locations, and the other closing criteria could be interpreted as the cost in the calculation. The fate of Southwestern is sealed because its costs (underutilization of space, age of the buildings, and inefficient use of the district’s finances) outweigh any potential benefits

(utilization of space as overflow for another school for the period of one-year).

The cost-benefit calculation argument reinforces market-oriented outcomes and utilities, and the argument suggests that the calculation can be automatically superimposed on schools regardless of other social or cultural factors that might be constituted as important by other publics. The focus of the argument is on the accuracy of the measurement to address complicated and uncertain problems that exist in the school district. And as a market-oriented terministic screen, the cost-benefit calculation narrowly defines the utility of Southwestern High and all other schools in the district according to their ability to produce goods and services that meet abstract market needs. For instance, according to the DPS Master Facilities Plan, the need appears to be “Total Capital Investment: $102.9 Million” (p. 70). Thus the argumentative structure of the cost-benefit calculation emphasizes instrumental means to the neglect, or better yet, the obfuscation of public reflection about predetermined market-oriented ends, including what constitutes economic necessity. Such decisions and the criteria and standards necessary to achieve them are ultimately restricted by the calculative argument to technocratic expertise and authority as they address educational problems by closing schools according to normative market calculations.

This section illustrates what Horkheimer and Adorno (1947/2002) and Horkheimer

(1947/2013) claim as the instrumentalization of public reasoning to mere thinking about technical tasks, calculations, and tools to produce market-oriented goods and services. But 156

neoliberal forms of instrumental rationality are not only dominated by a market abstraction, but also characterized by racialized ideologies. In other words, I argue in the next section that whiteness norms, under the guise of colorblindness and a superficial treatment of cultural and ethnic differences, are rhetorically reproduced in the DPS Academic Plan as an instrumental rationality by which to judge Southwestern High School.

The Standard of Whiteness: Colorblindly (E)Race(ing) to the Top of the Meritocracy

Within the field of Intercultural Communication Studies alone, whiteness has been theorized in numerous ways, including as an identification referent (Jackson, Shin, & Hilson,

2000), public pedagogical performance (Warren, 2003), and a post-racial imaginary (Griffin,

2015). In their work on “whiteness as a strategic rhetoric,” Nakayama and Krizek (1995) argue that whiteness is a paradoxical discursive position. On one hand, whiteness avoids a definitive essence. When attempting to define whiteness, it finds a way to slip through the analytical grasp.

And yet, whiteness persistently and subtly presents itself in everyday social relations as normative. Because whiteness has become naturalized and seemingly universalized, it is often unknowingly perceived as the norm by which all others are to understand themselves (Nakayama

& Krizek).

Consequently, whiteness invisibly produces and maintains social hierarchies, white privileges, institutional racism, and material inequalities (Flores, Ashcraft, & Marafiote, 2010;

Warren, 2003). Whiteness extends beyond a particular race or ethnicity. It describes certain dimensions of power including normative race privilege; a privileged white standpoint from which to view others, one’s self, and society; and a particular set of ill-defined, often invisible, but hegemonic cultural practices (Frankenburg, 1993). Those who adopt this socially privileged position of "white" are often unaware of how complicit they are in maintaining and producing 157

the very social and institutional privileges that not only protect their way of living, but also subjugate others to discursive and material forms of marginalization (Wander, Nakayama, &

Martin, 1999). This represents the ideological nature of whiteness. One way that whiteness functions ideologically is to erect and protect institutional and everyday experiences of white privilege and the material interests of white people over the interests of people of color

(Crenshaw, 1997). This could be carried out in numerous rhetorical ways including the superimposing of racialized categories on people and experiences or through a rhetoric of colorblindness with its faulty assumptions that power and race can simply be transcended, and that everyone can be treated as “individuals” (Crenshaw). Colorblindness allows those in positions of whiteness to dismiss talk about race and turn a blind eye to practices of racial discrimination in social interactions and in institutions. Consequently, the task of an ideological critique of colorblindness in public arguments for school closures would entail locating

“interactions that implicate unspoken issues of race, discursive spaces where the power of whiteness is invoked but its explicit terminology is not” (Crenshaw, p. 254).

Furthermore, Jennifer Simpson (2008) argues that whiteness and any attempts at challenging its hegemonic discursive position are tied to the logics of the historical moment. One such historical contingency is neoliberalism. Morrissey (2015) acknowledges this reality when she writes “neoliberal logics of privatization and personal responsibility couch the advancement of some U.S. subjects and the decline of others within discourses that inconspicuously work in the service of whiteness, downplaying the role of race within U.S. culture” (p. 130). As

Morrissey notes, such rhetorical strategies of whiteness in the neoliberal moment have much in common with racial neoliberalism, or the public suppression and privatization of discussions of race and racism (Enck-Wanzer, 2011). Drawing from this wide swath of intercultural 158

communication and rhetorical studies literature, I suggest that the neoliberal instrumental rationality that underlies and motivates technical arguments for Southwestern High’s closure are subtly (un)marked by colorblind logics that gloss over the cultural and racial differences among

DPS students. Secondly, this colorblind rhetoric reproduces whiteness as a silent standard for technocrat judgment of the worthiness of Southwestern High School.

According to the February 2007 DPS Policy on School Closures and Consolidations, “the board may decide to close schools that have failed to make adequate progress pursuant to [No

Child Left Behind] or any other state or federal law requiring reconstitution, etc. as a means of correcting performance deficiencies” (p. 2). The policy continues, “the decision to close a school for academic reasons shall be based on a consideration of the availability of ‘higher performing schools’ in close proximity, as determined by the General Superintendent” (p. 2). When the

Emergency Financial Manager was instituted, Robert Bobb and his successor Roy Roberts took- over the duties of the “General Superintendent” and formulated new sets of academic standards in two documents, the Excellent Schools for Every Child: Detroit Public Schools Academic Plan

(March 2010) and Higher Standards for All: Detroit Public Schools Education Plan Addendum

(January 2012). Together these documents constitute the local carrying out of No Child Left

Behind (NCLB) mandates and Common Core State Standards. Robert Bobb writes in the introduction of the Academic Plan, “this academic plan will drive our further planning around facilities and finances” (p. 2). Consequently, these two documents were instrumental in the criteria-setting for determining Southwestern High’s status as “low-performing,” and what that would then mean for the future “planning around facilities and finances” of the school.

Academic plans are intended as tools for keeping schools accountable to parents and the school district. Therefore, critique of academic plans reveals the criteria upon which schools are judged. 159

Additionally, I suggest that these documents furnish an opportunity for assessing the neoliberal instrumental rationality underling Southwestern High’s closure criteria and provide insight into how racial and cultural ideologies function in the criteria-setting process.

Within these texts, latent forms of whiteness are rhetorically concealed by the prominence of a colorblind individualist meritocracy. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (2006) explains that this ideology of meritocracy, or “reward by merit,” has become the reasonable racism for a post- racial social world (p. 32). Meritocracy focuses attention on individual achievements and rewards or punishes based on those individualized criteria. Equality of opportunity is assumed; and any suggestion of structural racism can then be explained away by colorblind rhetorical appeals to the calculation of individual achievements, cultural deficiency, or even an individual’s effort (Bonilla-Silva & Forman, 2000). But as Brandi Lawless and Mary Jane Collier (2014) argue, “the framing of issues as a merit-based, ‘economic’ imperative along with advancing a perspective featuring color-blindness (sic), ignores unearned privilege…and can perpetuate a discourse of whiteness as the standard” (p. 155). Thus, one might claim that market-oriented neoliberal rationality and discursive standards of whiteness meet at the crossroads of the meritocracy, particularly in the achievement-obsessed culture of education.

For example, the DPS Academic Plan rhetorically affirms this colorblind meritocracy.

Barbara Byrd-Bennett, the DPS Chief Academic and Accountability Auditor, summarizes the meritocracy in the following introductory comments:

This plan provides very specific directions on how to get students where they need to be: in the line of graduates waiting with anticipation to receive a diploma. When we achieve the goals we’ve set, it will be clear to everyone what students must know and be able to do to earn that diploma, and what we must do to support students along the way. On graduation day, that diploma will be more meaningful, not only for students and their proud families, but for the college admissions officer, the potential employer, and the Detroit community (p. 3) 160

Underlying Byrd-Bennett’s comments is an assumption that DPS serves a culturally-simplified student population with a singular goal and therefore one set of instruments or measurements can ensure that the goal is attained. This meritocracy chorus is repeated throughout the Academic

Plan and the Addendum in various rhetorical forms. For instance, the word “everyone,” whose referent is unclear, serves an anaphora rhetorical function in the text in that it seeks to illicit an emotional response to rally readers behind the meritocracy as it culminates in the “five areas of focus.” According to the Academic Plan, “To aggressively accelerate student achievement, we have identified five areas of focus, and within each area, have defined the goals, strategies, and objectives to be accomplish” (p. 18). The cultural singularity of the meritocracy is clear throughout all five areas, and each area is filled with common neoliberal meritocracy phrases.

For instance, “Teaching and Learning” is constituted as “we will transform out instructional programs to meet children where they are and move them to greater achievement,” (p. 19). “Safe

Schools and a Marketplace of Choices” emphasizes the importance of “Student Conduct” as “an orderly, safe, secure, and drug-free environment with a zero-tolerance policy and enforced codes of conduct” (p. 21). The area of “Committed and Talented Staff” is narrowly conceptualized to

“focus professional development of educators on teaching to standards, using appropriate curriculum, monitoring results, developing interventions, and re-teaching for student mastery”

(p. 22). The area of “Accountability for Student Achievement” states, “we will conduct our work with the highest level of professional responsibility and integrity to students, and commit to monitor and report school and district progress” (p. 23). And the area of “Family/Community

Support” will “allow families to tap into the district’s instructional management system to see how their students performed on tests” (p. 24). 161

The constant rhetorical appeal to a colorblind meritocracy as the sole arbiter of student success distracts from having to consider the impact of race or cultural diversity on academic performance. One familiar phrase in particular encapsulates the colorblind sensibility at the center of the DPS meritocracy: “Creating Centers of Excellence at Every School for Every Child,

Every Day, in Every Neighborhood across Detroit Public Schools” (p. 2). Its position in the texts shifts from opening to conclusion of paragraphs as a metaphor for the shifting nature of whiteness, but its meaning as a neoliberal tagline for the race-neutral meritocracy remains consistent: all students, teachers, neighborhoods, and schools are subsumed into a singular post- racial category. The totalizing nature of the rhetorical phrase conceals any differences among student’s cultural sensibilities and histories. Instead, all students have the same needs: “All of our children, including children with special needs and children learning English, must develop the knowledge and skills to gain admission to the college they want to attend or the employment they seek” (p. 2). Therefore, individual academic success and the high quality of education provided by individual schools can be ensured through a rigorous and reasonable meritocracy:

“Parents know how we’re measuring student achievement, and whether their children and their children’s schools are making gains” (p. 5). Similar rhetorical appeals to excellence as an instrumentalized standard of measurability to dismiss racial and cultural differences between students (and ultimately between individual schools) can be observed in the “Taking Ownership”

(2010) pledge produced by the non-profit Excellent Schools Detroit. For instance, according to the pledge, the signatories write:

Recognize that many Detroit children have physical, social, economic, and emotional barriers to learning….However, there are excellent schools in Detroit, often working with community partners, to overcome these challenges; albeit there are too few of them. This plan is about changing the conditions within Detroit that will spur the creation of many more excellent schools—so that every child can attend one. (p. 6) 162

Constituted in a negative light, “challenges” of identity differences as related to academic performance is for “excellent schools” and “community partners” to “overcome.” The main goal of district governance becomes the creation of more excellent schools or the production of performative measurements and other forms of colorless meritocracies to control for potential problems of cultural differences. Perhaps this critical observation supports in part what

Horkheimer and Adorno (1947/2002) argue are the cultural homogenizing and standardization impulses of instrumental rationality. The discursive emphasis on producing instrumental measurements in both the DPS Academic Plan and “Taking Ownership” pledge rhetorically functions to preserve whiteness as an argumentative standard in the meritocracy that judges student and school performance by excusing technocrats from having to seriously consider cultural and racial privileges that may exist between individual students and schools.

Even when superficial “ethnic” differences are mentioned in the DPS Academic Plan and

Addendum, they are quickly dismissed by rhetorical appeals to this meritocracy. For instance, the Academic Plan does make vague references that “ethnicity” exists in DPS. For instance, one page of the Plan is labeled “Demographics,” and includes a pie chart representing the total ethnic makeup of the district (p. 4). According to the chart, 88% of students are African-American,

9.588% are Hispanic, 2.4% are Caucasian, .0009% are Asian, and .0003% are Native American, and below the chart, the following text appears: “Eligible for free/reduced price lunch: 77%” (p.

4). Ethnicity appears again under the “Clear Goals” section of the Academic Plan. This section of the report deals with “the 27 indicators of success that address our academic emergency…This ambitious plan raises the expectations for our students, parents, and community at large” (p. 7).

Among those 27 indicators are test score indicators, such as the MEAP test, Adequate Yearly 163

Progress (AYP), and the ACT as well as student attendance, dropout rate, graduation rate, student suspensions and expulsions. According to the DPS website, AYP is defined as a

“measure used to hold schools and districts responsible for student achievement in English language arts and mathematics. AYP is based on Michigan Educational Assessment Program

(MEAP) test results, participation rates in MEAP testing, and attendance or graduation rates”

(“Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP),” 2015). Markers of ethnicity only appear under graduation rate and dropout rate. For instance, in bulleted points, the Plan reports the “National graduation rate: 89%, for black males: 44%, for black females: 58%” (p. 11), and the “National dropout rate:

8.7%, for black males: 9.7%, and for black females 5.3%” (p. 12). These markers of “ethnicity” in the Academic Plan suggest an awareness that culture plays into issues of graduation rates and dropout rates. But only “black” students are marked as having “ethnicity,” leaving all other co- cultural and white students unmarked. “Ethnicity” is also constituted as important only on the national level, but there is no reference of “ethnicity” in relation to DPS student graduation rates or dropout rates. Instead of mentioning the individual cultural differences and racialized experiences that exist in classrooms, such differences are obfuscated in the DPS Academic Plan by rhetorical appeals to performative accountability. Drawing audience attention to the importance of holding students and schools accountable to the meritocracy suggests the discursive dominance of whiteness that denies audience opportunity for considering any possible association between performative measurements and racial or cultural differences. Rather, whiteness seems assumed as a default cultural and racial standard by which every DPS student and school are judged.

With the neoliberal meritocracy formed and hegemonic position of whiteness subsumed in the Academic Plan and its Addendum, the final rhetorical and ideological move then is to apply 164

the colorless neoliberal meritocracy to Southwestern High School as a criterion to judge the performance of the school, and hence its worthiness to stay open. This phenomenon is illustrated in the Southwestern High School Annual Education Report (AER) Cover Letter (2011-2012).

The Southwestern AER Cover Letter (2011-2012) specifically lists the 80% graduation rate goal and the 95% testing rate goals that were in the DPS Academic Plan as one of the criteria that led to its low-performance determination and subsequent closure. Additionally, there is a side-by- side comparison of “All Students,” “Black Students,” “Limited English Proficient,” and

“Economically Disadvantaged” student performance for both sets of performance criteria. The stylistic presentation of the technical data and the ideological selection of these specific identity markers further suggest whiteness as an (in)visible standard—the colorless category that pervades the Academic Plan and trickles down into the assessment of Southwestern—implicit in the neoliberal meritocracy. Peter McLaren (2002) argues, “unless we give white students a sense of their own identity as an emergent ethnicity—we naturalize whiteness as a cultural marker against which Otherness is defined” (p. 133). The argumentative assumption of the Southwestern

AER Cover Letter (2011-2012) is that individual students belong in these apparent categories of

“Black Students,” “Limited English Proficient,” and “Economically Disadvantaged” according to obvious cultural and economic markers. However, critical reflection on the comparison to whiteness standards implied in such categorization strategies is denied. Instead, the argumentative emphasis is on the outcome of the measurement disallowing opportunity for individual and public reflexivity on potential relations between racial inequities and selection of academic performance indicators or even the decision to close Southwestern. Whiteness is ideologically subsumed into a colorblind neoliberal instrumental rationality and its discursive emphases on merit, accuracy of measurement, and ensuring high performance of students and 165

schools, regardless of the excuses of cultural and racial privileges. In an effort to make the violent rhetorical effects of this colorblind meritocracy more visible, I turn now to illustrate how neoliberal instrumental rationality works to negate Latina/o students and their experiences from public argument in Detroit’s education policy discourse.

The Third Persona in Southwestern High’s Closure

Since the 1960s, Latina/o communities in Southwest Detroit have demanded cultural recognition in the school district (Salas, 2014). But their demands for Spanish-language courses,

Latina/o history and culture curricula, and bilingual and bicultural education have been largely ignored (Salas). The closure of Southwestern High School represents another historical moment where their voices are overshadowed. In response to Roy Robert’s announcement that

Southwestern High would close, Latina/o community members protested with signs reading “No mas correr escuelas” (stop running our schools) and argued that the closure would mean a possible end to bilingual education in Detroit, overcrowding at receiving high schools, and fracture the Latina/o community in Southwest Detroit (Foley, 2012, ¶ 2). But these objections were met with the violence of silence. From a public argument perspective, what warrants this silence from those in power?

One possible warrant for this technocrat silence is what I have been referring to in this chapter as the neoliberal logic of instrumental rationality and in this section it takes the rhetorical form of school report cards. Brought into being largely by the reporting mandates of

No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and incentivized by competitive federal funding schemes such as

Title I School Improvement Grants, one of the latest instruments of education reforms has been the use of school report cards and school rankings as means to hold local schools accountable to parents and policymakers for results (Ravitch, 2010). Typically these texts contain a summary of 166

each school’s performance data and assign a letter grade indicating their performance in relation to other schools. School report cards represent what Horkheimer and Adorno (1947/2002) have described as the instrumentalization of rationality in that their assumption is that schooling can be improved through breaking education into its most basic units and persistently refining the measurement as the object of education reform.

In Detroit, multiple non-profits and the Michigan Department of Education (MDE) have published report cards and school rankings that play crucial roles in the decisions to close schools. For example, Excellent Schools Detroit published a school report card “to celebrate schools that are doing well and put public pressure on school leaders to close schools that year after year are failing their students” (“The Best and Worst Results for Detroit Students,” 2011, p.

1). The EducationYes! Report Card is also used to keep schools accountable for their results.

According to the MDE, EducationYes! “is Michigan's system for determining school accreditation status. The system includes components for student achievement, measuring both status and change, and a measurement of Indicators of School Performance” (Michigan’s School

Accreditation System, 2015 ¶ 1). Understood as public arguments, these school report cards ideologically function to silence audience experiences, which become a third persona in the school closure public discourse. The third persona in rhetorical discourse is “the ‘it’ that is not present, that is objectified in a way that ‘you’ and ‘I’ are not” (Wander, 1984, p. 192). Wander’s understanding of the third persona allows this critic to link technical arguments, their underlying neoliberal logic of instrumental rationality, and the experiences of those Latina/o audiences in

Southwest Detroit negated from the school closure discourse.

The ability of the Latina/o community in Southwest Detroit to make arguments in the public discourse grounded in their own cultural sensibilities for keeping the school open is 167

constrained by the ideological position implied in school report cards and their underlying neoliberal logics of instrumental rationality. This is the ideal audience constructed by the text and to which the rhetor invites their audience to become (Black 1970/1999). In the case of school report cards, the intended audience is the parent or guardian. The Excellent Schools Detroit school report card titled “The Best and Worst Results for Detroit Students” asks this audience a series of questions such as, “looking for a good school for your child?” (“The Best and Worst

Results for Detroit Students,” 2011, n.p.). The report card invites this audience to “learn more about your choices. Attend one of our Parent School Shopper Fairs …where these schools will be showcased” (“The Best and Worst,” n.p). To help facilitate this parental action, the report card also provides a guide titled “Choosing a School: What To Ask When You Visit a School”

(“The Best and Worst,” n.p). Through an emphasis on choice, shopping, and showcasing schools, a consumer subject emerges and parents are invited to become this ideal audience when making decisions regarding the futures of their children.

This ideal consumer subject simultaneously creates a pseudo-individual freedom and limits that freedom through prescribing how the ideal audience should interpret the value of schools. For instance, the Southwestern High School EducationYes! report card judges the high school based solely on the criteria of enrollment history, attendance history, and MEAP/MME academic performance. The criteria are measured by quantitative data, bar graphs, and “yes” or

“no” responses. While the reader might find these performative measurements and data representations somewhat enlightening, audience attention is ultimately drawn to the letter grade assigned to Southwestern High. At the top of Southwestern High’s EducationYes! Report Card is its grade: “D/Alert,” which means “Comprehensive School Audit by External Team Continues,

Restructure Plan” (Detroit Public Schools Southwestern High School, 2011-2012, p. 2). Letter 168

grades are powerful rhetorical symbols that capture and maintain audiences’ attention. Technical formulas and performative variables are difficult, if not impossible, for a non-technical audience, such as parents and policymakers, to accurately interpret. A letter grade reduces this complexity while ordering dissimilar school values into a hierarchy. Schools ranked as earning an “A” are constituted as better than schools that received a “B,” and the consumer subject is more likely to choose the higher ranked school for their child. As Burke (1950) argues, “humanity is goaded by the spirit of hierarchy (or moved by the sense of order)” (p. 16). Parents are moved by hierarchy toward acting on the market-oriented measurements and colorblind meritocracy that are represented in the letter grade and were critiqued earlier in this chapter. Standardizing school values and ordering them in a hierarchy could be interpreted through a positivist frame as an objective process but such objectivity also conceals the control technocrats have over the criteria selected to determine the school’s letter grade and the embedded values by which consumers choose a school.

Rhetorical constructions of the consumer as the ideal parents and other decision-makers should become when making judgments about the value of schools also negates those experiences that cannot be reduced to consumption. Philip Wander (1984) argues that texts can function ideologically to negate human beings from public purview requiring critical attention to context:

‘Being negated’ includes not only being alienated through language…but also being negated in history, a being whose presence, through relevant to what is said, is negated through silence. The moral significance of being negated through what is and is not said reveals itself in all its anguish and confusion in context….The objectification of certain individuals and groups discloses itself through what is and is not said about them and through actual conditions affecting their ability to speak for themselves. Operating through existing social, political, and economic arrangements, negation extends beyond the ‘text’ to include the ability of produce texts, to engage in discourse, to be heard in the public space. (p. 192) 169

Southwest Detroit is the context in which the decision to close Southwestern High School was made. In her ethnographic study of Southwest Detroit, Luz María Gordillo (2010) describes the unavoidable “sense of Mexicanness” that she felt walking through Mexicantown (p. 124). The smells wafting from the taqueria (taco stand) and from the bakery that just took the pan dulce

(sweet bread) out of the oven are in the air. She sees the Hijo del Maiz (Son of Corn) that stands over the West Vernor and Military Street intersection, and Mexican flags are draped from house windows. The sounds of children speaking Spanish can be clearly heard. And although

Mexicantown is less than one mile away from the former site of Southwestern High School, it might as well be a thousand miles away. The close proximity of Mexicantown to Southwestern

High serves as a metaphorical reminder of the intimate relationship between the school and its community. But as obvious as the existence of Latina/o cultural markers are in Mexicantown, the importance of the school for the Latina/o community it serves, their cultural sensibilities, and experiences in Southwest Detroit are negated by colorblind, market-oriented instruments as criteria for judgment of a school’s value.

As these report cards are used in the public sphere for deciding which schools should be closed and convincing parents and other decision-makers of that urgency, they negate from public consideration that which should be obvious, namely, the existence of the Latina/o community. Stated differently, acting as consumers—the ideal audience school report cards invite us to become— reproduces a social reality of schools that negates Latina/o experiences in

Southwest Detroit. Reality is understood as “the existing world of nature, social arrangements, and the experiences of people living in them” (Cloud, 2018, p. 6). Instead of valuing schools according to local individual and community experiences of them, school report cards circulate 170

social realities of schools in terms of colorless market abstractions. These school report cards illustrate that in the entelechial pursuit of normalizing and standardizing instruments of accountability, experiences that do not conform to a colorblind market abstraction can be dismissed as unworthy justifications to keep school doors open without having to speak to them because they are not meaningful in light of the instrumental criteria. Moreover, in order for the

Latina/o community of Southwest Detroit to participate in the public sphere, they are forced to adapt to the ideal subject of consumer. In a similar vein, Stuart Hall (1981) argues, “we have to

‘speak through’ the ideologies which are active in our society and which provide us a means of

‘making sense’ of social relations and our place in them” (p. 32). This also illustrates the violence of the ideological nature of school closure criteria. To borrow from Galtung (1969), school closure criteria represent a form of structural violence in that they prevent from achieving that which is within grasp. Keeping Southwestern High open was possible at one point, but instead, negating Latina/o experiences as the third persona in school closure public discourse allow for the continued neoliberalization of education and school meanings. In other words, technical arguments for school closures in this case could be read as a form of marginalization hidden from purview by a colorless and market-oriented instrumental rationality.

Conclusion

Neoliberal instrumental rationality in the school closure discourse suggests a collapsing boundary between homo narrans and homo oeconomicus (Hayward & Hanan, 2014). This collapse has ramifications for grounding public arguments regarding school closures, as I have illustrated in this chapter. Goodnight (1982/1999) voiced similar concerns that technical arguments were beginning to overshadow possibilities for equitable democratic deliberation and human flourishing. In the current education policymaking discourse, arguments concerning a 171

topic of such an obvious public nature, such as public school closings, are increasingly instrumentalized to the point where it seems that the public cannot even debate closure criteria because of their trappings in technical jargon, concealment in “reasonable” economic calculations, and constant evasion of critique. Certainly, the public can deliberate about the implementation of measurement, but the hegemonic position of such thinking (i.e., the need to measure and objects to measure) is so deeply engrained that it is often difficult to argue for alternatives. The search for alternatives seems even more insurmountable when public policy debate has to be done in the narrow confines of prescribed argumentative styles, forms, and forums, which strategically obfuscate co-cultural voices that may challenge hegemonic practices.

But describing and critiquing the ideological strategies of power and their underlying instrumental rationality is a first step to making visible the “the silhouette of a Third Persona— the ‘it’ that is not present” in the market rationalities and colorblind whiteness of neoliberal forms of reason (Wander, 1984, p. 192). It is easy to overestimate both the emancipatory power of democratic deliberation and the insurmountability of neoliberal instrumental rationality.

James Carey (1994) once voiced skepticism regarding our discipline’s engagement with the study of economics: “the project is, to put it too simply, to revitalize our understanding of communication [or rhetorical reason] independent of economics and to revitalize, as a consequence, those civic republican possibilities implicit in our tradition but fading in our time”

(p. 334). But for those that desire to see democratic human flourishing and are hopeful about the public potential of education, disassociating from debates over economics in the neoliberal moment is not an option. Several rhetorical critics have done it well (Hanan & Hayward, 2014;

Aune, 2001; Collier, 2014). Certainly, as rhetorical critics, we should be attentive to ensuring that channels of public deliberation remain accessible for everyone. And to do so, requires 172

continued engagement with the violence of unproblematized neoliberal forms of the market and colorblind abstractions that hide in technical arguments and the vestiges of “data.”

173

CHAPTER V: INNOVATION: RHETORICAL STRUGGLES OVER THE COMMONS OF

EDUCATION AND SCHOOLS IN SOUTHWEST DETROIT

In the previous two chapters, I argue that the rhetorical features of the logics that justified closing Southwestern High School in Detroit advance a neoliberalization—that is, a capitalist marketization—of the meaning of schools and education. In Chapter Three, I claim urban crises are moments (and are fashioned to be moments) for socially producing the value of school spaces in terms of their potential financial output, which then positively modifies the capitalist accumulation exigence in the city. In Chapter Four, I contend the entelechial perfection of instrumental rationality directs practical judgments in education policy toward colorblind market criteria. Both chapters illustrate that the ideological mystification of neoliberalism is partly due to a rhetorical effort to “bring recalcitrant rhetors ‘into the fold’” (Murphy, 1992, p. 64) through a constant, almost violent enforcement that there is no alternative to the market as the organizing principle of education politics. In this chapter, I introduce the concept of enclosure to name this ideological function of neoliberal discourses in Detroit’s education politics landscape.

Initially, the term enclosure in feudal England referred to laws and informal practices such as building fences that closed off collective rights to the commons—fisheries, forests, and other unowned and shared resources— and turned these resources into private property (Shiva,

2005). While enclosure generated surplus value for the new landowner, it also transformed commoner relations to nature and even dissolved entire communities who relied on common lands for their very sustenance (Thompson, 1963). Marx argues that this process of seizing and converting common resources into private ownership was instrumental in the transformation of feudalism to the capitalist mode of production (see his discussion of primitive accumulation in

Capital, Vol. 1, Part VIII). But enclosure is not relegated to capitalism’s origins. Neoliberal 174

privatization and commodification represent new enclosures that seize and convert non- commodified activities such as community building and housework for capital accumulation and consumption (Midnight Notes Collective, 1990). Additionally, Hardt and Negri (2009) argue that our neoliberal moment signifies capitalism’s enclosure of an immaterial common. “This common is not only the earth we share but also the languages we create, the social practices we establish, the modes of sociality that define our relationships” (Hardt & Negri, 2009, p. 139). In other words, neoliberal capitalism encloses social life by capturing and monetizing material as well as immaterial commons such as our human capacities for critique, collaboration, and communication.

Few arenas of social life exemplify this neoliberal enclosure than public schooling. For example, “public schools are firmly grounded in both sides of this equation [both material and immaterial commons], representing a vital public good that is deeply implicated in the production of knowledge, ideas, values, ways of being, and social relations crucial to democratic life” (De Lissovoy, Means, & Saltman, 2015, p. vii). Of course, public schools are state institutions and therefore regularly reproduce existing social inequities (see Bowles & Gintis,

1976). At the same time, public schooling has a vital role to play in “the task of democracy

[which] is forever the creation of a freer and more humane experience in which all share and to which all contribute” (Dewey, 1951, p. 394). Public schooling creates the conditions for democratic possibility by fostering the development of communication, creativity, imagination, and other human capacities for social cooperation. But as neoliberalism encloses state institutions to resemble financial markets, it is increasing difficult to imagine schools as public goods for mutual benefit or realize the democratic potential of public schooling to “enable

[students] to share in the common life” (Dewey, 1916, p. 8). Structural privatization of schools 175

emphasizes their exclusivity. For example, parental shopping for schools depicts students as self- identifying, competitive subjects and corporate management of schools transforms learning into a cost-benefit calculation. Within this neoliberal arrangement it is difficult if not seemingly impossible to “locate questions of educational value and organization within the principles of human equality and global commonality” (De Lissovoy, Means, & Saltman, 2015, p. vii). I argue that part of the reason for this is that neoliberalism works ideologically through rhetoric to enclose such possibilities. In other words, enclosure offers one way of thinking about the ideological capacity of rhetoric to ensure that there is no reasonable alternative to market relations in educational politics. This ideological project of neoliberalism is crucial to transferring common resource of schools and education into private ownership, whether state or market.

But as historian Peter Linebaugh (2008) cautions, speaking of “the commons as if it were a natural resource is misleading at best and dangerous at worst—the commons is an activity” (p.

279). Shifting to the verb form, Linebaugh (2008) coins commoning to refer to collective struggles to common a resource, whether that be a school or language. Such struggles also involve a simultaneous nurturing of alternative social relations and values to those given by the monetary calculus of capitalist markets (Harvey, 2013). In other words, commoning is both a historical and cultural practice that seeks to create non-commodified meanings by engaging in cooperative acts that claim and treat a resource as common.

More specifically, commoning can be understood as what Raymond Williams (1977) calls an emergent cultural practice. Emergent cultural practices develop within and in opposition to the dominant ideas and practices of the ruling class. They must always be understood in relation to the dominant power because they are determined by “a complex and interrelated 176

process of limits and pressures” (Williams, 1977, p. 87). But the limitations and pressures imposed by dominant structures and discourses on the emergent also create kairotic moments for challenging and producing “new meanings and values, new practices, new relationships and kinds of relationships” (Williams, 1977, p. 123). As an emergent cultural practice, commoning exploits contradictions in dominant discourses to begin cultivating meanings that are not beholden to the enclosures of privatization and commodification. While it is an open-ended cultural practice, commoning is based on certain principles such as mutual benefit, human solidarity, and is oppositional to the consumer logics of capitalism (Linebaugh, 2014).

To illustrate the ideological function of neoliberalism’s rhetorical features as enclosure and the rhetorical and cultural potential of commoning in educational politics, I critique a final logic in the school closure discourse— innovation. Innovation, I argue, represents a discursive struggle in the education politics of school closures over the commons of public schools. Shortly after his February 2012 announcement that Southwestern High and other schools in Detroit

Public Schools (DPS) would be shuttered, Emergency Manager Roy Roberts met with business and community leaders in April to unveil publicly his extensive action plan to restructure the school district. The rhetorical features of innovation in his speech depict neoliberalism’s ideological capacity to capture and subject the possibility of coherent meanings, social relations, and values to the monetary calculus. As I argue, enclosure happens in the emergency manager’s speech as he first mobilizes a metaphor for the school district that legitimizes his own authority to innovate school governance while closing-off the rights of others to school governance and second uses movement rhetoric that seizes and repurposes political imaginations of what quality education can be in the school district. 177

But my analyzes in this chapter also underscores that neoliberalism’s ideological attempts to enclose the meanings of schools and education are often contested by students and others who seek alternative meanings than those provided by capitalist markets. In response to the decision to close Southwestern High School and the emergency manager’s action plan, 250 students from

Southwestern and Western International High Schools staged a walkout in April (Sands, 2012a).

For their act of protest, a majority of the students received five-day school suspensions (Sands,

2012b). Instead of political defeat, these suspended students organized the Southwest Detroit

Freedom School (SW Detroit Freedom School) in Clark Park, the heart of Mexicantown in

Detroit (Sands, 2012b). These students compiled and archived texts online from the walkout and freedom school, including student speeches, their demands, requests for parental and guardian support, videos and pictures from the protests, and news coverage of the events. These texts can be interpreted as revealing and exploiting the contradictions in the dominant discourse of innovation. Moreover, I argue they are representative of commoning cultural practices that first seek to open school governance to their voices and second to imagine an alternative education quality to monetary valuation. In a neoliberal social order that has marginalized and excluded

Latina/o cultural sensibilities, commoning represents one way DPS Latina/o students practice their cultural sensibilities in struggle to locate non-commodified meanings of schools and education not only for themselves, but for all DPS students. This chapter is organized around the two points of contradiction between the emergency manager and the student protestors over innovation: school governance and education quality.

178

Legitimizing Rights to Innovate School Governance: The Emergency Manager’s

Presumption

Historically, U.S. education reforms have mediated a recurrent tension between utopian ideals and incremental institutional change (Tyack & Cuban, 1995). Similarly, in Detroit, efforts to reform the school district can be described as a seemingly impossible knot of lofty aspirations and sheer frustrations pulled taut by a steady lack of resources, outside economic interests, political conflicts, and racial tensions (see Chapter Two). But through his speech to community and business leaders, Emergency Manager Roy Roberts attempts to cut this knot once and for all.

Key to his rhetorical effort is his action plan to restructure the school district into what is called a portfolio school district. Political Scientist Paul T. Hill (2006), who is credited as its leading advocate, describes this “radically different approach to public education” (p. 2) as essentially the transformation of a school district into a “quasi-market, albeit one that is funded and overseen by the public” (p. 13). Education scholar Katrina Bulkley (2010) explains that the portfolio model bundles together three reform strategies: standards-based reform, market-based reforms, and differentiation of schools. Although these strategies differ, each is predicated on a general mistrust of conventional public education bureaucracies inherited from the Progressive

Era, particularly those governing institutions devised to make schools more responsive to the public (Bulkley, 2010). In the interest of efficiency, expansion of educational opportunities, cost reduction, and freedom of decision-making, the portfolio model seeks to replace governing bureaucracies such as school boards with “a new set of structures and incentives that fosters innovation, adaptability, and performance” (Hill, 2006, p. 3).

Critical to accomplishing these material changes to the school district is his rhetorical construction of innovation. As Roberts states early in his speech, “I intend to lay out a bold 179

action plan that is designed to strategically root innovation deeply dug within our souls to provide sustainability in our portfolio of schools for many, many years to come” (“2012-2013

Action Plan,” 2012). While innovation may imply openness to new ideas, the prevailing meaning of the word has become narrowly identified with reliance on market means—including entrepreneurialism, competition, and investing in human capital—to alter established practices

(Mensink, 2011). Furthermore, Roberts’ use of agricultural metaphors such as rooting and digging to describe the innovation process suggests innovation is not a spontaneous result of human action, but rather an ideological process. Innovation must be cultivated in individual hearts and minds to create and sustain those ways of thinking and being that can produce a school marketplace in Detroit. As Lakoff and Johnson (1980) argue, metaphors can structure audience thinking and practice. I argue that Roberts’ metaphorical construction of the school district as a ship in his articulation of his legitimacy to innovate the school district fulfills this rhetorical function, which also ideologically encloses—that is, closes-off— rights to school district self-governance.

To prepare for the realization of a school marketplace in Detroit, Roberts first moves in the speech to legitimize his own authority to innovate school governance. Herbert Simons (1976) writes that legitimacy involves the rhetorical process of conferring the “right to exercise authoritative influence in a given area or to issue binding directives” (p. 234). Once conferred, legitimacy must also be continually maintained through rhetorical acts that secure public belief in one’s legitimacy. Roberts’ articulation of his personal motivations for accepting the emergency manager position seeks to fulfill these rhetorical requirements. For instance, Roberts claims, “I took this job because I knew that if we wanted to turn this ship around, the status quo would need to be challenged” (“2012-2013 Action Plan,” 2012). Envisioning the school district 180

as a ship is reminiscent of the ship of state metaphor used by Plato’s Socrates in Book VI of the

Republic. In the parable, the sailors (political demagogues) battle for control of the ship (the state) while the “true pilot” (the philosopher-king) is marked as the one who remains unconcerned with their squabbling and stays fixated upward on the navigational star. For Plato, the parable serves as a warning against democratic forms of governance that could lead to chaos and rule by political interests, and in Roberts’ speech, the ship metaphor conveys a similar skepticism toward the existing elected governance of the school district.

Moreover, the ship metaphor asserts an exclusive right to innovate school district governance. Framing the school district as a ship assumes an individual captain. Roberts identifies himself as the “true pilot” of the school district because, “ten months ago I walked into the position of Emergency Manager of Detroit Public Schools with a deep desire to do the right thing by the children of the City of Detroit” (“2012-2013 Action Plan,” 2012). While the action of “walked into” suggests a casual activity, it also conceals the Michigan legislature’s actions that usurped voter political will to restore the emergency manager position. After voters repealed the emergency manager law or Public Act 4 (2011) by referendum, the state legislature passed

Public Act 436 (2012) only one month later. The bill not only reinstated the position, but also expanded the office’s powers and made the position irrevocable by any future referendum. To convey that Roberts “walked into” the position downplays the significance of the position as the locus of his legitimacy and the political contentions that surround it. Instead, he stresses his legitimacy is conferred by “a deep desire to do the right thing by the children of the City of

Detroit” (“2012-2013 Action Plan,” 2012). In other words, his right to exercise leadership of the school district is conferred by his moral desire instead of a realized action and a paternalistic assumption that he knows what is in the best interest of the “children”—a reinforcement of his 181

paternalistic assumption. Designating this desire as his navigational star grants his motives an aura of political and economic innocence, particularly in comparison to the political squabbles and economic improprieties of the existing school board. In contrast, he will “bring more professionalism and outside thinking to the table” (“2012-2013 Action Plan,” 2012). Beyond a simple criticism of the existing school board’s lack of decorum and conventionalism, Roberts challenges their moral competence to lead the school district and conveys the innovation he seeks to bring to school district governance for the betterment of the children is the discipline of private industry. Rooting his exclusive right to school governance in what is right for the children illustrates what Brown (2015) identifies as neoliberalism’s contradictory claims to superior morality in order to downplay its disregard for the demos as it restructures the state to mimic a marketplace and its logics.

The ship metaphor also constrains the school district to a single course. Ship implies one course. Instead of continuing on its ill-fated trajectory, Roberts argues for turning around the school district. “A time has come for us to come together and advance a common agenda that will not tolerate the status quo, that isn’t afraid of innovation” (“2012-2013 Action Plan,” 2012).

For Roberts, the dictates of the moment require opposing the existing educational institution and setting a new course toward innovation. While innovation could mean improving the existing institution or implementing old ideas for education reform, the ship metaphor binds the meaning of innovation to novelty. Any potential political struggle over the ship’s course is framed as between those who “tolerate the status quo” and those who “advance a common agenda.”

Roberts’ use of the verb form “tolerate” reinforces the repugnancy of settling with the present course of school district governance while “advance” suggests the collective effort toward the novel is progressive. Those who wish to continue on the current course only do so out of fear of 182

the waters ahead in the pursuit of the novel and not for any other reason such as a desire to improve rather than abandon the elected school board model. Those who prefer to “tinker around the edges” (“2012-2013 Action Plan,” 2012) risk the prospect of the ship running aground. But turning around the ship also involves risks, which Roberts meets with a blind certainty that novelty—regardless of meaning—must be better than the current course. Novelty also conceals that turning around requires acceptance of a course already fated—the discipline of private industry. The confidence and vagueness of novelty give this discipline of private industry an aura of hopefulness particularly in moments of governance and finical crisis (see Chapter 3). After all, neoliberalism, for all its realistic pretensions is a utopian project (Bourdieu, 1998).

Lastly, the ship metaphor discursively designates all others in the school district as crew.

Crews are needed to maintain the ship and keep it on course. But the crew can also steer the ship off course and pose a potentially mutinous threat to the captain. A similar suspicion of dissident voices can be found in the educational change literature. For instance, innovation is described as

“bubbling up” (Fullan & Quinn, 2016, p. 30). At the same time, “leaders” must “manage innovations,” and terms adapted from business and product development such as “lean startup” and “prototyping” describe how to foster “focused innovation” of schools (Fullan & Quinn,

2016, p. 30). In other words, innovation as an instrument of educational change encourages input from below to the extent that that input can be managed. Acting on a similar suspicion and managerial drive, the portfolio school district model encourages “institutional change designed to shift decision-making responsibility away from locally elected school boards and toward a disparate range of alternative venues, including private markets, higher levels of government, and mayoral control” (Bulkley, 2010, p. 15). Control over schools is increasingly centralized in the hands of state and private portfolio managers who emphasize data-driven decision making, 183

incentives, and freedom from union agreements and other bureaucratic constraints for school leaders to optimize sluggish performance and maximize plunging bottom lines (Menefee-Libey,

2010). The portfolio school district model problematizes popular perceptions of the neoliberal innovation as only favoring market freedoms and opposed to the centralization of state control.

Indeed, one of the contradictions of neoliberalism in education politics is that maintaining legitimacy for the marketization of public institutions requires a coercive state and a distinct power relationship between crew and captain.

To maintain control over the crew and legitimacy for transitioning school governance toward the innovation of portfolio management, Roberts employs fear appeals in his speech.

Roberts warns “the time to stop talking about what to do has come. The time to start doing it is now, today, yesterday” (“2012-2013 Action Plan,” 2012). Deliberation about innovation is foreclosed by the ominous moment and acting—even action without an object—is preferable considering the horrors that await the fate of the ship. Deliberation opens governance to dissident voices and critiques of the emergency manager’s legitimacy. Emphasizing action on the other hand puts potential dissidents to work as regulated subjects or crewmembers tasked with keeping the ship on the course set by the captain. Moreover, Roberts threatens, “let me tell you that if we don't wrap our support around DPS, we'll be doing an epic disservice to the most valuable and vulnerable students who depend on us the most. We cannot let that happen” (“2012-2013 Action

Plan,” 2012). Wrapping support prescribes for the public an ideal submissive orientation toward school governance that if they do not execute jeopardizes their "moral, ethical, and illustrious obligation to all of our children” (“2012-2013 Action Plan,” 2012). Students are framed as valuable and vulnerable cargo whose profitability and preciousness are put at risk without intervention on their behalf. In a speech that is rather dull, Roberts reaches his emotional climax 184

when using this exaggerated language to describe the disastrous consequence that awaits if the crew abandons its moral duty to the children. Fear of risking their return on investment compels his audience to submit to his legitimacy. Jeffries (2011) argues that fear “is deployed to capture both the common and the commons” (p. 351). Fear is integral to enclosure by closing-off rights to the public discourse about the future of schools that do not conform to the perimeters established by innovation, which in turn opens the possibility for the transfer of school governance from the elected school board to portfolio managers such as Roy Roberts.

Considering his discursive maneuvering to exclude, constrain, and designate, Roberts’ rhetorical attempts in the speech to confer and maintain his legitimacy as a portfolio manager of the school district could be interpreted as a reinforcement of what is called the tragedy of the commons. The tragedy of the commons is a political myth that first appears in Garrett Hardin’s

(1968) article in Science. In his thought experiment, Hardin (1968) uses a hypothetical example of cattle over-grazing in an open pasture to illustrate that common resources become increasingly depleted and ultimately ravaged due to a human tendency to maximize individual utility. To avoid this “tragedy of the commons,” (Hardin, 1968, p. 1243) two actions must be taken. First, public morality must be transformed to one that is rooted in our “recognition of necessity” to give up individual freedoms to “preserve and nurture other and more precious freedoms”

(Hardin, 1968, p. 1248). Second, to preserve the commons, their management must be turned over from local communities to state or private ownership (Hardin, 1968). Several conceptual and empirical problems have been found with Hardin’s thought experiment (see, Harvey, 2012;

Ostrom, 1990). But the political myth remains persuasive, especially as it has been marshaled into neoliberal politics to depict “commons as an unprofitable wasteland awaiting improvement through free-market liberation” (Nixon, 2012, p. 596). Its effect has been to impress on 185

communities their moral obligation to transform themselves and transfer management of commons to private ownership usually through state action (Nixon, 2012). In his speech, Roy

Roberts similarly impresses on his audience their moral obligation to become crew members and transfer the helm of the ship from the school board to him and his private industry discipline.

Such innovations are rhetorically legitimated by his depiction of the commons of school governance as morally bankrupt, backward, and irresponsible with the futures of the children. At the same time, these depictions and his appeals to moral superiority, novelty, and fear function ideologically to enclose—that is, close-off— common rights of the crew to participate in school governance.

Legitimizing Rights to Innovate School Governance: Student Challenges

Only a few weeks after Roberts’ speech, on April 25, 2012, around 175 students from

Western International High School joined 75 students from Southwestern High School and walked out of their schools (Sands, 2012a). According to the student organizers of the event, the walkout was intended “to protest the closing of Southwestern and to demand better quality education for all DPS students” (April 30, 2012, 2012, ¶ 1). I suggest that their rhetorical acts of protest represent a particular kind of emergent cultural practice. As mentioned earlier, emergent cultural practices are those that are oppositional and alternative to the dominant authority

(Williams, 1977). Beyond contradicting the dominant discourse of innovation as articulated by the emergency manager, the student protests illustrate the emergent cultural practice of commoning. As described above, commoning is understood as a conscious search for alternative ways of relating to schools and each other than that which is given by the market calculus of neoliberalism. In Roberts’ speech, the dominant discourse of innovation works ideologically to enclose or close-off participation in the restructuring of the school district. Student protestor texts 186

exploit the contradiction that the emergency manager speaks for them and seek wider participation in the public discourse through commoning.

The student protesters publicly assert that their right to contribute to the innovation of

DPS schools stems from their collective experience as students. For instance, Freddie Burse—a student at Western International High School—explains to an onlooking crowd of students and adults in his archived speech from the walkout, “the thing is, despite what any emergency manager thinks, we are not stupid. We know that the solution to problems in our school is not to close them. We need to improve our system. And we have ideas” (Freddie Burse Speech, 2012).

Burse’s declaration challenges the emergency manager’s false dilemma between having to choose between the current or a new course for the school district. Student protestors like Burse do not deny problems in the schools, but rather associate those problems with the need for innovation that favors improvement over novelty, focuses on the classroom and the school district, and opposes school closures. Burse states, “we experience the problems firsthand and we want a seat at the table to fix them” (Freddie Burse Speech, 2012). In other words, their experiential knowledge grounds student claims to participate in school district governance.

Despite student experiential knowledge of school problems, they are kept out of school district governance through what they perceive as the criminalization or their treatment as criminals. In his speech from the walkout, Freddie Burse characterizes “the solutions we’ve been given is that a bunch of big goons in rent cop jump suits [are] ready to use excessive force against us at any time. Our prison comes complete with wardens” (Freddie Burse Speech, 2012).

Criminalization transforms schools to resemble prisons. Prisons are spaces in which all but the most basic right to survival are taken away from inmates as a form of punishment or supposed rehabilitation. As a metaphor for schools, prison positions administrators as wardens, resource 187

officers as prison guards authorized to use necessary force, and students as inmates in need of institutional discipline. In other words, the metaphor implies that the innovations taken to address school district woes actually function to restrict rights to the school to those in power and deprive others of any claims they may have to the governance of that school.

Criminalization not only reinforces this stark division of power, but also encloses through pathologizing student experiences. Burse explains in his speech, “it makes sense that kids are acting a fool in the hallways or in the bathrooms—they’re not being engaged in class” (Freddie

Burse Speech, 2012). In a local radio interview about the school walkout, Burse elaborates on this lack of student engagement, “our teachers don’t have job security, which basically makes them less engaged in their job which hurts our education. So basically I think that my educational processing is being destroyed by teachers who don’t have job security” (Fahle,

2012). Although the dismantling of teacher unions or shift to performance pay are not mentioned, Burse’s structural criticism offers a potential reason for why students are “acting a fool” in a way that audiences may find easily identifiable. Furthermore, “acting a fool” accentuates the playfulness or mistakenness of the behavior, or as Kenneth Burke (1984) might contend, “acting a fool” comically frames student behaviors in humane terms and thus cues a response such as enlightening the student to less harmful behaviors. On the other hand, criminalization tragically frames (Burke, 1984) the offending student as a criminal and authorizes punitive repercussions for the delinquent. In a school district that is mostly poor, black, and brown, a “mark of criminality” (McCann, 2017, p. xi) already labels them as threats to the social order. Strict procedural responses such as those outlined in the student code of conduct and their tragic framing of students also foreclose the likelihood that student understandings of their experiences or their ideas for innovation such as addressing the insecure employment of 188

teachers would be considered by the adults. But at the same time their voice is publicly used to legitimize transferring school district governance to portfolio management. Consequently, criminalization could be understood as an ideological attempt to enclose—close-off—their rights as students. Or as Freddie Burse explains in his speech, even “kids who do try to come to school but show up a few minutes late get sent home, given suspensions, and denied their right to learn.

We’re being pushed out before we ever get in” (Freddie Burse Speech, 2012). In other words, criminalization pathologizes their experiences and denies their rights as students to the school.

Pushed literally and figuratively outside formal policymaking institutions, walking out of school symbolizes a search for alternative means of legitimizing their rights to schools and say in school governance. As Natalie Rivera states in her speech from the protest, “we had to walk out today because we have nowhere else to go. All of these cuts being made across the city are coming without any input from the students” (Natalie Rivera Speech, 2012). Despite the emergency manager’s claims to the contrary, such absences are condoned because “Detroit students are unimportant…. I am sick and tired of policies that push us out of schools, treat us like criminals, and don’t engage us in the classroom. We deserve more. We demand more”

(Natalie Rivera Speech, 2012). However, students are not adults let alone possess expert authority to influence the course of innovation. Furthermore, student voices are often denied by those who appeal to the proper institutional channels or even co-opted by those in power for the advancement of their own political or economic interests.

In situations like these, those on the margins can use rhetorical strategies such as identifying with basic social norms to move themselves from society’s margins to the centers of legitimacy (Francesconi, 1982). In their speeches, Burse and Rivera along with other DPS students attempt this identification through the use of terms that connote ownership of schools 189

such as “our schools” and “our own classrooms” (Natalie Rivera Speech, 2012). In capitalist society, the dominant social norm of property ownership is foundational to claiming rights to a resource (Wood, 2012). Yet while private property ownership is restrictive, the ownership they claim is common to all students. Furthermore, one of the prevailing social norms in education reform has been public input (Tyack & Cuban, 1995). Even school choice advocates claim to be responding to consumer demands. But as Rivera contends in her speech, “the fact that we attend a public school and the public isn’t involved in any decisions made by the board of education is unacceptable” (Natalie Rivera Speech, 2012). Rivera exploits the contradiction between these dominant social norms and the lack of legitimate outlets in DPS to participate in discussions about something they own and advocates, “we’re here to say today that they have to listen to us.

We should have our voices heard in any decisions that may affect us. We will be heard even if it takes walking out of school” (Natalie Rivera Speech, 2012). In other words, student legitimization of their rights and voices is framed by Rivera as being grounded in a more faithful practice of dominant social norms while those in dominant positions within the school district are framed as not only violating these social norms, but as stealing public resources and restricting public participation.

Considering that the legitimacy of the emergency manager’s proposed innovation to transfer school governance to portfolio management hinges on a paternalistic assumption, those in power must response to student claims. But when those in positions of power cannot directly challenge protestor legitimacy without compromising their own, they are instead forced to challenge protestor tactics (Jeffreys-Jones, 1978). For example, in response to the student walkouts, DPS Spokesperson Steve Wasko told a reporter, “for a district that has worked hard to ensure students attend classes every day, all day, throughout the school year, to have adults 190

encouraging students to skip school is irresponsible and pathetic” (Detroit News - Suspended

DPS Students find ‘Freedom’, 2012). Assuming that students are being used by irresponsible adults not only challenges students’ ability to speak for themselves, but also represents another attempt to enclose student voices from participating in the public discourse of school governance.

To reinforce the legitimacy of their school walkout against those in the school district that seek to undercut its tactics, students use the rhetorical tactic of adapting historical movements for their present political purpose. Video of the school walkout shows mostly brown and black student bodies assembling in Clark Park in the center of Detroit’s Mexicantown. As they came together, students can be heard chanting and holding signs that read, “Sí se puede!” (“Yes, we can” or “Yes, it can be done”) (Sacramento Knoxx, 2012). In another archived video, students are seen chanting “Sí se puede” as they walk around the park (EMEACGreenScreen, 2012). The phrase “Sí se puede” was coined by United Farmer Workers (UFW) co-founder Dolores Huerta in 1972 (Godoy, 2017). According to Huerta, Chicana/o community leaders argued with her that the grower lobby in Arizona made it impossible to change a state law that forbade the words

“boycott” and “strike” —“In Arizona no se puede—no you can’t” (Godoy, 2017, ¶ 24). To which she replied, “Sí se puede!” (Godoy, 2017, ¶ 24). The phrase has become a rallying cry of self-determination not only for the Chicana/o Movement, but has also mobilized a host of

Latina/o labor and civil rights struggles throughout the United States (Acuña, 2011). For instance, in 2006, federal anti-migrant legislation threatened migrant rights. In response, groups in several cities across the country marched and proclaimed the refrain, “Si, se puede” (Engler &

Engler, 2016). Writing of these national demonstrations in Motion Magazine, Reverend Jesse

Jackson (2006) declared, “as I see it, their rallying cry —'Sí se puede -- (Yes We Can)’ is 191

Spanish for ‘We Shall Overcome’” (¶ 31). For Jackson, “Sí se puede” symbolizes “the hands that picked the cotton are joining with the hands that picked the lettuce, connecting barrios and ghettos, fields and plantations” (¶ 5). In other words, the phrase represents solidarity as form of self-determination against impossible odds.

Rooted in a memory of Latina/o struggles for justice, the rallying cry of “Sí se puede” in the present protest is more than a reconstruction of history. Dominant education reform discourses often identify parents, community leaders, and other supposed “stakeholders” as the agents of political change. Reinforced by power imbalances and the urgency of uncertain material conditions in the school district, claims to represent the best interests of students frame those students without rights and limit their ability to speak for themselves. And yet, the rallying cry of “Sí se puede” inspires a relentless hope and confidence in their own collective effort to have a say in the governance of their schools.

Moreover, the rallying cry of “Sí se puede” and the school walkout represent commoning cultural practices that endeavor to create a common space for students to voice their demands. A common space is not given or authorized by authority like public spaces, but rather is taken, claimed by communities who then “mould this kind of space according to their collective needs and aspirations” (Stavrides, 2016, p. 106). In the case of the DPS student protestors, the symbolic action of walking out of school represents an attempt to common schools for voicing what cannot be said inside their walls in spite of claims to public ownership. David Harvey (2012) writes that commons are produced in and through “an unstable and malleable social relation between a particular self-defined social group and those aspects of its actually existing or yet-to-be-created social and/or physical environment deemed crucial to its life and livelihood” (Harvey, 2012, p.

73). The phrase “existing or yet-to-be-created social and/or physical environment” indicates that 192

public resources such as schools can become common to the degree that they are claimed as such through collective action to say “off-limits to the logic of market exchange” (Harvey, 2012, p.

73). The rallying cry of “Sí se puede” serves this rhetorical function as it mobilizes students to claim their rights of ownership in spite of the ominous marketization of schools and school governance that has pushed them and their voices outside. In other words, “Sí se puede” epitomizes an ethos of commoning—collective right to participate in public spaces. Both the rallying cry and the school walkout represent initial steps toward discursively challenging dominant social relations to schools and producing a different social relation between students and school that connotes common ownership. Through opening discursive spaces free to all students, the possibility for discovering different understandings of themselves other than as criminals can be pursued by the students. Creating common discursive spaces is a first but crucial step toward innovation outside of the neoliberal framework of the market for the governance of schools. Such alternative visions of potential innovation must struggle against attempts by those in power such as the emergency manager to (re)define innovation in the school district, to which I will now turn.

Defining Innovation of Quality Education: The Emergency Manager’s Movement

Cultivating Detroit’s education landscape to produce a school marketplace first requires

Emergency Manager Roy Roberts to legitimize his own authority to innovate school governance and rhetorical critique reveals the ideological act of enclosing—closing off—participation in school governance. But cultivation also requires breaking up the soil of minds and hearts in which resources such as education are planted. To accomplish this rhetorical task in his speech,

Roberts calls for a movement that “isn't afraid of innovation, that isn't afraid of working across historic barriers, and that isn't afraid of doing things that have never been done before” (“2012- 193

2013 Action Plan,” 2012). Roberts’ emphasis on movement to realize innovation is curious since

Michigan Public Act 436 (2012) grants emergency managers extraordinary powers, including the unilateral ability to break collective bargaining agreements, fire elected officials, and sell public assets. Furthermore, emergency managers operate outside of conventional representative politics in pursing their state-mandated objectives of alleviating financial and academic deficiencies. Yet, emergency managers must still craft rhetorical strategies that can address problems to achieving enacting desired changes, including “attract and mold workers (i.e., followers),” “secure adoption of their product by the larger structure,” and “react to resistance generated by the larger structure” (Simons, 1970, pp. 3-4). Education reformers, even those in positions of power like

Roberts, frequently make use of oppositional rhetorics and assume the role of dissenter to change established institutions and norms, catalyze popular support for replacing traditional institutions, and organize fragmented voices into a collectivity that can transcend preconceived ideas about education.

But movement, according to McGee (1980a), is also an interpretation of historical and factual changes. Moreover, “the whole notion of ‘movement’ is mythical, a trick-of-the-mind which must be understood as an illusion and not as a fact” (McGee, 1980a, pp. 242-243). If a rhetor such as Roberts interprets phenomena as a movement, then he is imposing a consciousness on that phenomena; in other words, he is defining that phenomena for an audience. For McGee

(1980a), “a [rhetorical] theory of movement, therefore, must determine the identity and meaning of the consciousness which inspires us, as citizens and as scholars, to seek and see ‘movement’ when we look at historical and social facts” (p. 242). Following McGee’s ideological approach, this section critiques Roberts’ rhetorical movement toward innovation and reveals a second ideological function of neoliberalism that encloses the common resource of education through 194

seizing and repurposing the public’s imagination of what quality education can be in the school district.

For Emergency Manager Roy Roberts, providing DPS students with opportunities for social mobility motivates his call for a collective endeavor. Historically, the belief that education is the only available means for upward social mobility has been a driving force in education reform efforts. Upon signing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, President Lyndon

Johnson (1965) remarked, “as a son of a tenant farmer, I know that education is the only valid passport from poverty” (¶ 18). Since A Nation at Risk (1983), fears that schools are not advancing individual economic success and the global competitive position of the U.S. disparage other reasons for education reform (Finkelstein, 1984). Similarly, in his speech, Roberts states,

“the only reason that I have had any success in my life is because of education” (“2012-2013

Action Plan,” 2012). Likewise, “I am keenly aware that the only chance many of our students will have to be successful will start with the quality of education that you and I, that we, provide for them” (“2012-2013 Action Plan,” 2012). Beyond a simple anecdote, Roberts defines education quality in terms of his persona of professional success and limits the organizing principle of any collective effort to achieve quality education to that of ensuring that students can rise out of poverty, secure employment, work hard, and earn a high wage and the respectability of one’s peers. In other words, achieve the American Dream. Education that does not meet this definition of success logically should be disregarded as inferior because it is not quality.

Yet, education’s inability to deliver on its promise of creating successful individuals risks disbandment even as Roberts calls into being a collective effort to produce quality education in

Detroit. In the U.S., absolute social mobility—intergenerational changes in income—and relative social mobility—position within the income distribution—have stagnated since the 1970s 195

(Putnam, 2015). In Detroit, racial and class discrimination in employment and housing, inequitable economic policies, and geographical location of residence determine social mobility

(Darden & Thomas, 2013). But instead of directly addressing these material determinants in his speech, Roberts places blame on the institutional failures of public schooling. “I saw too many kids that reminded me of myself but who didn’t stand a chance at success because adults at every level were failing them” (“2012-2013 Action Plan,” 2012). Blaming adults— a referent to teachers, unions, administrators, school boards, and others who represent the public schooling institution— provides a potential scapegoat for public frustrations that social mobility has not actually been realized while preserving its dominant position as a commonplace in the education reform discourse. Rhetorical scholar Mark Hlavacik (2016) argues blame is an almost universal rhetorical tactic in education reforms and has served varied political purposes. In Roberts’ speech, blame interprets the material lack of social mobility as an institutional failure of public schooling and mobilizes public frustration against the current educational arrangement in Detroit.

While blame distracts audiences from the material determinants of social immobility, it also functions ideologically to seize—that is, take possession of—the legitimate frustrations of parents and others in the city to make his desired changes to the school district.

To address what he has constructed as a poor quality of education in the school district,

Roberts calls for a movement against what he terms a “mediocrity of failure:”

As we look to tackle the challenges we face in our city and our schools, we must be bold in our thinking and we must join together to create a movement in our community that no longer accepts mediocrity of failure. (“2012-2013 Action Plan,” 2012)

Mediocrity of failure is a paradox. Mediocrity is logically preferable to failure. But fusing the

terms together has the potential to create what Burke (1984) calls perspective by incongruity or a

“verbal atom cracking” that happens when “a word belongs by custom to a certain category— 196

and by rational planning you wrench it loose and metaphorically apply it to a different category”

(p. 308). Typically, mediocrity is associated with ordinariness or averageness. But in a neoliberal social order structured by financialization, mediocrity is ripped from this lexicon and associated with failure. After all, financial products that do not outperform do not generate profit, and so from the perspective of investors and portfolio managers, the rational response to mediocrity is abandonment, shuttering, and searching for more profitable alternatives. This perspective

“appeals by exemplifying relationships between objects which our customary rational vocabulary has ignored” (Burke, 1984, p. 90). In particular, the paradox encloses audiences’ ways of seeing ordinary education quality as mediocrity equivalent to failure and thus cause for the school district to “establish and maintain a relentless focus on accountability and commit to take action where underperformance persists” (“2012-2013 Action Plan,” 2012). Roberts assures that through this seized perspective of quality education, “parents and policymakers will easily be able to tell which schools are making the mark and which schools are not” facilitating “a clear practice of closing programs and schools that continue to fail our children” (“2012-2013 Action

Plan,” 2012). As if anticipating school closure critics, Roberts promises “we will never again close a school program that is performing. If a good program is in a bad building or a sparse neighborhood we will move that program intact to a better location” (“2012-2013 Action Plan,”

2012). Consequently, mediocrity of failure not only ideologically seizes how individuals make meaning out of an ordinary quality of education. The paradox also ideologically repurposes parental and policymaker meaning making process to efficiently facilitate a school closure process in which schools must constantly validate their own existence by producing educational values—or quality—limited to performative terms. 197

Stated differently, the movement of which Roberts speaks is toward a particular innovation that underlies the portfolio school district model to improve the quality of education.

As Paul T. Hill and his colleagues write in a Center on Reinventing Public Education report:

In a portfolio district, schools are not assumed to be permanent but contingent: schools in which students do not learn enough to prepare for higher education and remunerative careers are transformed or replaced. A portfolio district is built for continuous improvement via expansion and imitation of the highest-performing schools, closure and replacement of the lowest performing, and constant search for new ideas. (Hill, Campbell, Menefee-Libey, Dusseault, DeArmond, & Gross, 2009, p. 1)

The appeal of this contingent approach to innovation is its supposed naturalness as it seeks to

imitate how innovation works in capitalist markets. Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter

(1942) describes this innovation process in capitalism as creative destruction. Prodded by the

profit motive, entrepreneurial innovators generate long-term economic wealth and prosperity by

forcing existing monopolies into competition, which in turn should drive down prices, increase

efficiencies, and destroy those firms that do not continuously innovate (Schumpeter, 1942).

While creative destruction is perceived as the natural evolution of innovation in business,

movement is crucial to the emergency manager’s rhetorical effort to sway his audience to see

market competition and the destruction of traditional public school districts as preferable to

stability. In the remainder of Roberts’ speech, he attempts to mediate this tension between

market competition and stability. For example, Roberts states that “unfortunately, all educators

agree that it takes three to five years of consistency and stability at the school level to effectively

implement best practices and learning strategies at any school” (“2012-2013 Action Plan,”

2012). At the same time, “we also know that a ‘one-size-fits-all’ model to educate over 60,000

students in our district does not make any sense whatsoever” (“2012-2013 Action Plan,” 2012).

The “we” that Roberts calls into being already assumes the market as a common sense as 198

opposed to what must be proved by the expertise of educators — consistency and stability.

Gramsci (1971/2012) argues “common sense is not something rigid and immobile, but is continually transforming itself, enriching itself with scientific ideas and with philosophical opinions which have entered ordinary life” (p. 326). But the dominant social order remains that way by (re)establishing the common sense against alternative ways of perceiving social reality

(Cloud, 1996). While the collective pronoun assumes audience agreement with this ideological position, Roberts reinforces market competition as the common sense way of making meaning out of their individual experiences of quality education stating, “and you've known it for a long time” (“2012-2013 Action Plan,” 2012). The stability offered by a “one-size-fits-all model” of public schooling may be said to be mandatory by experts, but Roberts dismisses it as impractical in light of how “we” understand our individualized educational experiences.

But the idea of stability is already an illusion within the economic system of capitalism.

As the Marxist humanist Marshall Berman (1982) argues, human creations are constantly in a state of precariousness—that is, insecure—under capitalism, especially in the neoliberal social order as the market economy expands to non-economic domains. Enormous, brick school buildings, for instance, may give the impression of solidness, longevity, and a sense of permanence and meaning for local neighborhoods. But “everything that bourgeois society builds is built to be torn down… so they can be recycled or replaced next week, and the whole process can go on again and again, hopefully forever, in ever more profitable forms” (Berman, 1982, p.

99). As the model for improving education quality, the capitalist mode of innovation in which everything is built to be destroyed enforces the impossibility of imagining a collective effort to improve education outside of a continuous (re)building of schools in the incessant pursuit of financial and performative profitability. 199

Likewise, Roberts’ rhetorical movement makes imagining innovation outside of market competition impossible by enclosing those forms of audience agency available to repair education in Detroit. Through his speech, Roberts constructs “a movement that harnesses our human talent to make a sustainable difference” (“2012-2013 Action Plan,” 2012). While harness conveys control of human talent, it also makes use of human talent; in other words, movement seizes and repurposes human talent—business talk for agency. For instance, in the midst what he has characterized as a seemingly hopeless situation, Roberts emboldens his audience to become

“committed citizens” by serving on governing councils of the newly created self-governing schools, which were established to grant local school “autonomy” (“2012-2013 Action Plan,”

2012). He also empowers parents through the creation of “school improvement groups” that would “allow parents to make ‘apples to apples’ comparisons when choosing a school for their children” (“2012-2013 Action Plan,” 2012). Both autonomy and parental choice represent a seizing of agency that make individuals solely responsible for traditional public responsibilities of the state. In particular, autonomy provides a neoliberal “motivational frame” (Avsar, 2008, p.

125) that advocates “freedom of individuals to make their own decisions no matter how mistaken they could be, the rejection of the culture of dependency, [and] the glorification of self-reliance”

(Avsar, 2008, p. 127). The same could be said of parental choice. By participating in these neoliberal forms of empowerment, human talent is repurposed as individuals come together in a collective movement “exerting a greater degree of choice” meaning “DPS must work to be seen as a valuable and competitive source provider” (“2012-2013 Action Plan,” 2012). Simply responding to consumer pressures forces “our traditional centralized bureaucratic business structure into one that is efficient, and financially self-sufficient, and one that services the needs of our schools based on the school’s demands,” whether those demands are from traditional 200

public schools, charter schools, or schools operated by the Educational Achievement Authority

(EAA) (“2012-2013 Action Plan,” 2012). Thus the rhetorical maneuverings of enclosure make viable to his audience the differentiating of schools or the breaking up of the school district as organic.

At the same time, this organic veneer cloaks the rhetorical movement of innovation that is working in his speech to change social relations. Ultimately, innovation, according to Roberts,

“is not a one-big-bang theory. This is about community” (“2012-2013 Action Plan,” 2012).

Instead of creating something new out of nothing, innovation is a rhetorical movement of community toward one that reflects ideal neoliberal social relations. Roberts describes this movement as a “movement that ignores the historic barriers of race and class that have plagued progress in this region for far, far too long” (“2012-2013 Action Plan,” 2012). While racism and class position are structural barriers to receiving an equitable education (Lipman, 2011), Roberts’ use of the disease metaphor reframes structural barriers as illnesses that must be purged from individual minds and hearts in the collective pursuit of progress. This movement resembles neoliberalism’s imposition of collective conformity to radical individualism (Bockman, 2013).

Ignoring racism and class in the aspirational pursuit of quality education is only available to the privileged some and must be enforced on Others. Roberts enforces this ignorance through enclosing how his ideal community relates to the commons of school. According to Roberts, he seeks to realize “a community that really cares about its schools—its most valuable resource”

(“2012-2013 Action Plan,” 2012). For Roberts, care means “wrap[ing] your support and human talent” around his proposed innovations to improve education quality because “your involvement is the only chance we have at offering true stability for the students that you and I hold dear”

(“2012-2013 Action Plan,” 2012). Accepting the innovations of market competition and 201

participating as a consumer in education politics offer audiences the only true forms of stability.

Consequently, embracing their implied precarious social relations to schools means schools become “stocks and bonds,” so that students can succeed “in a complex, fast-changing, modern economy” (Hill, 2006, p. 1-2). Because the alternative is perpetuating the mediocrity of failure in

Detroit, it is only through enclosing—seizing and repurposing— community social relations to schools that education quality can be collectively pursued to ensure that DPS students achieve success in life.

Defining Innovation of Quality Education: Student’s Alternative Imagination

As critiqued, the emergency manager’s rhetorical articulation of movement toward innovation in his speech functions ideologically as enclosure through seizing and repurposing the political imaginations of what quality education can be in Detroit. Through their speeches and other texts from the school walkout and freedom school, student protestors exploit the contradictions in his dominant construction of quality education. Whereas Roberts articulates quality education in neoliberal terms of individual success, performance, and market competition, students demand education as a social benefit and engage in commoning cultural practices to locate non-commodified alternatives to his proposed innovation.

For the student protestors, monetary valuation of education risks its quality. As one student protestor told the crowd of assembled students, school district officials, police officers, and other community members, “all I hear when I hear about DPS schools is closings, chartering, money, money, money, money, and lack of money. To be honest, I don’t think our education should have a price tag” (Raychel Gafford Speech, 2012). This use of the price tag metaphor in her speech rebukes how the emergency manager’s valuation of education structures thinking about quality education and the innovations needed to achieve it. For instance, the metaphor 202

implies that education’s value has been commodified or reduced to the form of money. In other words, commodification translates education into a monetary value crowding out all other potential values. Commodification makes prominent if not all-encompassing questions of cost, financial benefits and risks, and profit in the education policymaking discourse. If a school is deemed unaffordable, close it. While the discursive prominence of monetary valuation may be deemed unavoidable particularly in times of financial crisis, attaching a price tag to education also converts education into a commodity that can be bought and sold. This also necessitates the development of particular innovations such as a school marketplace and establishing competition to facilitate that marketplace. Considering all this, placing a price tag on education seizes education quality making it impossible to politically imagine that “schools are supposed to be about educating students so we can be the best members of the community and grow to be successful adults” (Raychel Gafford Speech, 2012). Instead, the monetary valuation of education repurposes students as commodities. As Gafford insists in her speech, “we should not be making money off of our students. We are children. We are people. Not dollar signs” (Raychel Gafford

Speech, 2012). Harkening to moral objections to purchasing people in the slave trade, Gafford and other student protestors take a self-humanizing stand against the price tag the school district has placed on education.

Additionally, the monetary valuation of education incentivizes profiting and innovations such as individualized learning that make it even more difficult to imagine education as a social benefit. For instance, the Education Achievement System was created by Michigan Governor

Rick Snyder as an experimental statewide school district—but only Detroit schools comprised the experimental group—for turning around low-performing schools primarily through technologies that promised students an “individualized learning experience” (Guyette, 2014, ¶ 203

21). Public education monies were transferred to private technology firms to refine and expand their own commercial online learning platforms. Beyond representing an opportunity for profit- making, the implementation of these learning platforms in the classroom also reconstituted teacher roles from instructor to “supervisor,” replaced learning with producing “stellar test results,” and contributed to the growing shift toward a market management culture in education

(Guyette, 2014, ¶ 57). Neoliberal discourses of managerial efficiency and cost-savings justify the state’s withdrawal from providing a public education and off-loading that cost onto private entities.

Responding to these exigencies in the school district, Natalie Rivera contends in her speech from the school walkout that “Roy Roberts, DPS, and The Education Achievement

System are failing us. They seem to think we will close our eyes while they dismantle the public school system and replace our teachers with unqualified, lower paid, uninvested workers”

(Natalie Rivera Speech, 2012). Closing one’s eyes could be interpreted as a metaphor for the ideological process of enclosure—the seizing and repurposing of quality education. In this light, closing off one’s vision for what quality education could look like is a crucial ideological task to the school district’s innovation efforts. Insisting on this lack of alternatives perpetuates perspectives of schools that transforms them into centers for material profit, inferior education for students, and ultimately, what Rivera perceives as the dismantling of public education.

Referring to the school walkout, Rivera states, “we’re all here for different reasons. But when it comes down to it we’re here to demand a quality education. …Our eyes are open” (Natalie

Rivera Speech, 2012). Speaking of demystification as “our eyes are open” locates agency in individuals that can be cultivated through collective effort, such as the student’s walkout to demand a quality education. 204

To empower the public to open their eyes to the ideological maneuverings of the monetary valuation of education, the student protestors continue engaging in commoning cultural practices that signify the beginning of a collective search for non-commodified means of innovation and attempt to define a different quality of education. David Harvey (2012) gestures toward this possibility in the following:

It is in this context that the revival of a rhetoric and theory of the commons takes on an added significance. If state-supplied public goods either decline or become a mere vehicle for private accumulations (as is happening to education), and if the state withdraws from their provision, then there is only one possible response, which is for populations to self-organize to provide their own commons (p. 87)

In the case of the student protest, providing their own commons or commoning is first articulated as fighting. One example of the word fighting being used to describe this cultural practice is found in the following student’s speech from the school walkout:

We shouldn’t have to fight to keep our schools open, we shouldn’t have to fight for better schools, we shouldn’t have to fight for a quality education. But because of the greed and corruption of those in power, we are forced to fight for it all. (Brandon Sandoval Speech, 2012)

Fighting is a different mode of engagement in education politics than that of market competition which is incentivized by the portfolio approach to innovation and made inevitable by the emergency manager to address poor education quality. While competitors must be orderly and engage by the rules laid out for them in the competition, the fighter operates outside these rules and appears out of control according to the dictates of competition. Consequently, in the realm of education politics, fighting is perceived as disruptive because it challenges the social order and the rules of market competition that sustain its dominance. Similarly, Johan Galtung (1990) argues that blue-collar crime—stealing from a convenience store—is portrayed as more violent than white-collar crimes—financial fraud— even though white-collar crimes are more costly and 205

integral to the functioning of the capitalist social order as a form of cultural violence. While competition is driven by self-interest and the requirement of profit, Brandon Sandoval’s use of the word fighting in his speech pictures actions of struggling, striving, and overcoming that are compelled by a spirit of justice and reciprocity. As a response to school closures and poor education quality, Sandoval cites King’s (1963) “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” (1963) in his speech and argues, “Martin Luther King once said, ‘injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.’ We can no longer sit back and let our future be taken from us, we must stand in solidarity with students everywhere” (Brandon Sandoval Speech, 2012). Injustice not only names school closures and the inadequacy of education quality, it also serves as a catalyst for pursuing a different moral response than self-interest. King (1963) expresses this spiritual component of commoning in another part of his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” in which he writes, “I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states…. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny” (¶ 4). Compelled by a similar sense of the interrelatedness of student futures in light of the threat of injustice,

Sandoval’s foregrounding of fighting as the appropriate action in education politics imagines a struggle for education quality organized around human solidarity and undermines the notion of education as the pursuit of individualized forms of success.

As a cultural practice, commoning in this case also challenges the enclosure of quality

education and its crowding out of values irreducible to monetary terms with educational

experimentation that takes the form of a freedom school. Dating to the 1960s Civil Rights

Movement and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), freedom schools were

started to challenge segregation and other forms of oppression as well as equip students with

skills neglected in the classroom. Importantly, freedom schools are not intended to replace public 206

schooling, but rather supplement and change those educational institutions (Adickes, 2005). In other words, freedom schools symbolize what quality education could be.

One text announcing the SW Detroit Freedom School suggests it would seek to serve a similar imaginative purpose. Noting the contradiction of being suspended from school for pursuing quality education, the student organizers write, “we do not understand why we are being punished with a loss of educational opportunity when that is exactly what we were fighting for” (Gafford, 2012). The announcement continues, “to further demonstrate our commitment to education, we will be attending our own school taught by ourselves and community educators for the duration of our suspension” (Gafford, 2012). These language choices exploit the school district’s bastardization of retributive justice and reveal the threat student fighting and commitment pose to a social order so intent on quality education they are willing to close schools and subject all others to the precariousness of continuous innovation, yet suspend students for similar aspirations. And now those suspended students are forced to provide their own education.

“We will be starting our first day of class at Southwest Detroit Freedom School at Clark Park, across from our beloved school which we were suspended from” (Gafford, 2012). Notably, the rhetorical construction of Western International High School in the announcement as beloved invites audiences to see social relations to public schools as precious instead of precarious. By comparison, preciousness frames precarious social relations as theft, not a natural process of innovation as framed by the emergency manager in his speech.

Instead of the continuous production of performative validation, the beloved school produces a different set of educational values that are symbolically represented by the freedom school. Student organizers announce the freedom school would feature classes on topics such as the history of Southwest Detroit, the Civil Rights Movement, hip-hop, social justice, and 207

Xican@ movement history (Gafford, 2012). Such selections represent an effort to (re)define quality education as one that centers cultural experiences of DPS students in the classroom. The

Xican@ movement history class in particular centers the experiences of Latina/o students— many of whom are taking part in and organizing the protest. As a commoning practice, this centering does not mean that if the ideal social relations of the beloved school are realized it would be a “Latina/o school” or a “Latina/o serving school.” In a neoliberal era of individualized learning experiences and niche market schooling, exclusivity potentially reinforces the very logics that have marginalized and excluded Latina/o cultural experiences from education politics.

In contrast, commoning is a practice of inclusiveness that attempts not to slip into yet another movement toward exclusivity (Harvey, 2012). This commoning principle is expressed in the Xican@ identity itself, which emerged as a cultural response to the complexity and heterogeneity of oppression under neoliberalism (Rios, 2008). “Xican@“ is the Nahuatl spelling of “Chicana/o” and symbolizes a desire to draw from Indigenous cultural roots to locate strategies for resisting a multitude of colonizations (Baca, 2008). The Xican@ identity highlights unity and justice as guiding moral principles and incorporates a multifaceted approach to addressing exclusions faced by Xican@s and other marginalized peoples (Rios; Urrieta, 2004).

Ana Castillo (1994) further explains, “Xicanisma is an ever-present consciousness of our interdependence specifically rooted in our culture and history. ... It is yielding; never resistant to change, one based on wholeness not dualisms” (Castillo, 1994, p. 226). Commoning also relies on alliances to liberate resources such as education for all public purposes and thus encourages opportunities for all manners of intercultural encounters (Harvey, 2012). As a challenge to the narrow monetary valuation of education, the freedom school represents a cultural attempt by students to create a discursive space for experimentation with what constitutes quality education 208

through offering classes on hip hop, social justice, and the Civil Rights Movement that

emphasize cultural expression, intercultural connection, and historical understanding of one’s

self and community.

But considering the financial and governance situation in Detroit, some in the school district may frame the freedom school organizers and their search for non-commodified

meanings of education quality as unrealistic. As Linebaugh (2014) explains, “capital derides

commoning by ideological uses of philosophy, logic, and economics which say the commons is

impossible or tragic. …They always assume as axiomatic that concept expressive of capital’s bid

for eternity, the a-historical ‘Human Nature’” (p. 14). As if anticipating similar disdain, protest

organizers pen a letter pleading for parental support for their walkout and freedom school.

Written in both Spanish and English, the letter compares their experience with the immigration experience shared by many of their parents. “We know that many of you came to this country for a better life and we respect that, now we want to fight for a better life for ourselves”

(Letter2OurParentz, 2012, ¶ 2). More than identification to secure parental support, the immigrant narrative that runs through the letter suggests emulation and indicates how students imagine their journey to secure a more equitable education.

For instance, often immigration is motivated by the search for a better life after leaving home for voluntary or involuntary reasons. But the immigrant’s journey and subsequent attempts to adapt to the host culture are frequently treacherous. Likewise, for DPS students, “it is unfair that we are not receiving the quality education that we deserve…. we were fed up and took a stand for something we believe in and were punished” (Letter2OurParentz, 2012, ¶ 2). Concern not only for one’s own economic opportunities but also for the well-being of others sustains immigrants journey. Similarly, students “knew that by doing the walkout there were going to be 209

repercussions …[but] understand that this is for OUR future and the future of those who come after us” (Letter2OurParentz, 2012, ¶ 3). Just as the immigrant’s search for freedom or opportunity is uncertain at the outset, so too the student’s exact vision for a quality education and its provision are unclear. Yet students insist that it must be pursued. Understood through the prism of the immigrant narrative, the student’s journey for quality education is characterized as undefined, but realistic in that it represents a common human narrative of journey and a willingness to struggle for the betterment of future generations. In other words, the students understand the school walkout and freedom school—like the commoning practices they symbolize—as a conscious yet uncertain search for a different vision of education quality that they frame in humanistic terms as coming into being through struggle. While the model of the market with its clearly defined roles for consumers, unambiguous competitive processes, and precise monetary valuations already assume as self-evident what constitutes a quality education, the immigrant narrative in the Letter2OurParentz frames the dominant imagination of quality education as a form of assimilation that is endeavoring to force them into a neoliberal valuation of education quality.

Consequently, commoning aims to raise a consciousness that challenges the forced axiomatic quality of market valuation of education. Consciousness raising in the commons literature means “an undoing of ideological mystifications in mind and heart” (Reid & Taylor,

2010, p. 40). In Detroit, school walkouts and freedom schools have been used as political tactics to bring public awareness to student’s racialized and inequitable experiences in schools. One of the largest student walkouts in the history of the city happened in April 1966. Not long before the

July 1967 rebellion, over two thousand students walked out of Northern High School on

Detroit’s Eastside over growing angst with the white educational establishment’s failure to treat 210

the all-black school as equal to the white schools in the district (Mirel,1999). But the “Northern boycott” (Franklin, 2004, p. 139) was more than a demonstration against racial division in the city. As Franklin (2004) argues in his history of the boycott, “the walkout and what followed served a unifying role in helping to construct and shape a sense of community among the city’s black population” (p. 138). Almost fifty years later, the Western International-Southwestern

High School joint walkout and SW Detroit Freedom School share a similar community consciousness raising ambition.

But commoning demands a different kind of community building. For feminist scholar

Silvia Federici (2012), community building is imperative to commoning in that it allows for realizing our shared social relations and wealth. But as Federici (2012) also acknowledges, communities are often based on the principle of exclusion, whether religion, ethnicity, or another privileged identity. Instead, commoning necessitates that community building be concerned with

“the production of ourselves as a common subject” (p. 145). In other words, community building should be based on the principle of social cooperation and formed through laboring with material resources such as schools and education. Constructing common subjects is a form of community building crucial for challenging the exclusionary logics and practices of neoliberal capitalism and imaging a common politics in the pursuit of a more egalitarian society (Federici, 2012).

For example, Raychel Gafford argues in her speech from the school walkout, “schools are not supposed to be ran as businesses. Education is a long term investment” (Raychel Gafford

Speech, 2012). Businesses require constant churning of profit to keep the doors open and while some may assert otherwise, in practice the drive for profit keeps them primarily focused on the short term. Considering monetary valuations crowd out educational values irreducible to its logics, Gafford’s rhetorical tactic of financial talk may undermine the smooth production of 211

individualized, competitive values and make room for other valuations such as what she terms the long term benefits of education. Continuing to speak in financial metaphors, Gafford argues

“schools are assets to the community. What’s going to happen when all our assets are privatized?

80% of charter schools are for profit. That’s not what our community needs. Our community thrives off of public education” (Raychel Gafford Speech, 2012). While resources are objects that are beneficial to a subject beyond the thing itself, asset is a claim of ownership that sees the object as useful in and of itself. Defining schools as community assets names their shared character as the long-term benefit of education. According to Gafford, it is this shared character of schools that holds communities together and is chiefly under threat by privatization. At the same time, Gafford positions schools as the fulcrum around which the innovation of a common politics beyond the exclusivity of market valuation and the enclosure of education quality could potentially form. In one interview, Gafford pleads, “we really need to pull together as a community. Our public school system is a very big asset. And I think a lot of students are now realizing what’s going on, you know, they're slowly starting to privatize what we have and we need our school system to thrive” (EMEACGreenScreen, 2012). While such a common politics is still coming into being as students struggle for a different definition of quality education in

Detroit, pulling together is possible through practicing non-commodified social relations to schools and guided by the commoning principles illustrated by the student protestor’s emergent cultural practices, including, mutual solidarity, creative experimentation, and inclusivity.

Conclusion

The founder of the Mosaic Youth Theatre of Detroit, Rick Sperling, was in Clark Park with the student protestors. He commented to the Detroit News that the student walkout and freedom school reminded him of the Northern High School Boycott. But for him, “the question 212

is can they create the momentum from ‘66, when 2,000 students walked out?” (Detroit News -

Suspended DPS Students find ‘Freedom’, 2012, ¶ 21). The political potential of commoning is also potentially stifled by the disciplining power of law enforcement. For instance, one student protestor received a ticket stating she “unlawfully in the city and county aforesaid commit the following offense: Disorderly conduct (Creating/loud noise, screaming, yelling with mega phone) .… Led a group of students to come out of class following her disrupting school” (April

30, 2012, 2012). While the disruption was framed as disorderly conduct and suitably punished, her disruption represents the rhetorical potential of commoning as a challenge to those in positions of power and as a mobilizing force toward something different in the school district besides neoliberalism and public school closures. For instance, the Coalition to Defend

Affirmative Action, Integration & Immigrant Rights, and Fight for Equality By Any Means

Necessary (BAMN) attributed the following to the student protestors’ rhetorical acts of disruption:

The power of the April 25th student walkouts from Southwestern and Western High Schools have FORCED DPS Emergency Manager Roy Roberts to back off on the closing of Maybury, an elementary school in Southwest Detroit that has a unique and essential bilingual educational program…. This is proof that actions led by Detroit’s Latina/o, black, immigrant and undocumented youth are our only hope to make our city what it should be. (BAMN, 2012, ¶ 1 and ¶3).

As an emergent cultural practice, commoning is not the end of social change or outside

the limitations imposed by neoliberal capitalism. It is a deeply rhetorical and cultural practice of

engaging the dominant social order in the pursuit of social change. But enclosure is constantly

functioning ideologically to advance the neoliberal social order in education politics by closing-

off, seizing, and repurposing the meanings of schools and education. Furthermore, as Ono and

Sloop (2002) warn, discourses that emerge from oppressed people should not be assumed to 213

challenge power. For instance, Raychel Gafford’s use of financial talk could potentially reinforce the monetary valuation of education quality. Furthermore, unlike the emergency manager’s rhetorical construction of movement toward innovation, commoning is transitional and could partially explain its inability to stop the closure of Southwestern High School. This illustrates an obstacle referred to in the commons literature as the problem of scaling up or connecting with other groups and other social issues to form a wider network of mutual aid (Ostrom, 1990). In the next and final chapter, I will sketch the potential contributions of the terms commoning and enclosure for Communication Studies.

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CHAPTER VI: CONCLUSION

In spring 2015, Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan announced that Sakthi Automotive Group would be purchasing the vacant Southwestern High School building and converting it into a training facility for manufacturing jobs. At the announcement ceremony, Mayor Duggan told the assembled crowd, "a building that was a center for education for almost a century is going to become an education center today as well…. [Sakthi is] going to be training Detroiters for the jobs of the future” (Wayland, 2015, ¶ 3). With $3.5 million in incentives from the state and

$900,000 in federal funds for demolition, the Sakthi Group chairman told reporters that their company’s investment of $31 million and plans for 650 employees are a “part of a long-term objective to grow the company and support southwest Detroit” (Wayland, 2015, ¶8). At the time of this writing in late 2018, an aluminum foundry sits where the former high school’s football field once was and what was once a gymnasium is now a warehouse. Commenting about future plans for the site, the CEO of Sakthi Automotive stated, "we will start pretty soon utilizing the high school, too” (Livengood, 2017, ¶ 10).

Less than one mile away from the shuttered Southwestern High School, work has started on the Gordie Howe International Bridge (the permanent name of the New International Trade

Crossing). At a groundbreaking ceremony, Governor Rick Snyder told reporters the reason for a second bridge was "common sense. This is the busiest commercial crossing between our nations, and there's an opportunity to see that grow and flourish” (Gallagher, 2018, ¶ 4). Prospering also compels substantial changes to the Delray neighborhood of Southwest Detroit. Delray residents in the “buyout zone” have been offered living arrangements in other parts of the city far away from the dumping, deadly industrial pollution, and expansion of infrastructure projects that has been slowly changing Delray for decades (Carlisle, 2017, ¶ 66). But as one neighborhood 215

resident put her reason for staying, “I love it here…. I’ve been here a long time. My church is over here. My family is over here…. It’s nothing like it used to be…. But it is home. This is home” (Carlisle, 2017, ¶ 70 and ¶ 73).

Reviewing

As I have argued in this dissertation, essential to the ideological mystification of these material changes in Southwest Detroit neighborhoods has been the rhetorical maneuverings of neoliberalism and its marketization of the city’s education politics landscape. These rhetorical maneuverings are illustrated in the neoliberal logics of crisis, instrumental rationality, and innovation that initially justified the closure of Southwestern High School in 2012. After contextualizing the evolution of Detroit’s education politics landscape in Chapter Two, I argued in Chapter Three that the rhetorical justifications for Southwestern High School’s closure are first and foremost situated as responses to financial and governance structural crises in the city and its school system. Situated within these crisis conditions, education policymakers animate the key terms of underutilization and underperformance forming a neoliberal public vocabulary for understanding crisis. The symbolic deployment of the school space as underutilized and underperforming confines the value of the school to its potential financial output and creates a kairotic moment for softening the urban terrain for development by dispossessing the school space of its cultural and political meaning as a community resource, particularly for the Latina/o community in Southwest Detroit.

In Chapter Four, I argued that public arguments for the school closure are also justified by an instrumental rationality. In the entelechial pursuit of perfecting school closure criteria and compelled by a terministic compulsion to carry out the implications of its market terminology, accountability becomes increasingly instrumentalized limiting argumentative grounds for 216

participating in the setting of school closing criteria to a highly-specialized technical sphere and obscuring from public judgment in education policymaking those values which cannot be realized in colorblind market terms. Furthermore, instrumental rationality establishes accountability instruments such as school report cards and prescribes consumer choice as the only legitimate means for people to participate in the rectification of educational failure. While people may or may not believe they are autonomous consumers, judging schools according to these instruments and their instrumental rationality reproduces a self-identifying consumer subject that negates Latina/o cultural sensibilities as the third persona in education policymaking discourse.

Through their rhetorical use to justify the school closure, market valuations of school spaces and colorblind market argumentative criteria advance a neoliberalization of school and education meanings by closing off, seizing, and repurposing ways of perceiving and acting in the urban space that are irreducible to market terms. In Chapter Five, I introduced the term enclosure to name these ideological functions of the rhetorical features of neoliberalism. To illustrate, I critiqued Emergency Manager Roy Roberts’ articulation of innovation in his effort to restructure the public school district into a portfolio school district. In his speech, he metaphorically constructs the school district as a ship, which closes off competing rights to school district governance and opens a possibility for transferring school governance from the elected school board to portfolio managers. Furthermore, his rhetorical use of movement in the speech represents an attempt to seize and repurpose the public’s imagination of what quality education could be in Detroit Public Schools (DPS) while (re)enforcing the necessity of precarious social relations to schools. 217

But this chapter also underscored that neoliberalism’s rhetorical attempts to enclose social relations to schools and imaginations of quality education to model a competitive market are often contested. Challenging their exclusion from the school closure discourse, Latina/o students join with other DPS students and struggle to locate alternative meanings for schools and education than those provided for them by those in positions of power. In this chapter, I argued that their rhetorical acts of protest—the school walkout and freedom school—represent emergent cultural practices called commoning that exploits contradictions in the dominant discourse of innovation to begin cultivating non-commodified meanings for schools and education in Detroit.

Through these cultural practices, the students attempt to open school governance for their own participation through the creation of a common discursive space and imagine a quality of education that is defined by principles such as mutual benefit, human solidarity, inclusivity, community building, and is opposed to market competition.

In summary, this dissertation sought to answer two critical questions. The first concerned how rhetoric mystifies the neoliberalization of the meanings of Southwestern High School and education in the urban space of Southwest Detroit. Situated within an urban and education crisis, a neoliberal public vocabulary confines the value of the school to its potential financial output and in the entelechial pursuit of perfecting school closure criteria, technocrats and ordinary people are compelled by a terministic compulsion to carry out the implications of its market terminology obscuring from public judgment of education quality those values which cannot be realized in colorblind market terms. As people participate in market valuations of school spaces and colorblind market argumentative criteria, the neoliberalization of school and education meanings is mystified through an ideological rhetorical process I have called enclosure that 218

entails closing off, seizing, and repurposing ways of perceiving and acting in the urban space that are irreducible to market terms.

The second critical question was interested in how the Latina/o community’s social relations and cultural sensibilities are shaped by and mobilized to challenge the neoliberal restructuring of Southwestern High School and education in the city. As discussed, the rhetorical features of neoliberalism dispossess the Latina/o community in Southwest Detroit of a communal resource and participating in neoliberal logics negates Latina/o cultural sensibilities as the third persona in the school closure discourse. I have interpreted these rhetorical features as violent in the sense that they normalize an inequitable status-quo and silence victims of the structural violence of school closings. But commoning represents one rhetorical way that Latina/o students in Southwest Detroit practice their cultural sensibilities in political struggle to locate alternatives to neoliberalism not only for themselves, but for all DPS students. In the next section, I expand on this review and describe how I perceive the concepts of enclosure and commoning as contributing to the fields of Rhetorical Studies and Intercultural Communication and make suggestions for future research.

Contributions and Suggestions for Future Research

Neoliberalism in rhetorical studies

Extracting from the analyses in these preceding chapters, neoliberalism is understood as a form of class warfare in which resources like education and schools are redistributed upward while we are being compelled to see the world through the optics of financial elites (Duménil &

Lévy, 2004; Harvey, 2005). But neoliberalism also entails the governing of society through market mechanisms. Crucial to this particular aspect of neoliberalism is “the remaking and redeployment of the state as the core agency that actively fabricates the subjectivities, social 219

relations and collective representations suited to making the fiction of markets real and consequential” (Wacquant, 2012, p. 68). Ironically, seizing and reorienting the state is required to create and impose those social conditions that could potentially realize the ideal “free” market society in Detroit or elsewhere (Mirowski, 2014; Peck, 2012). Within the framework of neoliberalism as both class warfare and market governance, the concept of the enclosure of the commons pushes to the forefront the acts of violence that advance this political project. By violence, I mean those systemic forms of violence that we perceive as normal and sustain “the often catastrophic consequences of the smooth functioning of our economic and political systems” (Žižek, 2008, p. 2). Hodinkson (2012) succinctly describes the violence of enclosure as

“not just about closing off soil and land in a narrow sense but shutting down access to any space or sociality that threatens our ideological or material dependence on capitalist social relations, thus threatening accumulation” (p. 509). It is through this violence of enclosure that I have interpreted the destructive yet normative way in which neoliberalism has advanced in Detroit’s education politics landscape. Thinking about the advancement of neoliberalism through this framework of enclosure has potential ramifications for rhetorical studies.

It adds to conversations in rhetorical studies about the ideological mystification of the neoliberal social order. In particular, conceiving of ideological rhetorics in the neoliberal social order as a form of enclosure makes it difficult to tell where persuasion ends and coercion beings.

One of the contributions of this dissertation has been to illustrate how ideological mystification of neoliberalism happens as ordinary people participate in market appropriation of our own rhetorical agency. Rhetorical agency is understood as our communicative ability to evaluate social life and act on those values and judgments. Cloud, Macek, and Aune (2006) claim that one of the rhetorical functions of ideological discourses is that they constrain our choices and 220

actions. But ideological discourses like neoliberalism also have a creative or constructive rhetorical potential. In other words, ideological discourses provide a way of making meaning out of the social world that unleashes positive actions to address failing schools through market valuations or inadequate education through the market criteria of school report cards. This creative potential is reliant on the lynchpin of distortion, but it also suggests that the ideological discourses of neoliberalism enable as much as disable rhetorical agency. After all, the rhetorical agency of in a school marketplace does allow one to actually effect change, which explains in part its appeal to audiences. At the same time, this form of rhetorical agency is sanctioned by the distortion and constant (re)enforcement that there is no alternative to competitive markets in education politics. Consequently, rhetorical agency is rendered to the rhetor’s valuation of urban spaces, judgment in education decision-making, or choice in education politics. Participating in this creative form of rhetorical agency destroys existing social relations to public spaces and valuation of resources such as public education allowing for something new like charter schools or individualized computer instruction. The violence of this ideological mystification can be understood as enclosure—closing off, seizing, and repurposing—of the immaterial commons of social relations and political imaginations that underlie rhetorical agency for advancing the neoliberal logics of competitive markets in social life.

For Ronald Greene (2006), neoliberalism’s absorption of the potential of human agency into capitalist markets means “we can no longer pretend that rhetorical agency exists outside the domain of capitalist command,” (p.86). But I contend that the metaphor of enclosure used to describe processes of ideological mystification emphasizes that neoliberalism’s absorption and weakening of rhetorical agency is always incomplete and often contested. Historically, the 221

commons have been indispensable both to the survival of capitalism (through co-optation or even enclosure) and germinal to the production of “autonomous spaces from which to reclaim control over the conditions of our reproduction, and as bases from which to counter the processes of enclosure and increasingly disentangle our lives from the market and the state” (Caffentis &

Federici, 2014, p. 1101). This contested nature of commons places the collective struggles of human beings over material and immaterial resources at the center of possibilities for rhetorical agency in the neoliberal social order. Of course, this agentic optimism does not entail that individuals and communities are free to make the world as they please, but constrained by a complex interweaving of histories, structures, and ideological discourses, human beings can organize and begin to create spaces for experimenting with social relations and political imaginations outside of neoliberal logics in the practice of making a resource like public schools common.

Thinking about the advancement of neoliberalism through this framework of the enclosure of the commons could also influence rhetorical criticism’s practice of demystification.

In rhetorical studies, one approach to ideology criticism “posits a dialectical and mutually conditioning relationship between ideology and lived experience, such that reference to experience serves as a resource in the creation of oppositional consciousness” (Cloud & Gunn,

2011). But the creation of an oppositional consciousness while essential may not be enough to demystify the ideological workings of neoliberalism since its logics are not always internalized in the hearts and minds of the audience or for that matter always an issue of perspectives. Rather as I have illustrated, we are compelled to act and be as if neoliberalism should be the organizing principle of social life. Consequently, rhetorical critique of the ideology of neoliberalism should uncover not only contradictions between consciousness and experience, but also the 222

contradictions between actions, being, and experience. As Marx and Engels wrote in the

Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1840, “thinking and being are thus certainly distinct, but at the same time they are in unity with each other” (Tucker, p. 1978, 86). One possibility for future ideology criticism in rhetorical studies could engage in this demystifying project is by critiquing the violence of neoliberal discourses as enclosure that persuades/coerces embodied ways of being and acting in the city that rhetorically reproduce urban spaces and subjects according to the dictates of neoliberal capitalism.

Neoliberalism in intercultural communication

For Mary Jane Collier (2014), neoliberalism calls interculturalists to locate ways to engage the economic. To this conversation, this dissertation makes its second contribution of the term commoning. In particular, commoning provides a potential framework for conceptualizing intercultural community building in the neoliberal social order as organized around collective efforts to common public resources such as schools or education. Intercultural communication research has emphasized that building community and intercultural alliances for social justice require bridging differences of cultural standpoints and histories through developing trust, interdependence, and dialogue across historically divided groups (Collier, 2014; Sorrells, 2010).

To this conversation, commoning adds that community building is also imperative to realizing our shared social relations and wealth outside of the exclusionary logics of neoliberal capitalism

(Federici, 2012). In other words, the possibility of non-commodified forms of community can come into being only through (re)claiming and managing public resources as common to all. In

Southwest Detroit, Latina/o students join together with other DPS students to create a common discursive space and imagine a quality of education that is defined by a different set of principles than those provided by the monetary valuations of neoliberal capitalism. Although their political 223

experimentation may have been short lived, it illustrates the possibility that commoning could be an effective cultural practice of inclusiveness that seeks to avoid the exclusivity of neoliberal privatization and commodification. Conversations between the literature on the commons and intercultural communication could discover other non-commodified forms of inclusivity and interrelatedness that work toward social change of the neoliberal social order. Pertinent to this task is locating new forms of community building and communication that cross not only divisions between peoples, but also those historically entrenched divisions between social issues.

As a cultural practice, commoning seeks to illuminate the common destruction of neoliberal enclosure to all areas of social life and create spaces for experimenting with different social relations to urban spaces, political imaginations, and understandings of ourselves and others to resist enclosure and locate alternative ways of living.

But as Federici (2012) point out, neoliberalism frequently co-opts the language of community and cooperation. To begin reweaving the social fabric this has torn, commoning points us toward another potential area of research in intercultural communication—the relationship between cultural practices and the possibility of a common politics. As Jodi Dean

(2012) argues, the commons “highlights not only new experiences of collectivity but also barriers to the politicization of these experiences” (p. 120). Commoning seeks to construct common subjects for challenging the exclusionary logics of neoliberal capitalism and imaging a common politics in the pursuit of a more egalitarian society (Federici, 2012). The challenge is and will be how to negotiate difference within this common politics. In Southwest Detroit, the students involved in the school walkout and freedom school performed Latina/o cultural sensibilities such as a rallying cry reminiscent of the cultural self-determination of the Chicana/o

Movement and the Xican@ identity as well as attempted to mobilize students and other 224

community members through discursive articulations of Latina/o lived experiences such as migration narratives. But instead of identity discourses becoming a movement toward exclusivity and being co-opted by the logics of neoliberalism, these cultural practices signified a political struggle to common precious resources for all DPS students. Further work will need to be done on the crucial role of public resources in mobilizing people against the neoliberal social order beyond the limited scope of identity politics. But vernacular cultural practices such as commoning could potentially signify culture as “a whole way of struggle” (Thompson, 1963, p.

33) against neoliberal enclosures and toward the production of anti-enclosure communal values, representations, institutions, and affects for procuring and preserving commons in Detroit and beyond.

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