Infrastructural Violence, School Districting, and Spatialized Inequity in the San Francisco Bay Area

Home , Exclusionary zoning

Provisioning Public Education: Infrastructural Violence, School Districting, and Spatialized Inequity in the San Francisco Bay Area

Anne Kiyono Calef

BA in Asian American Studies Pomona College Claremont, CA (2012)

Submitted to the Department of Urban Studies and Planning in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Master in City Planning

at the

MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

May 2020

The author here by grants to MIT the permission to reproduce and to distribute publicly paper and electronic copies of the thesis document in whole or in part in any medium now known or hereafter created.

Author______Department of Urban Studies and Planning 20 May 2020

Certified by ______Assistant Professor Devin Michelle Bunten Department of Urban Studies and Planning Thesis Supervisor

Accepted by______Ceasar McDowell Professor of the Practice Chair, MCP Committee Department of Urban Studies and Planning Provisioning Public Education: Infrastructural Violence, School Districting, and Spatialized Inequity in the San Francisco Bay Area

Anne Kiyono Calef

Submitted to the Department of Urban Studies and Planning on May 20, 2020 in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master in City Planning

ABSTRACT

With an alarming budget deficit and mounting fiscal pressures, Oakland Unified School District made a contentious and familiar decision in 2019- to close and consolidate schools. The ensuing conflict exposed a deeper structural fault line with roots in the racialized plunder that has fueled American prosperity and poverty from its founding. Situating the legal and political history of public education within an infrastructural violence framework, this thesis examines how the United States’ system for provisioning schooling has created conditions in which school closures are structurally inevitable in low-income, urban communities of color. I look closely at the boundary between two vastly different but adjacent school districts in the San Francisco Bay Area to argue that the infrastructure of public education enacts violence through its segregation of resources, inequitable distribution of opportunity, and abjection of Black and Latinx students. Under such a framework, school closures emerge as more than the mere consequence of administrative failure, but as the product of a socially constructed and maintained distributional regime.

Thesis Supervisor: Devin Michelle Bunten Title: Assistant Professor of Urban Economics and Housing, MIT DUSP

Thesis Reader: Gabriella Carolini Title: Associate Professor of International Development and Urban Planning, MIT DUSP

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This thesis is wholly indebted to the insightful comments, deep care, and patient guidance of Professor Devin Michelle Bunten and Professor Gabriella Carolini. I am incredibly grateful for your ongoing support, care, and, above all else, joy that you shared with me throughout this process.

In a semester defined by social-distancing, tumult, and deep Zoom fatigue, I would also like to thank my roommates (and apartment dog, Jojo) for being constant sources of humor, levity, and empathy. Without you Jojo, my Instagram story would have been much bleaker.

3 TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION 5 LITERATURE REVIEW 7 INFRASTRUCTURAL THEORY 9

CHAPTER 1: LOCAL CONTROL AND THE PROVISIONING OF PUBLIC EDUCATION 12 OVERVIEW OF THE PROVISIONING OF PUBLIC EDUCATION IN THE UNITED STATES 12 LOCALISM AND THE POLITICAL TRADITION OF RESOURCE SEQUESTRATION 14 HISTORY OF THE SCHOOL DISTRICT IN THE UNITED STATES 17 THE SCHOOL DISTRICT AND LOCALISM 20

CHAPTER 2: POLITICAL FRAGMENTATION AND THE MAINTENANCE OF SEGREGATION 21 WHITE FLIGHT AND MUNICIPAL PROLIFERATION 21 SCHOOL DISTRICT FRAGMENTATION 24 LEGAL CHALLENGES TO SCHOOL DESEGREGATION 26 STATE FUNDING EQUALIZATION IN CALIFORNIA 28 INEQUITABLE DISTRICTS AND UNEVEN EDUCATIONAL OUTCOMES 30

CHAPTER 3: SCHOOL DISTRICT BORDERS AND INFRASTRUCTURAL VIOLENCE 31 CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE STUDIES AND INFRASTRUCTURAL VIOLENCE 31 SCHOOL DISTRICTING IN THE SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA 32 INFRASTRUCTURAL VIOLENCE AND THE DISCRETIONARY ENFORCEMENT OF SCHOOL DISTRICT BOUNDARIES 34 ABJECTION AND EMBODIED DISTINCTION 36

CONCLUSION: ON INFRASTRUCTURE, SCHOOL CLOSURES, AND THE INTIMACY OF SCHOOLING 40

WORKS CITED 42

4 INTRODUCTION

Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) parent Saru Jayaraman arrived at a recent OUSD school board meeting on crutches. When asked by a reporter about her injuries, Jayaraman responded, “four cops threw me to the ground, injured my knee, tore my ACL, injured my MC meniscus and bone and another parents' ribs were cracked” (quoted in Katsuyama 2019). The violence that Jayaraman described began not on the street, but in an elementary school auditorium. Along with five other community members, Jayaraman was arrested for protesting school closures at the prior OUSD School Board meeting on October 23, 2019. Amidst shouts of “Oakland is not for sale,” Jayaraman pledged to sue the City of Oakland and continue disrupting school board meetings, declaring that “every school board meeting is important, every school board meeting is a chance for us to tell the board that it’s not going to happen, it’s not going to be business as usual until they listen to our demands” (Tadayon, 2019).

Source: Teresa Harrington / Ed Source (2019)

Jayaraman, along with other parents, teachers, community members, and students were protesting the school district’s plan to close up to 24 schools in the next ten years. With an alarming budget deficit, OUSD officials assert that schools must be consolidated in order to return the district to financial solvency (Harrington, 2019; McEvoy, 2019). The budget shortfall follows years of “poor business practices”(Alameda County Grand Jury, 2019) which, combined with declining enrollment and increased pension obligations, have led to mounting fiscal pressures despite the backdrop of ongoing gentrification in Oakland and corporate investment. In this light, OUSD’s rationale for shuttering school buildings and reassigning their students, teachers, and staff, could be viewed as a cold-eyed cost-benefit analysis, and indeed, it echoes

5 arguments heard around the country that view shrinkage as the primary solution to financial stress (Bierbaum, 2020). However, attention of school reformers has been pulled inexorably towards a familiar target: “underutilized” schools whose students are predominantly Latinx and/or African American (Ewing, 2018; Tieken & Auldridge-Reveles, 2019).1 In this context, police violence can be understood less as a shocking breach of decorum and more as the traditional mode of interaction.

Sharpening tensions around school closures in cities like Oakland expose a deeper structural fault line: the tectonic forces of racialized plunder that have fueled American prosperity and poverty from its founding (Hannah-Jones, 2019). The larger historical and legal context makes clear how these forces have oriented public school construction, finance, and management toward the benefit of the powerful and connected. Situating urban public education within a framework of infrastructural violence, this paper examines how the system for provisioning public education in the United States has created conditions in which school closures are structurally inevitable in low-income, urban communities of color. An infrastructural framework not only highlights the material consequences of school districting policies but also how the legal and political architecture itself is a “terrain of power and contestation” (Appel et al., 2018). Focusing on the distributive system for education prompts key questions related to governance, citizenship, and exclusion. It invites larger questions about belonging and abjection- as Appel, Anand and Gupta (2018) ask, “to whom will resources be distributed and from whom will they be withdrawn? … Which communities will be provisioned with resources for social and physical reproduction and which will not?” (p. 2).

I argue that the infrastructure developed in the United States to provision public education has reified social stratification, perpetuated racialized violence and furthered spatialized inequality. Studying the history of racism within the “double helix” (Ewing, 2018) of education and urban policy, I demonstrate how the infrastructure of public education, and the normative values embedded within it, operates to segregate resources, differentially distribute opportunity, and abject Black and Latinx students. I look closely at two vastly different but adjacent school districts to chart infrastructural violence as it becomes opaque at district borders. This study ultimately seeks to relocate equity-driven education policy within the realm of urban planning by presenting another example of “state-sanctioned infrastructural abandonment” (Appel, et al, 2018, p. 2) and extending theoretical lenses familiar to planning mainstays such as water (Acey, 2019; Anand, 2012) and energy (Harrison et al., 2019; Pilo, 2017) to the American schoolhouse. Under such a framework, school closures emerge as more than the mere consequence of

1 Roots International Academy, the first school to close under the OUSD “Blueprint for Quality Schools” plan, stands as an example of this logic. At a January 2019 board meeting, OUSD Deputy Chief of Innovation Yvette Renteria commented that Roots’ was an “unsustainable small school with limited resources” and some of the lowest test scores in the district (Green & McEvoy, 2019). With 88% of their students identifying as Latinx or African American, the decision to close Roots also fell within national trends of school closures disproportionately affecting communities of color (Oakland Unified School District, n.d.; Tieken & Auldridge-Reveles, 2019).

6 administrative failure, but as the product of a socially constructed and maintained distributional regime.

LITERATURE REVIEW

The topic of school closures has been extensively discussed in educational studies and policy research. In addition to significant literature on the proceedings of school closures (Good, 2017, p. 946), education scholars have also used a critical race theory (CRT) to analyze the decisionmaking processes of school district officials, specifically resituating logics and rationale within larger systems of race and racism (Khalifa et al., 2014). CRT has also been useful in critiquing liberal equity policies that can reify existing power dynamics as well as identifying counter- stories that challenge majoritarian narratives (Capper, 2015). While CRT research on school closures has largely centered on the discursive practices of district leaders and community members (Capper, 2015; Khalifa et al., 2014; Love, 2004; Shiller, 2018; Stovall, 2016), its core framework can also be productively applied to an analysis of historical and material networks that have led to the uneven distribution of academic performance, resources, and power.

At the intersection of critical race theory and education studies, there exists a significant body of research that explicitly links school closures to neoliberal policy and logic. Scholars such as Basu (2007), Lipman (2011), Cucchiara (2013), Stovall (2008, 2013), Johnson (2013) and Deeds & Pattillo (2015) critique competition-based reforms that seek to create an “urban educational marketplace” (Cucchiara, 2013) in which school closures are viewed as the natural conclusion to “failing” schools. These policies rely heavily on the rhetoric of “choice” to promote alternatives to district-run public schools, including publicly funded, privately operated charter schools and publicly funded vouchers to attend privately owned and operated schools. When combined with limited opportunity, housing uncertainty and sequestered resources, neoliberal reform fosters what Stovall (2013) terms a “politics of desperation” amongst low-income communities of color that are purported to be the beneficiary of these very education reform policies. Cucchiara (2013) similarly examines the continual rise of “market-driven solutions to entrenched social problems” (p. 17) in cities. Focusing on an initiative in Philadelphia that pushed traditionally under- resourced schools to compete in the “marketplace” for middle- and high- income families, Cucchiara argues that “the initiative, and its attendant discourses and policies, subtly recast families’ entitlement to public education” (p. 15) and thus social citizenship.

Education reforms that proffer choice and privatization as solutions to entrenched inequities echo neoliberal urban policies that have reshaped cities since the 1980s. Such a juncture presents research opportunities for planners and education scholars alike. Pauline Lipman (2011) explains that education scholarship frequently overlooks the urban environment, accepting it as a natural backdrop rather than, citing David Harvey, as “the locus of accumulated contradictions of a society” that is “produced by a global political, economic, and ideological project geared to

7 capital accumulation through dispossession and exploitation” (p. 4). By charting the relationship between neoliberal urbanism and education policy, Lipman (2011) demonstrates that “education policy is constitutive of [the] urban restructuring processes” (p. 22) described by critical geographers and urban sociologists. Lipman’s “new political economy of urban education” framework is useful to understanding the design and construction of contemporary urban education, importantly including its fundamental connections to neoliberal urbanism. A focus on the processes and outcomes of school closures, however, neglects the larger systems that have created and fostered inequitable resource distribution –including school district formation and financing- that undergird those structures.

Scholars have observed that, with a few notable exceptions, education research has “tended to neglect long-term, historical trends” (Kelly, 2019, p. 1). Kelly (2019) studies school district boundaries in Northern California to demonstrate the need for “extending our temporal frame when conducting geospatial education research” (p. 1). While Kelly does not as directly engage in the political economic aspects of the provisioning of public education as Lipman does, he reveals the history of school district boundary manipulation, and thus challenges the perception of school district boundaries as “pre-governmental” (Saiger, 2010).

Critical analysis of the school district model for the provisioning of public education has largely been undertaken by legal scholars within the context of the larger debate between localist and regionalist approaches to governance (Briffault, 1996; Ford, 1994; Fox, 2019; Saiger, 2010; Shoked, 2017; Wilson, 2014). As a notable exception, education scholar Kathryn McDermott (1999) investigated the deep ideological foundation of localism to public education, arguing that “it is impossible to confront and combat the causes of educational inequality without questioning the principle of local control as it has operated historically” (p. 6). More recently, education scholars have begun studying the impacts of school districting, specifically school district fragmentation post-Milliken v. Bradley and the ongoing pursual of racial segregation (Bischoff, 2008; Frankenberg et al., 2017; Holme & Finnigan, 2013; Siegel-Hawley, 2014; Taylor et al., 2019; Reber, 2005).

Despite the school district’s distinctly spatial configuration, a critical analysis of the provisioning of public education is largely absent from urban planning literature. Such a gap is notable for multiple reasons. On the surface level, the perceived quality of schools, like other urban amenities, informs housing decisions and effects housing markets (Clark & Herrin, 2000). Similarly, public schools jostle with other community and economic development initiatives for scarce local resources, including other spatially-configured funding structures (e.g. tax-increment financing) (Lipman, 2011; Marantz, 2018). Peering into history, education and housing policy have been inextricably bound throughout movements to both segregate and desegregate communities (Ewing, 2018). Finally, pushing to a theoretical plane, this spatial conception of access and belonging raises important questions about urban governance, citizenship, and biopolitics. While not engaging directly with school districting, urban planning scholarship has

8 begun to examine public education within the context of urban revitalization and shrinkage (Cucchiara, 2013; Silverman, 2014), place identity (Good, 2019), and community development (Good, 2019; Silverman, 2014; J. Vincent, 2006; J. M. Vincent, 2014). This study seeks to add to that body of literature by relocating an analysis of the fundamental structuring of education provisioning in the United States within urban planning.

INFRASTRUCTURAL THEORY

Infrastructure emerged in anthropology and related social sciences as a popular site for theory- building and critical analysis in the 1990s.2 As a broad term that encompasses both material and intangible systems that “facilitate the flow of goods, people, or ideas and allow for their exchange over space” (Larkin, 2013, p. 328), scholars have studied the infrastructure of topics ranging from municipal water (Anand, 2012) to cemeteries (O’Neill, 2012), oil (Appel, 2012) to intimacy (Wilson, 2016), internet software (Star & Ruhleder, 1996) to the Panama Canal (Carse, 2012). An attention to infrastructure unearths the promises and disappointments of states, the social connection and disconnection of subjects, the reproduction and abandonment of communities, and the breakdowns and adaptations of societies. Appel, Anand and Gupta (2018) explain that infrastructures are “critical locations through which sociality, governance and politics, accumulation and dispossession, and institutions and aspirations are formed, reformed and performed. At the same time as they promise circulation and distribution, however, these precarious assemblies also threaten to break down and fail” (p. 3). To critically study infrastructure is thus not to index Keynesian triumphalism, but to reflect on the cracks, the leaks, the deferred maintenance, the missed opportunities, and the broken promises that pervade our built environment.

Source: Vincent Garcia / Society for Cultural Anthropology (2015)

2 Boyer (2018) cites Star and Ruhleder (1994, 1996), Bowker (2010), Anand (2012), Appel (2012), Larkin (2013) and Appel et al (2015) as some seminal texts.

While definitions of infrastructure are necessarily baggy and approaches to their study are accordingly diverse, there are key themes related to infrastructure that can be productive to a study of public education in the United States. First, embedded within infrastructure are commentaries on expertise, standardization and progress. Influential scholars in science and technology studies including Hughes (1987, 1993), have argued that infrastructures begin as “a series of small, independent technologies with widely varying technical standards” that transition into “infrastructure when either one technological system comes to dominate over others or when independent systems converge into a network” (Larkin, 2013, p. 330). The extension and routinization of networks thus necessitates “an account of translation” (Larkin, 2013, p. 330) as systems respond to the particular regimes and conditions endemic to different areas. Discussions of labor and expertise are inseparable from an analysis of the translation, maintenance and repair that sprawling infrastructures require.

Secondly, infrastructures grow and transform. They are complex assemblages of actors, policies and ideas that are rarely constructed by singular entities. Instead, infrastructures are “brought into being through compromised, improved projects of maintenance and repair” (Appel et al, 2019, p. 12). This framework necessarily shifts analytical focus towards the processes and daily labor, performed at all scales, to maintain, manage, and adapt large-scale systems.

Further, infrastructure breaks, disconnects and abandons. Star and Ruheleder (1996) famously argued that infrastructure is “visible upon breakdown,” its failure to deliver expected services illuminating its otherwise quiet presence. These failures and disconnects also unearth larger logics of citizenship, revealing “strate[gies] of government,” producing an ethics and eliciting certain “moral behaviors” (Larkin, 2013, p. 331). The differential distribution of resources through infrastructure identifies and governs publics (Anand, 2018), empowering some residents while simultaneously abjecting others (Anand, 2012).

Finally, infrastructure is quotidian, intimate, and social. Infrastructure is experienced through daily, routine actions and prompts researchers to “rethink governance and citizenship not at a distance but pressing into the flesh” (Appel et al, 2018, p. 22). It is intimate – structuring individuals’ lives, touching nerves, evoking senses, and prompting embodied responses. As a fundamentally relational concept, infrastructure “produce[s] a sense of belonging, accomplishment, or loss, as polities are constantly being unmade and remade through not only the things that infrastructures carry, but also the semiotic and sensory ways in which they shape being” (Appel et al, 2018, p. 26). Larkin (2013) cites Czech historian Mrázek (2002) to describe the “experience of infrastructure as an ‘enthusiasm of the imagination’ (p .166), referring to the feelings of promise that technologies such as infrastructure can stimulate” (p. 332). Infrastructures “form us as subjects on a technopolitical level but also through the mobilization of affect and the senses of desire, pride, and frustration, feelings which can be deeply political”

10 (p. 333). A study of infrastructure thus offers a “shortcut to the political economy” (Wilson, 2016, p. 248) while simultaneously highlighting and illuminating the most personal, intimate, fragile and violent relations between “people, things, and the institutions that govern or provision them” (Appel et al, 2018, p. 3).

By situating the system developed to distribute public education in the United States within infrastructural theory, this thesis seeks to highlight the ideological underpinnings of school governance, the legal and political mechanisms that make and remake school governance structures, the material impact of the differential distribution of education, and the deeply embodied effects that this particular infrastructure has on students and parents. Chapter One provides an overview of how education is provisioned in the United States, tracing key themes- localism, technocratic administration, and exclusion- through the history of the school district. Acknowledging that the school district model is inherently spatial, Chapter Two then examines housing policies in the 20th century that shaped the urban demographic and political landscape, as well as national court cases that maintained social stratification and repaired segregationist legal infrastructure. Chapter Two ends by looking closely at attempts within California to bend funding structures towards equity and the inequalities that continue to exist nonetheless. Chapter Three examines the boundary between two vastly different but adjacent school districts in the San Francisco Bay Area to argue that the infrastructure of public education enacts violence through its segregation of resources, inequitable distribution of opportunity, and abjection of Black and Latinx students. Finally, this thesis concludes with an examination of the political and affective complexities of schooling in the context of “state-sanctioned infrastructural abandonment” (Appel et al, 2018, p. 2).

11 CHAPTER 1: LOCAL CONTROL AND THE PROVISIONING OF PUBLIC EDUCATION

OVERVIEW OF THE PROVISIONING OF PUBLIC EDUCATION IN THE UNITED STATES

When comparing the United States Constitution to the governing documents of other countries, one right is notably absent- the right to education (Lurie, 2013). Historians of education have noted that in the late 18th the idea of a national, free public education system for white children existed within prominent educational thought, however, it was never explicitly included within the articles of the Constitution or the Bill of Rights (Haubenreich, 2012). Education historians have theorized that this is in part due to the Bill of Rights skew towards “natural rights” as well as limiting, rather than expanding, federal rights (Haubenreich, 2012). By not explicitly claiming federal responsibility for public education, Framers left “full authority for schools” with state governments who then delegated most financial and operational responsibilities to localities (Springer, Houck, & Guthrie, 2015, pg. 6). While later chapters will address legal attempts to assert a federal right to education, and the benefits associated with doing so, this section will focus on the spatial mechanism through which states supply education- the school district- and the political traditions beneath it.

Source: US Department of Education, NCES

12 School financing mechanisms differ across states, but the vast majority of funds are provided by state government revenue from different tax sources (e.g. income, lotteries, and sales tax) and local governments through locally initiated property taxes. The federal government did not play a significant role in school financing until the passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) in 1965 which authorized grants to support specific programs at the district level (U.S. Department of Education, 2014). In 2016-17, state funds accounted for 47% of national revenue for public elementary and secondary schools, local funds amounted 44.9% of revenue, and federal funds provided a mere 8.1% (National Center for Education Statistics, n.d.). Locally imposed property taxes accounted for 36.6% of total school revenue, varying greatly across states from 3.9% in Vermont to 62.3% in New Hampshire3 (National Center for Education Statistics, n.d.). In the past several decades, federal funds have increased, typically in service of specific, national policy objectives (Springer et al., 2015).

All states are obligated by their own constitutions to provide education and install a chief state school officer, often in conjunction with a state board of education to supervise that process. While states retain a supervisory role of all public schools (e.g. establishing instruction standards, certificating educators, dispersing federal funds, setting building codes, etc.), forty- nine states4 delegate the actual management of schools to local entities that govern geographic subdivisions, “school districts” (Shoked, 2017). In twenty-three states, school district boundaries do not match that of general-purpose local governments (e.g. counties, sub-counties, cities, townships or villages). In the remaining twenty-six states, school district boundaries either correspond to county lines, sub-county lines (including California), or follow both county and subcounty lines, with areas incorporated as cities forming their own districts separated from a general countywide school district. Geographic overlap can lead to political overlap, in which the general government appoints the school board, or the school board can remain politically independent with board members elected directly by residents. It is important to note that regardless of political dependency on the general government, school boards remain distinct legal entities (Shoked, 2017).

Saiger (2010) explains that, from a functional perspective, “the boundaries of the roughly 15,000 school districts in the United States define… a kind of territorial sovereignty” (para). Almost all states grant districts “substantial autonomy” within their borders, including the ability to bargain with organized labor, budget, spend, set policy, tax and even incur debt. Although school districts have broad operational and financial autonomy, legal scholar Aaron Saiger (2010) asserts that school districts are still “emphatically not sovereign” (para). School districts, like municipalities, are actually “creatures of the state,” that are delegated their powers from state governments and can thus be established, deconstructed or consolidated by state legislatures.

3 Excluding Hawai’i, the only state that does not delegate school management to districts, and the District of Columbia. 4 Hawai’i manages schools at a state level

13 However, this legal reality is often obscured by key normative value associated with public education- localism.

LOCALISM AND THE POLITICAL TRADITION OF RESOURCE SEQUESTRATION

Localism, or the “ideological preference for decentralized, independent, and autonomous governance structures,” lays in the heart of local government structures in the United States (Wilson, 2014). Legal scholar Richard Briffault explains in his seminal article “Our Localism (Part I): The Structure of Local Government Law” (1990a) that localism is “primarily centered on the affirmation of private values. Localist ideology and local political action tend not to build up public life, but rather contribute to the pervasive privatism that is the hallmark of contemporary American politics” (p. 1-2). While federal constitutional law is typically seen as emphasizing state plenary power over local governments, the Supreme Court has “tended to validate the states’ delegation of regulatory power and fiscal responsibility to local governments despite the inequalities and externalities localism creates” (Briffault, 1990a). Localism, at its core, reflects a desire to convene or sequester political and economic power within a given geographic boundary. Briffualt uses school finance and exclusionary zoning debates to highlight the “deep-seated ambiguities in the concept of local power,” “the salience of interlocal conflict in appraising the scope of local power,” and the “close connection between local legal and political autonomy and issues of distributive justice” (p. 3-4). The impacts of localism are striking not only in conflicts between the state and localities, but also between localities themselves.

Exclusion is incentivized, in part, through a property tax structure wherein high-property wealth towns are able to generate greater revenue with lower tax rates than their low-property wealth peers. In his seminal article “The Boundaries of Race: Political Geography in Legal Analysis,” Ford (1994) demonstrates how even if all interpersonal racism and legal support for racial discrimination were to magically disappear from a nation’s citizenry, the combination of these taxation policies with an existing geography stratified along racial and class lines would be sufficient to ensure that de facto segregation occur. Higher incomes would lead all-white towns to develop larger properties, and thus a larger property tax base. The resulting disparity in municipal service between all-white and all-Black towns (or difference in tax rates as all-white towns could use their larger tax base to garner the same services while taxing less) would create what Ford referred to as a “real economic incentive” for white citizens of mixed cities to “depart, or even secede, from the mixed cities, and whites in unincorporated areas would be spurred to form their own jurisdictions and to resist consolidation with the larger mixed cities or all-black cities” (p. 1851). In Ford’s model, racial segregation might eventually give way to pure economic segregation if residential segregation did not impact employment opportunities and

14 therefore wealth building, and enterprising housing developers might be able to facilitate some racial integration if zoning power did not impose limitations.

Source: City of Piedmont

Exclusionary zoning encompasses a range of tools used by local governments to limit the amount of affordable housing in their municipality. Such measures can include restrictive land use regulations such as the low-density, lack of multi-family residential housing zoning and large lot sizes seen above in Piedmont, CA. It can also include complex and expensive to navigate building approval processes. Scholars note that, bearing all of these tools in mind, an increase of state-level involvement can lead to lower levels of segregation (Hertz, 2016). However, as many large cities struggle with lower revenue and greater expenses per capita relative to suburbs, legal localism “legitimates state inaction” (Briffault, 1990b, p. 355). Looking closely at the two most prominent types of localities- cities and suburbs- Briffault (1990b) explains how a doctrine of localism presumes that localities are fiscally self-sufficient and thus shies from a state responsibility to assist with local needs (p. 355). Judicial support of local autonomy generally buttresses a suburban right to guard fiscal resources, often to the detriment of their urban neighbors, while simultaneously eschewing states’ responsibility to intervene. Large cities are

15 left to grapple with concentrated need and limited recourse. Paradoxically, “local power can thus lead to city powerlessness” (Briffault, 1990b, p. 355).

For residents in relatively homogenous, wealthy localities, localism works. It aggregates resources, reduces need, preserves the status quo, and empowers residents to control growth as they see fit. Proponents of localism argue that local control is the center of American democracy and a critical component of an effective, accountable government. McDermott (1997) explains that many academic theorists writing about localism “appeal to a Tocquevillian vision of citizen self-government and community participation that cannot be preserved in a more centralized setting” (p. 5). Localism follows and illuminates other ideological north stars in American political thought by rewarding individualism and prioritizing privatism. Indeed, McDermott found during her research in Connecticut that challenges to localism were often framed as an attack on personal liberties.

The argument for local control over education also turns on ideals of community participation and government accountability. Advocates of local control believe that civic participation is a critical component of public education, and that devolution of school financing to a local level is the primary method for guaranteeing that involvement. Proponents argue that residents will select a locality that matches their preference for education, opting to pay more depending on how much they value that preference (Reynolds, 2008). The flaws in this “consumer voter” logic have been well-documented, namely that it assumes only those with financial resources value education and ignores how wealthier municipalities actually levy lower tax rates than poorer municipalities to receive greater revenues for schools (Reynolds, 2008).

The Supreme Court famously enshrined this commitment to local control in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez (2013) when it declared that “In part, local control means… the freedom to devote more money to the education of one’s children. Equally important, however, is the opportunity it offers for participation in the decisionmaking process that determines how those local tax dollars will be spent” (quoted in Reynolds, 2008, p. 769). Local control of funding is seen as an opportunity for communities to set their financial commitment to, and ideal program for, schooling. The Court continues, explaining that, “Each locality is free to tailor local programs to local needs. Pluralism also affords some opportunity for experimentation, innovation, and a healthy competition for educational excellence” (quoted in Reynolds, 2008, p. 769).

Critics will argue that localist doctrine not only stokes inequality across a region, but also fails to deliver the civic engagement that it promises. After conducting two years of field research in New Haven and surrounding suburban school districts in Connecticut, education scholar Kathryn McDermott (1997) found that local school politics are actually “characterized by low levels of participation, and more critically by decision-making processes largely closed to ordinary

16 citizens” (p. 7). McDermott observed low voter participation in school board elections, that the general public was largely unaware of school boards’ activities, and that if citizens did attend meetings the bureaucratic structure did not facilitate meaningful engagement. In short, McDermott found that while “democratic control of public education is a potent ideal… it should also be regarded as a myth” (p. 7). It is, nonetheless, a powerful and lasting myth that has promulgated the concept of the school district for centuries.

HISTORY OF THE SCHOOL DISTRICT IN THE UNITED STATES

Settler-colonial education in what is now termed the United States began with the English Massachusetts Bay Colony, located on unceded lands of the Massachusett people. The colonizers’ shared religious beliefs led their legislature to pass the first public education law in the world, mandating all small towns to appoint a teacher and all larger towns to establish a “gram[m]ar school” (Shoked, 2017, p. 964). Legal scholar Nadav Shoked notes that this law, termed the “Ould Deluder Satan” Act, is considered a key moment in United States’ legal history because it “inaugurated the public duty of providing schooling” and, importantly, rendered “this duty a local - rather than colonial- obligation” (Shoked, 2017, p. 964). However, in contrast to our contemporary system, this responsibility rested upon general purpose governments, rather than a distinct entity created solely to provision education.

Shoked (2017) explains that separate government entities to fulfill schooling obligations emerged from Boston’s unique self-governance processes, relative to other English towns and colonies, and the challenge of administering education in rural areas. Boston’s existing governance structure, the town meeting, proved cumbersome for administering schools, and the duties associated with school management were eventually delegated to town “selectmen.” However, the selectmen’s short term periods rendered them ineffective at managing schools, and leaders later appointed “visitation committees” to focus specifically on public schools. By the end of the colonial era, the visitation committees had “transformed into a formal school committee with separate and established powers- into, that is, a ‘school board’” (Shoked, 2017, p. 968). Following the Revolutionary War, a drafting committee was formed to answer a key question- “how public should public schools be in ethos, constituency, and governance?” (Shoked, 2017, p. 968). The resulting ordinance “The System of Public Education” was adopted by the town meeting and led to the creation of the “first comprehensive system of public schools in any American city” to be overseen by a publicly elected “school committee” (Shoked, 2017, p. 969). The concept of the school board is thus rooted in tensions that have continued to haunt school governance since- a desire for highly localized control, participatory democracy, and a need for specialized and ongoing administration.

Elsewhere in Massachusetts, the increasing dispersal of colonizers challenged communities’ ability to comply with the Olde Deluder Satan Act and provide an education through the town

17 school model. Colonizers that lived farther from the town school were reluctant to pay taxes for a school that was difficult to access, and towns were ultimately forced to operate multiple schools in different areas. A “precinct” model was ultimately approved by the Colonial legislature that allowed each “precinct” to fundraise for their own schools. Massachusetts state legislature’s 1789 Act following Independence formalized both the school committee and district model by listing school “committees” amongst “bodies responsible for a town’s schooling obligations” and precincts, now “districts,” as “holders of duties and powers” (Shoked, 2017, p.971-972). Although the two ideas remained distinct in the Act, towns began to combine them.

Shoked (2017) explains that while the consolidated school district and board emerged in a “peculiar colonial context” (p. 973), over the course of the 19th century it spread around the country due to four primary motivations: “imitation, lack of other local governments, political needs for community-level decision making, and funding necessities'' (p. 979). By the time United States colonialism was expanding across North America, the school district was viewed as an inextricable component of the country’s first public school system. New territories created through the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 were “highly encouraged” to provide public schooling, and some looked directly to Massachusetts as an example as they established their own systems.

The Federal government also offered territorial governments land for schools, and in the absence of other local government structures, the concept of the school committee was imported as a management structure to build their schooling system, and schools themselves. Additionally, separating school governance from general governments was “the sole way for legislatures to appease all communities [by enabling] each to chart its own course, an approach particularly appropriate in an era infused with Jacksonian ideas of popular self-determination” (Shoked, 2017, p. 981). The school district was nimble- it could be constructed along or against existing boundaries, by municipalities or sets of parents- and thus emerged as the “smallest, and most voluntary, unit of self-government in the political system” (Shoked, 2017, p. 981). Finally, the creation of school districts separate from existing general purpose government provided reformers with new avenues for raising much needed funds for schools. As states constitutions began to mandate public education, legislatures established school districts to similarly bypass “languid” general government financing (Shoked, 2017, p. 982). By the end of the 19th century, the school district, “as a politically separate entity with secure governing powers,” was firmly established in American law (Shoked, 2017, p. 984).

The Progressive Era brought the first major challenge to the school district as reformers sought to simultaneously professionalize and centralize public school governance (McDermott, 1999, p. 14). Fearful of corruption, Progressives wanted to divorce “politics” from education by centering expertise and applying scientific management principles to education. To limit politicking and patronage, Reformers first fought to dismantle school districts but later campaigned for its expansion. In urban environments, Progressives replaced large school boards with

18 representatives elected from different wards with smaller boards elected across the city. Reformers claimed this would encourage greater expertise on the board but it also served to intentionally limit participation of low income communities. One Reformer stated that the new election process would also serve to eliminate “the inevitable representation from ‘poor wards’” (McDermott, 1999, p. 15).

In rural settings, large numbers of small districts that were seen as vulnerable to politics and inhospitable to expertise were consolidated. In some parts of the country, however, efforts to consolidate districts were limited due to the lack of geographic overlap between general government boundaries and school districts. Coupled with resident pushback, a compromise was ultimately reached that gave control of consolidations to residents (Shoked, 2017, p. 994). Shoked demonstrates that Progressive Era reforms to education not only distance the school board from residents but also demonstrated the “school district’s normative malleability” (p. 994-995). While school districts originated out of a desire for local control and management, they had now become a vehicle to limit community decisionmaking and expand the role of expertise.

This trend towards centralization and scientific management in education policy reflects larger epistemic and technological shifts. Turning to contemporaneous material infrastructural projects, Appel et al (2018) cite historian Patrick Joyce (2003) to explain that “while privileging the circulation of people and things, infrastructures also served to permit state so separate politics from nature, the technical from the political, and the human from the nonhuman” (p. 4). These attempts to “depoliticize” were offered as a means to free subjects to “participate in civil society and produce economic life” but also differentiated populations and subjected some to “premature death” (Appel et al, 2018, p. 4-5). Indeed, for education reformers this emerging emphasis on scientific management and desire for business-like administration also gave way to tracking, ability grouping, and standardized tests that have been proven to foreclose educational opportunity for low-income, Black and Latinx students (McDermott, 1999; Rury & Rife, 2018).

Progressive Era reforms are largely responsible for the school district as we know it today and have been the subject of much critique since their success. The 1960s and 1970s bore witness to major pushbacks against Progressive Era reforms. The model was critiqued for its reliance on experts and community elites- both for their biases against those that lack social power and their silencing of

Source: Birmingham Public Library Archives / Facing History and Ourselves

19 community knowledge. Further, against a backdrop of Sputnik and low standardized test scores, experts were increasingly viewed as incompetent (McDermott, 1999). Reforms pushed for increased resident participation, moving towards a school-based management model (such as the school councils developed in Chicago), or a school-choice paradigm promoted by neoliberal thinker Milton Friedman.

THE SCHOOL DISTRICT AND LOCALISM

By serving multiple goals and asserting several key normative values, the school district has “sunk into and inside of other structures, social arrangements, and technologies” (Star, 1999, p. 381) to the point that its origins are both understudied and rarely discussed in legal (see Shoked, 2017, note 19), education policy (Batchis, 2010), and urban policy fields (Silverman, 2014). Star (199) explains that one defining feature of infrastructure is its “embeddedness” as one infrastructure sinks into and inside other structures, “people do not necessarily distinguish the several coordinated aspects of infrastructure” (p. 381). This can render infrastructures transparent, such that it “invisibly supports … tasks” while simultaneously linking with conventions of practice and embodying standards (Star, 1999, p. 381). In the case of public education infrastructure, this limited critiques of both the ideological values it asserts and the infrastructural violence that it enacts.

According to Shoked (2017), the four normative values that have justified the school district’s preeminence are “democratic participation, small-scale community building, efficient school management through expertise, and stable school funding” (p. 996). All four are worthy of discussion and have been systematically unpacked by Shoked (2017) and McDermott (1997). As previously mentioned, the model fails to engender the large-scale democratic participation that localist proponents claim. Small-scale community-building is unlikely to occur at the district- rather than school or municipal- scale. If expertise is prioritized, school boards are now on “equal footing with general governments respecting the capacity to promote efficient management” (Shoked, 2017, p. 1010).

Finally, as we see clearly in the Oakland example, school districts can no longer promise stable or sufficient school funding. In fact, we find that attempts to further these values through the school district model have actually resulted in the opposite effects. We will see in the following chapter how localist ideology and its purported commitment to democratic participation and small-scale community building has facilitated the continuance of exclusion, wealth plunder and inequitable educational outcomes.

20 CHAPTER 2: POLITICAL FRAGMENTATION AND THE MAINTENANCE OF SEGREGATION

An undeniable tension arises when educational governance structures are laid over racially and socioeconomically segregated metropolitan areas (Saiger, 2010). In order to fully understand the impact that the school district model has had on urban public education, we must also then understand how cities are organized. This chapter uses the San Francisco Bay Area, specifically the City of Oakland, as staging ground to provide a brief overview of 20th century urban history and understand how fundamental schools have been to urban development and social stratification. It then delves into national court cases to analyze how core functions of public education infrastructure (segregation, resource hoarding) were dismantled, managed, and ultimately repaired through legal and political channels. Specifically, how in the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education (1954) school district fragmentation emerged as the “preeminent tool for resisting the racial integration of schools” (Saiger, 2010, para). The chapter concludes by looking at state-level efforts to ameliorate desegregation within their own jurisdiction and the enduring inequalities that persist across school district boundaries despite reforms.

WHITE FLIGHT AND MUNICIPAL PROLIFERATION

In the first half of the 20th century, six million African Americans fled racial terror in the South and settled in Northern and Western cities (Coates, 2014). Oakland, California, a largely industrial city across the bay from San Francisco saw its Black population grow by over 500 percent from 1940 to 1950 as wartime manufacturing and naval industries drew many migrants (Montojo, 2017). As the city’s Black population grew, its white population began to shrink. From 1950 to 1970 Oakland’s white population fell from 86 percent of all residents to just 59 percent, and by 1980 the city had become majority people of color – with a population that was 47 percent African American, 8.3 percent Asian or Pacific Islander, 9.5 percent Latinx, 0.8 percent Native American, and just 38.6 percent white (Montojo, 2017). Similar demographic shifts occurred throughout the country as white families took advantage of federal policies designed to facilitate white homeownership and the creation of suburbs. This White Flight was motivated not only by a desire for higher quality, affordable housing, but also to avoid social and “fiscal/political” interactions with Black neighbors (Boustan, 2016).

Black families were barred from accessing the same programs through a slew of public policies and publicly encouraged private practices. Prior to World War II, the Homeowners’ Loan Corporation created “Residential Security” maps that marked large neighborhoods accessible to communities of color as “unsafe” for public and private investment (“redlining”) thus limiting communities of color’s ability to access home ownership programs. The Federal Housing

21 Authority (FHA) formed after WWII to provide mortgage insurance to aspiring homeowners similarly encouraged and policed racial segregation. In the Bay Area, the FHA provided insurance to the Westlake subdivision in Daly City that included restrictions, “racial covenants,” limiting sale to non-whites embedded within the deeds for all properties. The unincorporated San Lorenzo community built in 1944 similarly included racial covenants excluding all people of color from its nearly 1,500 single- family homes (Eli Moore et al., 2019). Racial covenants were enforced by homeowners’ associations, realtors, and violence. Wilbur Gary described a Example of restrictive covenant in Berkeley, CA. Source: Eli Moore et al (2019) 400-person mob that stoned his family’s home and placed a Ku Klux Klan cross on their lawn when they moved into a home in the Rollingwood subdivision of unincorporated San Pablo in 1952:

Sheriff’s deputies stood by and observed the rock throwing, they did not make a single arrest, nor did they order the rock throwers to stop. Since that night more rocks have been thrown and threats have been made, but still no arrests have been made and there has been no action by the authorities to put an end to this lawlessness (Gary quoted in Eli Moore et al., 2019, p. 27).

African American families like the Garys experienced such violence and intimidation by both residents and law enforcement throughout the region. Even baseball star Willie Mays struggled to buy a house in San Francisco in 1957- and was subjected to violence when he was finally able to do so (Eli Moore et al., 2019, p. 28). As white families relocated to suburbs outside of traditional urban centers, these policies and practices decimated opportunities for Black wealth generation and massively restricted access to affordable, high-quality housing (Bunten, 2018).

Rather than join the existing metropolis, many of these new, racially homogenous communities chose to incorporate as new municipalities. Kenneth T. Jackson (1985) explains in Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States that there were three primary reasons suburbs chose to form their own governments: “(1) sharper racial, ethnic, and class distinctions, (2) new

22 laws that made incorporation and annexation unworkable, and (3) improved suburban services” (p. 150). While states had previously required that unincorporated areas be annexed by neighboring cities, they began to relax incorporation requirements. Metropolitan fragmentation, or the presence of multiple local governments in one area, proliferated as these racially- homogenous suburbs formed their own local governments rather than share resources and services with existing, generally more heterogenous cities (Wilson, 2014).

This trajectory can be seen in Oakland’s development. Following incorporation in 1854, Oakland leaders began the “Greater Oakland Movement” that sought to expand geographic boundaries and grow their resident base. Boosters felt that larger governments were less susceptible to corruption, and initially wanted to create the largest city on the West Coast by annexing neighboring municipalities (Chris Hambrick, 2019). However, by the turn of the century, Oakland, like many other cities, were rebuffed when they tried to annex the rest of Alameda County (Jackson, 2006). Attempts to absorb the wealthy municipality, Piedmont, were also spurned, leading to Oakland’s donut shape- Piedmont exists as an independent entity surrounded on all sides by Oakland.

Economist Charles Tiebout (1956) famously hypothesized that fragmentation would lead to a beneficial and “efficient provision of public goods by breeding competition among multiple localities for residents”(Wilson, 2014, p. 1425). In his “A Pure Theory of Local Expenditures,” he claimed that, given an array of local governments to choose from, residents would move to the local government that best matches their preference for taxation rates and public services (Tiebout, 1956). Tiebout failed to account for how “political geography will constrain individual decisions regarding residence” (Ford, 1994, p. 1882), the role of endogenous amenities (manifested as a preference for racial or class homogeneity), and how high property-wealth begets lower tax rates. By celebrating the “efficiency value” of a multiplicity of local governments, each with the autonomy to determine local taxing and spending, Tiebout’s model has served as a resounding endorsement of municipal fragmentation and localist ideologies.

However, while ostensibly race- and class- neutral, research has shown that higher amounts of political fragmentation in a metropolitan area is correlated with increased racial and class segregation (Bischoff, 2008). Citing Tiebout’s theory as well as Gregory Weiher’s “boundary line recruitment theory,” legal scholar Erika Wilson (2014) explains under this logic boundaries “become recruitment tools that allow residents to locate themselves in accordance with their preferences thereby allowing metropolitan fragmentation to continue occurring along the lines of race and class in the absence of explicit federal, state, or local policies” (p. 1432). The ensuing competition between localities ultimately “facilitates a perverse type of community building that breeds racial and economic exclusion” (Wilson, 2014, p. 1435) as municipalities compete for high-tax revenue generating residents while simultaneously seeking to exclude residents that require more social services.

San Lorenzo Development near Oakland, CA Source: Eli Moore et al (2019)

SCHOOL DISTRICT FRAGMENTATION

School districts, as geographically defined entities, can meet the same demand for exclusion and resource concentration. With the exception of Hawai’i that contains one single school district across the state, school districts work “de facto with general local governments that encompass overlapping territory [to] to jointly deploy zoning, tax policy, and school quality to compete for residents who bring taxable wealth and to exclude those who are poor and/or expensive” (Saiger, 2010, para). Like municipal fragmentation, the proliferation of new school districts can create a “spiral of stratification” within metro regions, lead to the duplication of services or “wasteful competition, and create a sense of alienation, separation and fear throughout the region (Holme & Finnigan, 2013). In the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education that outlawed racial segregation between schools in the same district, school district fragmentation has emerged as the “preeminent tool for resisting the racial integration of schools” (Saiger, 2010, para).

Measuring the effects of school district fragmentation on segregation, sociologist Kendra Bischoff (2008) found that segregation is more acute for children than the general population,

24 and that as fragmentation increased so did racial segregation. In order to assess district fragmentation, Bischoff measured the likelihood that two school-age children in the same Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) would attend the same school in the same district. She then compared the racial diversity of districts to the racial diversity of the entire MSA and found that nationally the school district was 9% less diverse than the MSA. The discrepancy was most acute in the Detroit metro area where school districts were 43.52% less diverse than the MSA (Bischoff, 2008, p. 198).

In 2019, a research agency, EdBuild, founded with the goal of “bringing common sense and fairness to the way states fund public schools,” found that across the country there were over 1,000 school district borders that outlined “school systems that are both racially isolated form their neighbors and receiving substantially less in funding per student” (EdBuild, 2019). Of those 1,000, 132 borders marked even more acute divides- places were the neighboring districts’ revenue differed by at least 20% and their demographics differed by at least 50% in race. The role that school districts play in perpetuating racial segregation in schools has not gone unnoticed, however, a series of legal disputes have made it increasingly difficult to challenge.

LEGAL CHALLENGES TO SCHOOL DESEGREGATION

Two key Supreme Court cases in the 1970s, Milliken v. Bradley (1974) and San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez (1973), formalized the school district’s role in maintaining school segregation and resource concentration by essentially barring desegregation programs across district lines and upholding local property tax funding schemes for education, regardless of the disparities they produce. In the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education (1954) such cases can be seen as successful attempts to repair public education infrastructure by restoring its ability to differentially provision education and thus perpetuate its role as a “sociomaterial terrain for the reproduction of racism” (Appel et al., 2018, p. 2).

Schoolchildren and NAACP members rally in Washington DC on the 25th Anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education. May 17, 1979.

Source: Nadworny and Turner (2019)

Twenty years after the Supreme Court found racial segregation in schools to be unconstitutional, Black students and parents in Detroit watched as money continued to pour into schools that they could not access. Due to policies that effectively barred Black families from moving to the suburbs, Black students were unable to join those school districts. In the ensuing case, Milliken v.Bradley (1974), parents sued the City of Detroit and State of Michigan and won- a lower court judge ordered that students be bused between Detroit and its 53 suburban school districts in order to achieve meaningful school desegregation in the region. However, the suburban school districts appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing not that their schools were integrated, but that any

26 discrimination on their part was unintentional (Nadworny & Cory Turner, 2019). The Supreme Court overturned the lower court’s decision and ruled that the suburban districts could not be required to participate in desegregation plans because they did not engage in the de jure discrimination of Black students (Ford, 1994).

Legal scholar Erika Wilson (2014) argues that the Court ultimately relied on the “importance of local control and purported autonomy of school districts” when it ruled that districts around Detroit could not be compelled to participate (p.1443). She quotes the decision to demonstrate the centrality of this logic, “school district lines may [not] be casually ignored or treated as a mere administrative convenience . . . [because] [n]o single tradition in public education is more deeply rooted than local control over the operation of schools; local autonomy has long been thought essential both to the maintenance of community concern and support for public schools and to quality of the educational process” (1443).

One year before, the Supreme Court decided another case important to school integration and financing. Ruling against the plaintiff, the Supreme Court determined in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez (1973) that education was not a fundamental right granted under the Constitution. Another consequence of San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez was effectively shifting all school financing legal challenges to state-level courts. Advocates have been fairly successful in state-level suits across the country, with 60 percent of cases leading to some for equalization of state funding.5 However, Ryan and Heise (2002) note that while "school finance litigation has been somewhat successful on the state level …. the general rule is that states must provide more money for poorer districts, while wealthier districts remain largely free to devote locally raised funds to local schools" (2046).

As current levels of school segregation begin to resemble that of the pre-Brown era (Holme & Finnigan, 2013), court cases and legislative reforms have pursued alternative methods for racial and financial equity across schools. However, even when plaintiffs have won declarations that interdistrict disparities violate state constitutions, state courts have refused to “order interdistrict financial equalization [and] in doing so affirm the legality of interdistrict disparities defined by boundaries”(Saiger, 2010, para). Saiger cites legal scholars Richard Ford and Richard Briffault to attribute this challenge to the stubborn “instinct” in American political, legal and civic cultural history to see school district boundaries as “pre-governmental” and somehow static rather than socially constructed. The virtual “sovereignty” that this assigns to school districts not only contradicts the actual legal doctrine that local governments are “creatures of the state,” but also makes it significantly more difficult to envision or enact regionalist approaches to the structuring of public education (Saiger, 2010, para).

5 Notable examples include Sheff v. O’Neill (1989) in Vermont and Serrano v. Priest I (1971) and Serrano v. Priest II (1976) in California.

27 STATE FUNDING EQUALIZATION IN CALIFORNIA

Within California, one major court case is responsible for the state’s funding equalization scheme, Serrano v. Priest.6 As a result of Serrano v. Priest, California implemented a state funding equalization program that sought to more equitably distribute revenue for school districts. Brought by parents and students in Los Angeles County public schools, the class action suit against state and county officials asserted that the existing funding system did not address broad disparities in funding (“Cases, Statutes, and Recent Developments,” 1972). The California State Supreme Court ultimately agreed with the plaintiffs and ruled that the school financing system was unconstitutional because wealthier towns were able to tax their residents at a lower rate and garner the same, if not higher, revenue. Serrano v. Priest altered school funding schemes such that local property taxes were aggregated at the state level and then distributed to localities (Stark & Zasloff, 2013). As a result of Serrano v. Priest, California implemented a state funding equalization program that sought to more equitably distribute local property tax revenue to school districts, in effect “convert[ing] the property tax from a price-like benefit tax into a redistributive statewide tax” (Stark and Zasloff, 2003, p. 803). Economist William Fischel (1989, 1996) has famously argued that Serrano led to the Proposition 13 “Tax Revolt” because it disturbed what was an otherwise functioning Tieboutian consumer choice model. Proposition 13 (passed in 1978) fixed property tax rates at the rate of sale and limited tax assessment increases to no more than 2 percent per year. It has had the cumulative effect of dramatically reducing property tax revenue for the state, and thus public schools (Picker, n.d.). In the aftermath of Proposition 13, California has pursued complicated measures to make-up for the precipitous drop in property tax revenue and currently dedicates 40% of its general fund to K-14 education every year (Murphy & Paluch, 2018). As can be seen in the chart below, Proposition dramatically shifted the education funding landscape in California, from a reliance on local property taxes to state-collected sources.

6 Serrano v. Priest II (1976) affirmed the decision Serrano v. Priest I (1971) on the basis of the California State Constitution after San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez (1973).

Source: from Ed100.org (2020)

In 2013, then Governor Jerry Brown promulgated a new formula for distributing state funding to school districts and educational agencies. This new approach, termed the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF), eliminated many restrictive “categorical” grants (e.g. for school counselors) and replaced them with per-pupil base grants. “Disadvantaged” students receive 20% more “supplemental” funding, and districts where more than half the student population is “disadvantaged” receive an additional extra 50% per pupil as a “concentration” grant (Calefati, 2017). The new structure led to the distribution of $31 billion in supplemental and concentration grant funding to school districts, which then have broad autonomy to determine spending. Despite LCFF’s attention to the multiplicity of student needs, its failure to keep pace with rising base costs (e.g. pensions), minimal oversight, and lack of a regional cost adjustment have led to much criticism.

INEQUITABLE DISTRICTS AND UNEVEN EDUCATIONAL OUTCOMES

Even with California’s state equalization funding formula, great disparities still exist. LCFF seeks to provide sufficient financial resources to meet student needs throughout the state but fails to disrupt the school district model for the actual provisioning of education. Early reports on LCFF impact revealed that while the new formula generally reduced class sizes for low-income students, those students were still often taught by novice teachers with less experience (Julien Lafortune, 2019). This could be due to the proven challenge that districts have recruiting and retaining teachers in schools with high levels of student need, and gestures to the true complexity of guaranteeing a quality education.

Other potential avenues for remediating racial and socioeconomic segregation have proved ineffectual. School choice plans effectively recreate the same power dynamics - plans are voluntary, they typically preserve the ability for “neighborhood kids to attend neighborhood schools,” and often, as is true in Oakland, fail to provide the transportation necessary for students to actually access school options outside of their immediate neighborhood (Ryan & Heise, 2002, p. 2046-2047). Similarly, even in California where interdistrict transfers are permitted, districts maintain broad discretion in accepting transferees. A district can reject an application if “they do not meet ‘specific, written standards for acceptance and rejection of applications,’ which may include ‘consideration of the capacity of a program, class, grade level, school building, or adverse financial impact’” (Fox, 2019, p. 309). The success of these measures in restricting maintaining the status quo can be seen nationally- only 8-9% of students who attend public schools take advantage of intradistrict (“school choice”) transfers, and only 1% of American children attend school outside of their resident district (Fox, 2019, p. 308-309). In theory, LCFF should make wealthy districts more apt to accept inter-district transfers because the funding, measured to match that student’s need, would travel with her. LCFF’s difficulty providing sufficient funding can explain part of an ongoing hesitancy, however, in a wealthy district where property-tax revenue exceeds their mandatory contribution, another explanation – one that is cognizant of the ideological and infrastructural underpinnings of public education.

30 CHAPTER 3: SCHOOL DISTRICT BORDERS AND INFRASTRUCTURAL VIOLENCE

Schooling has long been framed as the great “equalizer,” the key to economic mobility and the American dream of self-creation and opportunity (Noguera, 2003). However, dramatic gaps in educational outcomes and the brutal reality of school closures demonstrate the fault lines underlying the American public education system. An examination of the school district as an infrastructure lays bare the failed “promise” of public education in the United States as well as opportunities for its reconfiguration. This chapter begins by providing an overview of infrastructure, specifically the framework of infrastructural violence formally introduced by Rodgers and O’Neill (2012). Returning to the San Francisco Bay Area, it then reads the history and effects of school districts through an infrastructural lens, with a specific attention to the inequitable distribution that the model engenders, despite a rhetorical veneer of modernity, progress, and promise. Such a reading seeks to not only reposition the provisioning of public education within the realm of planning discourse but also highlight how the public school district negotiates citizenship and belonging. To do the later, the chapter closes with an attention to the discretionary enforcement of school district boundaries in the San Francisco Bay Area to place the localist ideology that undergirds school districting in a larger conversation with infrastructure’s role in reifying social stratification through processes of abjection.

CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE STUDIES AND INFRASTRUCTURAL VIOLENCE

An infrastructural framework allows not only for an examination of the environments in which a system is situated but also an attention to how power structures are reified through the provisioning of a public good. In the introduction to their book The Promise of the Infrastructure (2018), editors Anand, Gupta, and Appel explain that infrastructures give “form to relations between states and subjects on one hand” (p. 4) and “have been technologies that modern states use not only to demonstrate development, progress, and modernity, giving these categories their aesthetics, form and substance… but also to differentiate populations and subject some to premature death” (p. 5).

Dennis Rodgers and Bruce O’Neill explain that “infrastructural violence identifies socially produced wrongs that occur through the workings of what are unambiguously collectively ‘owned’ networks, by virtue of the fact of living within a shared social space” (Rodgers and O’Neill 2012: 405-406). They explain how there are two forms of infrastructural violence: active and passive. Active infrastructural violence is marked by intent- it is “designed to be violent,

31 whether in their implementation or in their functioning” (Rodgers and O’Neill, 2012: 406) and includes the “appropriation and deployment of infrastructure by elite bodies to police vulnerable populations” (Rodgers and O’Neill, 2012: 406). In contrast, passive forms of infrastructural violence derive harmful effects from “infrastructure’s limitations and omissions rather than its direct consequences” (Rodgers and O’Neill, 2012: 407). In the history and contemporary reality of school district organization and financing we saw both. The federal, state, and local policies that fostered white flight and selective suburbanization can be seen as an active form of infrastructural violence that sought to systematically foreclose opportunities for wealth accumulation through social engineering (Coates, 2014). Post-Brown era metropolitan fragmentation, land use policies, and taxation that are technically race-neutral can also be seen as forms of active infrastructural violence because they are examples of legal and political infrastructures used to exclude “undesirable” populations while “perpetuating race- and class- based inequalities in education” (Wilson, 2014, pg. 1442).

On a school level, the effects of passive infrastructural violence can also be seen. In districts on the “losing” side of distributional inequality, like Oakland, a lower access to resources is correlated with lower educational outcomes for students (Saiger, 2010). Although public schools are rarely responsible for their own lack of resources, they become a symbol and transmitter of that violence as they are limited in their ability to provide a quality education, despite a charge to provide socio-economic opportunity. Rodgers and O’Neill (2012) explain that the “collectively held nature of infrastructure that makes it such a powerful site for not just thinking about society’s responsibility to itself and to each of its members, but also for identifying those who undermine this responsibility and for thinking about how to build more just cities” (p. 406).

SCHOOL DISTRICTING IN THE SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA

Studying the spatial history of public education in California reveals that school district boundaries were both variable and used to actively promote racial segregation. Kelly (2019) explains how school district boundaries in California have shifted throughout the history of the state. Reviewing historical records for school districts in nine counties in Northern California, Kelly found that in the late 18th and early 20th century school admission was less contingent on district boundaries than originally thought. He cites a 1912 example in which a San Jose superintendent “described the city’s long-standing tradition of permitting children living outside of San Jose to attend its schools freely” to explain that boundary maps had a tendency to “misrepresent actual practices” (p. 4). Between 1910 and 1930, many communities petitioned county governments to shift boundaries to match actual attendance patterns, demonstrating how, in the context of school districting and residential segregation “maps can create a reality and not just reflect it” (Kelly, 2019, pg. 4). Redrawing of district borders between 1910 and 1930 was also in response to a shift of school financing from the state to local level. In 1910, California abolished the statewide property tax leading many districts to levy their own property taxes to

32 fund schools (Kelly, 2019, p. 4). According to Kelly, the San Jose superintendent “insisted that the policy of admitting ‘outside children’... was ended in response to changes in the state’s school funding system” (p. 4).

School district reorganization after World War II not only maintained school segregation but extended it. In line with other national reform movements, the California legislature formed the State Commission on School Districts in 1945 to consolidate school districts. As a result, the number of school districts in California shrunk by 57% between 1945 and 1972. Kelly (2019) found that the commission was “explicit about the importance of using redistricting to keep students apart, rather than bring them together” (p. 9). He found that the observed irregularity in district shape was due to a desire to preserve segregation as the Commission (1946) sought to match “natural groupings” of people and insisted that no new districts should “include sharply contrasting centers of cultural, religious, or economic interests which would probably result in discrimination of some children” (as quoted in Kelly, 2019, p. 9). The elasticity of district boundaries demonstrates that they are not inherent or primordial but rather a technology used to differentially provision public education.

State officials encouraged local commissions to facilitate school segregation not only through their consolidation of school district boundaries, but also with the drawing of school attendance boundaries within a district. When a local commission considered merging two diverse communities in the same attendance zone, a state official (1949) explained that “unification does not mean centralization of attendance…Quite to the contrary, the ‘neighborhood’ feelings for the ‘neighborhood’ school should remain as strong under unification as present” (as quoted in Kelly, 2019, p. 10). The goals of district reorganization were so transparent at the time that it drew notice from civil rights activists and the media. A reporter for the Los Angeles Sentinel wrote that the new district boundaries demonstrated that Jim Crow continued in California, and the NAACP condemned the “gerrymandered district lines” that “extend[ed] the pattern of segregation” (Kelly, 2019, p. 10). Officials were successful - in the 1950s, six elementary schools in Richmond were almost entirely African American (>95%), even though African American children only accounted for 22% of the elementary population district wide (Kelly, 2019, p. 10).

The variability of school district borders in the 20th century demonstrates how the infrastructure used to distribute public education in the United States not only reproduces but also actively extends racial segregation and social stratification. Infrastructure can render “broader processes of marginalization, abjection and disconnection...operational and sustainable” (Rodgers and O’Neill, 2012, p. 403). In the case of public education in the United States, the school district has succeeded in doing exactly that- operationalizing and sustaining school segregation and inequitable resource distribution, even in the face of numerous attempts to address those processes. Examining the public school district as an infrastructure is also useful in highlighting

33 its collectively owned nature and not only “thinking about society’s responsibility to itself and to each of its members, but also for identifying those who undermine this responsibility” (Rodgers and O’Neill, 2012, p. 206). The infrastructure for provisioning public education has survived numerous challenges because of its exceptional ability to preserve suburban privilege, hoard opportunity (Grooms, 2019; Rury & Saatcioglu, 2011), and further processes of marginalization and abjection.

INFRASTRUCTURAL VIOLENCE AND THE DISCRETIONARY ENFORCEMENT OF SCHOOL DISTRICT BOUNDARIES

Tucked entirely within the City of Oakland, Piedmont, California is known for its high-income residents, expensive homes, and high performing schools. With a 2017 median household income of $202,631(EdBuild.org, n.d.), Piedmont earned its reputation as a “City of Millionaires” in the early 1900’s and has resisted incorporation since then (Faw & Jabbar, 2020). The relationship between Piedmont and Oakland has long been tense. Piedmont maintains many of their own municipal services to serve their town population of 11,000. including their own police, fire, parks, and, importantly, schools. However, even one of the few amenities they share, library services, proved contentious. When Oakland faced major budget cuts in 2011 and dramatically cut library services, Piedmont refused to contribute more despite already paying less- Piedmont contributes $35 per resident while Oakland pays $50 per resident (Jones, 2012). Between the 1890s and 1960s, as Oakland’s Black population grew exponentially, Piedmont was one of the Bay Area’s “Sunset Towns” where African Americans, Mexican Americans, Chinese Americans, or other people of color were not allowed to be present in the city after sunset (Eli Moore et al., 2019).

34 Compared to Oakland, Piedmont is overwhelmingly wealthy and white. In 214, the Piedmont housing stock contained exactly 66 multi- family units compared to the 3,858 detached single family homes (City of Piedmont, 2014). Furthermore, the Piedmont Charter requires a citywide vote before making residential zoning map changes, especially when adding high-density, multi- family housing (City of Piedmont, 2014).

Bearing in mind that that the median property value in Piedmont is $1,715,700 (EdBuild.org, n.d.), Piedmont provides a clear example of how purportedly race-neutral policies can lead to racial segregation (Bischoff, 2008, pg. 183)- the City of Piedmont is 73% white and 2% Black, compared to its surrounding city, Oakland, that is 37% white and 24% Black (Schwartz, Ockerman, & Schwartz, 2019). Both the median property value and average household income in Oakland are approximately a third of Piedmont’s, $564,000 and $63,242 respectively. Notably, these stark socioeconomic and racial divides also translate to student need- approximately 73% of students in OUSD qualify for free and reduced lunch, while only 1% of Piedmont Unified School District (PUSD) students do- and per pupil expenditures, PUSD pays approximately $3,600 more per pupil than OUSD. The socioeconomic differences between the two districts also translates to a stark educational achievement gap. Only 30% of the 2016 high school graduating class from OUSD went on to enroll in a four-year college, compared to 95% of PUSD graduating seniors (Fox, 2019).

The challenges that school district fragmentation pose to regional educational equity can be seen in the border politics that emerge between districts. In their analysis of “school district hopping,” when families send a child to a school district in which they do not formally reside, scholars Leah Faw and Huriya Jabbar (2020) looked closely at the non-resident policies for PUSD and

35 OUSD. Faw and Jabbar (2020) note that while OUSD maintains “lenient residency requirements” that reflect an “unwillingness to create policy that would create barriers to enrollment” (p. 25), PUSD has a four-page document outlining proof-of-residency requirements and a “full process for ‘Termination of Enrollment’ if ‘questions arise regarding the student’s residency’” (Faw & Jabbar, 2020, pg. 26). The discrepancy reflects a “low” and “high” status that Faw & Jabbar attribute to districts. In addition to the gaps in educational achievement and funding, they note OUSD’s history of financial insolvency and state receivership, high teacher turnover rates, aging infrastructure and declining enrollment as sources contributing to Oakland’s “poor” reputation in the area (Faw & Jabbar, 2020, p. 24). Other “high status” districts in the Bay Area, such as Orinda and Walnut Creek School Districts demonstrated similar demographics and stringent board policies regarding non-resident students as Piedmont (Faw & Jabbar, 2020, pgs. 26-27).

ABJECTION AND EMBODIED DISTINCTION

Orinda Union School District, just east of Oakland, is a similarly “high status” district that actively enforces its strict residency requirements. Located on the other side of the Oakland Hills, the City of Orinda has a population of 19,475 and is a self-proclaimed “delightful place in which to work , live, visit and play along with its: culture, excellent schools, history, natural beauty and safety” (City of Orinda, n.d.). Orinda, like Piedmont, has a high median property value, $1,221,600, a high median household income, $185,592, and an extremely low student poverty rate within their school district, 2% (EdBuild.org, n.d.). In order to attend public school in Orinda, you must prove residency with at least three documents, though they note that “additional residence verification documents may be requested on an as needed basis” (Orinda Union School District, 2019). Orinda, like all Californian school districts, is required to allow interdistrict transfers, however requests must be submitted within a 16 day window in July in order to be considered and applications are approved at the Superintendent's discretion (Orinda Union School District, n.d.).

In the 2010-2011 school year, Orinda earned widespread notoriety for hiring private investigators to determine if a seven-year old Latina student named Vivian, actually “resided” within the district. The Board determined that even though Vivian lived in a wealthy home where her mother, Maria, was a housekeeper, Vivian was a “resident” of Bay Point where her grandmother resided. Even after Maria informed the investigator that she received mail at her mother’s house to avoid her ex-husband, against whom she had a restraining order, the District expelled Vivian from their schools. In a city where 82.4% of the population is white and only 4.6% of residents are Hispanic or Latinx, seven year-old Vivian was singled out as someone who did not belong (Reich, 2014).

Vivian pictures at home with her Justin Bieber doll. Source: Bay Are News Group (2014)

Vivian’s case in Orinda is a blatant example of how public education infrastructure is used to not only reproduce social control but also render lower income, students of color abject. In his study of municipal water infrastructure in Mumbai, Anand (2012) explains that,

abjection is a dialectical process produced out of deeply situated discursive relationships and material practices, where difference is constantly reproduced, enacted and fore- grounded between people that have deep overlapping social histories. Critically, these differences are realized and reproduced through the production and management of urban infrastructure (p. 490).

Orinda’s education infrastructure, or more broadly California’s, is used to reject Maria and Vivian’s claim to municipal citizenship and in so doing reproduce a definition of belonging that is predicated on the highly racialized process of wealth accumulation. It is important to note that it is Vivian herself, as a seven-year old student that was rejected - and that someone must have filed a complaint to initiate the $1,872 probe targeting Vivian out of 2,555 students in Orinda Union (EdBuild.org, n.d.; Matthias Gafni, 2015; Roberts, 2014). Anand (2012) explains that abjection is “a social and political process through which particular populations are pushed beyond the biopolitical care of the state or other institutions, even as they remain central to the constitution of such social (or political collectives)” (p. 488). The reproductive labor that Maria, and other domestic workers like her, perform for white, Orinda families is absolutely central to

37 the economic functioning of these particular social collectives, and yet Vivian and Maria are disconnected from the basic biopolitical care provided through an elementary education. By denying her daughter a place in their school, we see how the educational infrastructure is used to differentially produce “legitimate” and “abject” citizens. The networks of care and politics of maternity involved in Vivian’s case are also interesting- Orinda Union refused to relent until Maria’s employer signed an affidavit to become Vivian’s caregiver (Matthias Gafni, 2014; Roberts, 2014).

Referring to Ferguson (1999), Anand (2012) draws a clear distinction between the status of being “disconnected” versus “unconnected” - the former is “an active process through which subjects are pushed down, or cast out of social and political systems they could once access and claim” (p. 489). Maria and Vivian were never supposed to access Orinda’s education system, but they did, leading to an active form of violence experienced through educational infrastructure. On November 14, 2014, Maria received a letter notifying her of the private investigation that had been conducted and its result: her daughter’s disenrollment from the district (Storch, 2014). No opportunities were provided to contest the decision, and Maria was informed that she had five days to remove Vivian from her school. The opaque decisionmaking process and inhumane manner in which Vivian’s enrollment was terminated have since been viewed as errors on the

38 part of the District, however, the case still demonstrates the lengths that “high status” school districts will go to enforce boundaries constructed to sequester educational resources and exclude undesirable students.

The discretionary policing of school district boundaries is perhaps the most blatant example of the infrastructural violence enacted by our current method for provisioning public education in the United States. Despite attempts to equalize funding through state-wide formulas, the district model, at its core, maintains and reproduces socioeconomic and racial segregation. Districts like Piedmont or Orinda are able to raise additional funding beyond what is provided by the state both through formal measures such as parcel taxes and informal processes such as active parent teacher organizations or similar entities (National Public Radio, 2019). In addition to greater resources, these spatially delineated collectives also grapple with significantly less student need (National Public Radio, 2019). Infrastructure is as imbued with the promise of modernity as it is the power to marginalize, abject, and disconnect (Rodgers and O’Neill, 2012). Reading school districts through this lens reveals not only the central role that public education plays in urban systems, ideologies, and stratification, but also the dire need for its reform.

39 CONCLUSION: ON INFRASTRUCTURE, SCHOOL CLOSURES, AND THE INTIMACY OF SCHOOLING

The school that Saru Jayaraman fought to preserve does not fit neatly into the all-too-familiar portrait of low-income, predominately Black and Latinx schools that have been targeted for closure across the country (Ewing, 2018; Good, 2017). In 2018-19, Kaiser Elementary School, where her children attended, had a student population that was 35.8% white, 55.1% of students met or exceeded state standardized test benchmarks in reading, 56.9% of students met or exceeded benchmarks in math, and 32.1% of students qualified for free or reduced-price lunch (EdData, 2020a; Oakland Unified School District, 2020b, 2020a). In comparison, Sankofa Elementary school that Kaiser will merge with was 3.2% white, 7.5% met benchmarks in reading (none exceeded benchmarks), 4.5% met or exceeded benchmarks in math, and 82% qualified for free or reduced-price lunch (EdData, 2020b; Oakland Unified School District, 2020a, 2020b).While enrollment in Kaiser has remained steady, gaining two students between the 2016- 17 and 2017-18 school years, Sankofa lost 128 students between those two school years alone (EdData, 2020a, 2020b).

Reading critical analyses of school consolidations, Sankofa is the school you would expect to close- but it instead it is its wealthy, “high-performing,” racially integrated neighbor, Kaiser. Rather than reassigning Sankofa students to other schools, Kaiser students are being asked to bus, or be driven by well-resourced parents, down the hill to attend Sankofa. Kaiser’s principal of 26 years will take over as the acting principal of the merged campus in part because Sankofa has struggled to maintain a permanent principal for several years (Marsh, 2019). Jayaraman, as progressive leader in the Bay Area, would seem like an unlikely opponent to such a merger – and indeed her organization skillfully lays the case against all school closures rather than simply Kaiser (Oakland Not For Sale, n.d.). Nonetheless, given the financial reality that the District claims, and that third parties agree with, a merger between Kaiser and Sankofa would seem to be in the service of resource distribution, disrupting the highly uneven patterns of achievement and resource throughout Oakland (Marsh, 2019).

This thesis has argued that the infrastructure responsible for provisioning public education has, at a fundamental level, created the conditions in which school closures are structurally inevitable in lower-income, predominately Black and Latinx, school districts such as Oakland. Jayaraman’s story highlights the affective, tender underbelly of infrastructure that becomes materially apparent when applied to education – schooling is personal, it is intimate, it is your child, it is complex, it muddies politics, it prompts you to put your body in harm’s way. With Vivian, Maria and Saru, we see the “affective relationship between people and infrastructure [that] while being shaped by notions of futurity, is not always positive and may instead result in deferral ruination, suspension, abandonment, and repurposing” (Stoler, 2013 quoted in Appel et al, 2018, p. 18). In the context of education, we see how infrastructure promises progress and freedom while simultaneously disconnecting and abjectifying schools, parents and, most heartbreakingly, children.

41 WORKS CITED

Acey, C. S. (2019). Silence and Voice in Nigeria’s Hybrid Urban Water Markets: Implications for Local Governance of Public Goods. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 43(2), 313–336. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12715

Adams, M., & Black, D. W. (2019). Equality of Opportunity and the Schoolhouse Gate. (Book Review). Yale Law Journal, 128(8), 1302.

Aggarwal, U., Mayorga, E., & Nevel, D. (2012). Slow violence and neoliberal education reform: Reflections on a school closure. Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology, 18(2), 156– 164. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0028099

Ahmed, N. (2013). Education: The “Business” of America. PennGSE Perspectives on Urban Education, 10(1), 2.

Alameda County Grand Jury. (2019). The Oakland Unified School District’s Broken Administrative Culture- Millions Wasted Every Year (2018-2019 Report). 22.

Anand, N. (2011). Pressure: The PoliTechnics of Water Supply in Mumbai. Cultural Anthropology, 26(4), 542–564. JSTOR.

Anand, N. (2012). Municipal disconnect: On abject water and its urban infrastructures. Ethnography, 13(4), 487–509. https://doi.org/10.1177/1466138111435743

Anand, N. (2018). A Public Matter: Water, Hydraulics, Biopolitics. In The Promise of Infrastructure (pp. 155–172). Duke University Press.

Anand, N., Gupta, A., & Appel, H. (Eds.). (2018). The Promise of Infrastructure. Duke University Press.

Appel, H. (2012). Offshore work: Oil, modularity, and the how of capitalism in Equatorial Guinea. American Ethnologist, 39(4), 692–709. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1425.2012.01389.x

Appel, H., Anand, N., & Gupta, A. (2015, September 24). The Infrastructure Toolbox: Introduction. Society for Cultural Anthropology. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/introduction-the-infrastructure- toolbox

Appel, H., Anand, N., & Gupta, A. (2018). Temporality, Politics, and the Promise of Infrastructure. In The Promise of Infrastructure (1st ed., pp. 1–41). Duke University Press.

Appel, H. C. (2012). Walls and white elephants: Oil extraction, responsibility, and infrastructural violence in Equatorial Guinea. Ethnography, 13(4), 439–465. https://doi.org/10.1177/1466138111435741

Auyero, J., & de Lara, A. B. (2012). In harm’s way at the urban margins. Ethnography, 13(4), 531– 557. https://doi.org/10.1177/1466138111435746

42 Baker, B. D., Farrie, D., & Sciarra, D. (2018). Is School Funding Fair? A National Report Card. Education Law Center. http://www.schoolfundingfairness.org/

Bakker, K. (2013). Constructing ‘Public’ Water: The World Bank, Urban Water Supply, and the Biopolitics of Development. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 31(2), 280–300. https://doi.org/10.1068/d5111

Bakker, K., Kooy, M., Shofiani, N. E., & Martijn, E.-J. (2008). Governance Failure: Rethinking the Institutional Dimensions of Urban Water Supply to Poor Households. World Development, 36(10), 1891–1915. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2007.09.015

Balibar, É. (2009). We, the People of Europe?: Reflections on Transnational Citizenship. Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400825783

Barnum, M. (2019, July 11). EdBuild, which highlighted funding disparities, plans to close next year. Chalkbeat. https://www.chalkbeat.org/2019/7/11/21121011/edbuild-nonprofit-that-highlighted- funding-disparities-plans-to-close-next-year

Basu, R. (2013). Multiplying spaces of subalterity in education: From ideological realms to strategizing outcomes: Multiplying spaces of subalterity in education. The Canadian Geographer / Le Géographe Canadien, 57(3), 260–270. https://doi.org/10.1111/cag.12029

Batchis, W. (2010). Urban Sprawl and the Constitution: Educational Inequality as an Impetus to Low Density Living. The Urban Lawyer, 42(1), 95–133.

Bay Area News Group. (2014, November 27). Orinda: District hires private investigator, kicks live-in nanny’s daughter out of school. East Bay Times. https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2014/11/27/orinda-district-hires-private-investigator-kicks-live- in-nannys-daughter-out-of-school/

Bay City News. (2019, October 25). Protesters to Sue Oakland District for Police Use of Force. NBC Bay Area. http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/Oakland-School-Board-Meeting-Protesters- to-Sue-District-for-Excessive-Force-by-Police-563895271.html

Berkman, M. B., & Plutzer, E. (2005). Ten Thousand Democracies: Politics and Public Opinion in America’s School Districts. Georgetown University Press. http://muse.jhu.edu/book/106

Berry, C. R., & West, M. R. (2010). Growing Pains: The School Consolidation Movement and Student Outcomes. Journal of Law, Economics, & Organization, 26(1), 1–29. JSTOR.

Bierbaum, A. H. (2020). Managing shrinkage by “right-sizing” schools: The case of school closures in Philadelphia. Journal of Urban Affairs, 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1080/07352166.2020.1712150

Birmingham Public Library Archives. (n.d.). Graymont Elementary School in Birmingham, Alabama, late 1930s. [Online Image]. Facing History and Ourselves. Retrieved May 19, 2020, from https://www.facinghistory.org/resource-library/image/graymont-elementary-school-birmingham- alabama-late-1930s

43 Bischoff, K. (2008). School District Fragmentation and Racial Residential Segregation: How Do Boundaries Matter? Urban Affairs Review, 44(2), 182–217. https://doi.org/10.1177/1078087408320651

Black, D. W. (2018). The Constitutional Compromise to Guarantee Education. Stanford Law Review, 70, 735–837.

Blanc, E. (2019, February 21). Oakland Teachers Are Striking Against Billionaire Privatizers. https://jacobinmag.com/2019/02/oakland-public-schools-teachers-strike

Bondi, L. (1987). School closures and local politics: The negotiation of primary school rationalization in Manchester. Political Geography Quarterly, 6(3), 203–224. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0260- 9827(87)80001-0

Boustan, L. P. (2016). Competition in the Promised Land: Black Migrants in Northern Cities and Labor Markets. In Competition in the Promised Land. Princeton University Press. https://www.degruyter.com/view/title/528016

Bowker, G. C., Baker, K., Millerand, F., & Ribes, D. (2010). Toward Information Infrastructure Studies: Ways of Knowing in a Networked Environment. In J. Hunsinger, L. Klastrup, & M. Allen (Eds.), International Handbook of Internet Research (pp. 97–117). Springer Netherlands. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-9789-8_5

Boyer, D. (2018). Infrastructure, Potential Energy, Revolution. In The Promise of Infrastructure (pp. 223–246). Duke University Press.

Briffault, R. (1990a). Our Localism: Part I: The Structure of Local Governemnt Law. Columbia Law Review, 90(1), 116.

Briffault, R. (1990b). Our Localism: Part II--Localism and Legal Theory. Columbia Law Review, 90(2), 346. https://doi.org/10.2307/1122776

Briffault, R. (1990c). Our Localism: Part II--Localism and Legal Theory. Columbia Law Review, 90(2), 346. https://doi.org/10.2307/1122776

Briffault, R. (1996). The Local Government Boundary Problem in Metropolitan Areas. Stanford Law Review, 48(5), 1115. https://doi.org/10.2307/1229382

Briscoe, F. M., & Khalifa, M. A. (2015). ‘That racism thing’: A critical race discourse analysis of a conflict over the proposed closure of a black high school. Race Ethnicity and Education, 18(6), 739–763. https://doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2013.792798

Bunten, D. (2018, May 23). A Sense of Where You Are. Frank Essays. http://www.franknews.us/essays/111/a-sense-of-where-you-are

Cagle, S., Ockerman, E., & Schwartz, D. (2019, September 19). Municipal Borders Have a Huge Impact on Millions of People’s Daily Lives. Here Are a Few of America’s Starkest. Vice.

44 https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/evjgek/municipal-borders-have-a-huge-impact-on-millions- of-peoples-daily-lives-here-are-a-few-of-americas-starkest-v26n3

Calefati, J. (2017, June 18). Is California’s investment in needy students paying off? Few signs yet that achievement gap is closing. CalMatters. https://calmatters.org/education/k-12- education/2017/06/is-californias-investment-in-needy-students-paying-off-few-signs-yet-that- achievement-gap-is-closing/

Calefati, J. (2018, July 22). California Teacher Pension Debt Swamps School Budgets. KQED. https://www.kqed.org/news/11681898/california-teacher-pension-debt-swamps-school-budgets

Capper, C. A. (2015). The 20th-Year Anniversary of Critical Race Theory in Education: Implications for Leading to Eliminate Racism. Educational Administration Quarterly, 51(5), 791–833. https://doi.org/10.1177/0013161X15607616

Carse, A. (2012). Nature as infrastructure: Making and managing the Panama Canal watershed. Social Studies of Science, 42(4), 539–563. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312712440166

Chang, A. (2018, January 8). We can draw school zones to make classrooms less segregated. This is how well your district does. Vox. https://www.vox.com/2018/1/8/16822374/school-segregation- gerrymander-map

Cidell, J. (2011). Distribution Centers among the Rooftops: The Global Logistics Network Meets the Suburban Spatial Imaginary. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 35(4), 832– 851. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2427.2010.00973.x

City of Orinda. (n.d.). About Orinda | Orinda, CA. City of Orinda. Retrieved April 28, 2020, from https://www.cityoforinda.org/262/About-Orinda

City of Piedmont. (2007, July 2). Piedmont Zoning Map. https://piedmont.ca.gov/UserFiles/Servers/Server_13659739/File/Government/Departments/Plan ning%20Division/Zoning/Piedmont%20Zoning%20Map.pdf

City of Piedmont. (2014). 2015-2023 Housing Element. http://piedmont.hosted.civiclive.com/UserFiles/Servers/Server_13659739/File/Government/Proje cts/General%20Plan%20and%20Housing%20Element/housing_element.pdf

Clandfield, D. (2010). The School As Community Hub: A Public Alternative To The Neo-Liberal Threat To Ontario Schools. Our Schools / Our Selves, 19(4), 7–74.

Clark, D. E., & Herrin, W. E. (2000). The Impact of Public School Attributes on Home Sale Prices in California. Growth & Change, 31(3), 385. https://doi.org/10.1111/0017-4815.00134

Coates, T.-N. (2014, June). The Case for Reparations. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/

Conner, J., & Rosen, S. (2013). How Students Are Leading Us: Youth Organizing and the Fight for Public Education in Philadelphia. PennGSE Perspectives on Urban Education, 10(1), 7.

45 Cucchiara, M. B. (2013). Marketing schools, marketing cities: Who wins and who loses when schools become urban amenities (Rotch Library - Stacks LC5133.P5 C84 2013). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013.

Dalakoglou, D., & Kallianos, Y. (2018). ‘Eating mountains’ and ‘eating each other’: Disjunctive modernization, infrastructural imaginaries and crisis in Greece. Political Geography, 67, 76–87. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2018.08.009

Danilchick, A. (2013). Editor’s Conclusion: Towards New Perspectives on Public Education and School Reform. PennGSE Perspectives on Urban Education, 10(1), 3.

Deeds, V., & Pattillo, M. (2015). Organizational “Failure” and Institutional Pluralism: A Case Study of an Urban School Closure. Urban Education, 50(4), 474–504. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042085913519337

Diem, S., & Frankenberg, E. (2013). The Politics of Diversity: Integration in an Era of Political and Legal Uncertainty. Teachers College Record, 30.

Diem, S., Holme, J. J., Edwards, W., Haynes, M., & Epstein, E. (2019). Diversity for Whom? Gentrification, Demographic Change, and the Politics of School Integration. Educational Policy. https://doi.org/info:doi/10.1177/0895904818807316

Dowdall, E. (2011). Closing Public Schools in Philadelphia: Lessons from Six Urban Districts (Philadelphia Research Intiative, p. 21). Pew Charitable Trust.

ED100. (n.d.). Who Pays: Where California’s Public School Funds Come From. Ed100.Org. Retrieved May 19, 2020, from https://ed100.org/lessons/whopays

EdBuild. (2019). Dismissed: America’s Most Divisive School District Borders (p. 54). EdBuild. https://s3.amazonaws.com/edbuild.org/public/projects/dismissed/report/EdBuild+Divisive+Bord ers+2019.pdf

EdBuild.org. (n.d.). Dividing Lines: 2013-2017. Retrieved December 19, 2019, from https://edbuild.org/content/dividing-lines/main

EdBuild.org. (2020). FundEd California Report: A Detailed Look at California’s Funding Policies. EdBuild. http://funded.edbuild.org/reports/state/CA/in-depth

EdData. (2020a, May). School Profile—Kaiser Elementary. Ed-Data.Org. http://www.eddata.org/school/Alameda/Oakland-Unified/Kaiser-Elementary

EdData. (2020b, May). School Profile—Sankofa Academy. Ed-Data.Org. http://www.eddata.org/school/Alameda/Oakland-Unified/Sankofa-Academy

Education Week. (2016). Interdistrict Enrollment Appealing, Tricky. Education Week, 35(31). Social Science Premium Collection. http://search.proquest.com.ezp- prod1.hul.harvard.edu/docview/1792384098?accountid=11311

46 Eli Moore, Nicole Montojo, & Nicole Mauri. (2019). Roots, Race, & Place: A History of Racially Exclusionary Housing in the San Francisco Bay Area. Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society, University of California, Berkeley. https://belonging.berkeley.edu/rootsraceplace/originsofexclusion

Epstein, K. (n.d.). Post Salon Backs Call on State Officials to Investigate and Remove FCMAT | Post News Group. Retrieved November 30, 2019, from https://postnewsgroup.com/2019/11/07/post- salon-backs-call-on-state-officials-to-investigate-and-remove-fcmat/

Epstein, K. K. (2006). A different view of urban schools: Civil rights, critical race theory, and unexplored realities. P. Lang.

Ewing, E. L. (2018). Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side. University of Chicago Press.

Faw, L., & Jabbar, H. (2020). Poor Choices: The Sociopolitical Context of “Grand Theft Education.” Urban Education, 55(1), 3–37. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042085916651322

Fensterwald, J. (2019, November 6). State audit finds education money not serving high-needs students, calls for changes in funding law. EdSource. https://edsource.org/2019/state-audit-finds- education-money-not-serving-high-needs-students-calls-for-changes-in-funding-law/619504

Fensterwald, J., & Frey, S. (n.d.). Budget deal confirms record K-12 spending. EdSource. Retrieved April 27, 2020, from https://edsource.org/2015/budget-deal-confirms-record-k-12- spending/81590

Ferguson, J. (2012). Structures of responsibility. Ethnography, 13(4), 558–562. https://doi.org/10.1177/1466138111435755

Fiel, J. (2015). Closing Ranks: Closure, Status Competition, and School Segregation. American Journal of Sociology, 121(1), 126–170. https://doi.org/10.1086/682027

Fine, M. (2013). Another Philadelphia Story: Mobilizing resistance and widening the educational imagination in the midst of corporate assault on the public sphere. PennGSE Perspectives on Urban Education, 10, 1–4.

Ford, R. T. (1994). The Boundaries of Race: Political Geography in Legal Analysis. Harvard Law Review, 107(8), 1841. https://doi.org/10.2307/1341760

Fox, D. M. (2019). Removing Residency Requirements from California Public School Enrollment. UC Davis Law Review, 52, 297–328.

Frankenberg, E., & Orfield, G. (Eds.). (2012). The Resegregation of Suburban Schools: A Hidden Crisis in American Education. Harvard Education Press.

Frankenberg, E., Siegel-Hawley, G., & Diem, S. (2017). Segregation by District Boundary Line: The Fragmentation of Memphis Area Schools. Educational Researcher, 46(8), 449–463. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X17732752

47 Freedberg, L., & Harrington, T. (2019, November 13). Oakland school chief’s tenure at pivotal point. EdSource. https://edsource.org/2019/oakland-school-chiefs-tenure-at-pivotal-point/619476

Friedman, B., & Solow, S. (n.d.). The Federal Right to an Adequate Education. 66.

Furlong, K. (2014). STS beyond the “modern infrastructure ideal”: Extending theory by engaging with infrastructure challenges in the South. Technology in Society, 38, 139–147. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techsoc.2014.04.001

Gabor, A. (2019, November). The K-12 Takeover: Big Philanthropy’s bid to privatize education. Harper’s Magazine. https://harpers.org/archive/2019/11/the-k-12-takeover-charter-schools-new- orleans/

Gallagher, M. (2015). Developing Housing and Education Partnerships (p. 30). Urban Institute. https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/49021/2000181-Developing-Housing-and- Education-Partnerships.pdf

Galvez, M. M. (2017). Next Steps for the Seattle Housing Authority-Seattle Public Schools Partnership (p. 46). Urban Institute. https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/95521/next-steps-for-the-seattle-housing- authority-seattle-public-schools-partnership.pdf

Garcia, V. (2015, September 24). Infrastructure Toolbox [Online Image]. Introduction: The Infrastructure Toolbox. https://assets.culanth.org/content/Theorizing-the- Contemporary/_t1140x760/Infrastructure-Toolbox- Thumbnail.jpg?mtime=20190218105614&focal=none

Good, R. M. (2017a). Invoking landscapes of spatialized inequality: Race, class, and place in Philadelphia’s school closure debate. Journal of Urban Affairs, 39(3), 358–380. https://doi.org/10.1080/07352166.2016.1245069

Good, R. M. (2017b). Histories that root us: Neighborhood, place, and the protest of school closures in Philadelphia. Urban Geography, 38(6), 861–883. https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2016.1182286

Good, R. M. (2019). Neighborhood Schools and Community Development: Revealing the Intersections through the Philadelphia School Closure Debate. Journal of Planning Education and Research, 0739456X1983976. https://doi.org/10.1177/0739456X19839769

Graham, S., & Thrift, N. (2007). Out of Order: Understanding Repair and Maintenance. Theory, Culture & Society, 24(3), 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276407075954

Green, M., & McEvoy, J. (2019, January 29). Why is the Closure of a Small School in Oakland Causing Such a Stir? KQED. https://www.kqed.org/news/11721015/the-big-fight-over-a-small- school-in-oakland-what-you-need-to-know

48 Grooms, A. (2019). Turbulence in St. Louis County: School Transfers, Opportunity Hoarding, and the Legacy of Brown. Peabody Journal of Education, 94(4), 403–419. https://doi.org/10.1080/0161956X.2019.1648952

Hambrick, C. (2019, April 4). Why Is Piedmont a Separate City From Oakland? https://www.kqed.org/news/11737575/why-is-piedmont-a-separate-city-from-oakland-2

Hannah-Jones, N. (2019, August 14). America Wasn’t a Democracy, Until Black Americans Made It One. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/black- history-american-democracy.html, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/black-history-american- democracy.html

Harrington, Teresa. (n.d.). Oakland Unified chided for ‘highly unusual’ and ‘suspicious’ fiscal practices. EdSource. Retrieved February 15, 2020, from https://edsource.org/2018/oakland- unified-chided-for-highly-unusual-and-suspicious-fiscal-practices/598938

Harrington, Teresa. (2019, November 26). OUSD School Board Meeting [Online Image]. EdSource. https://mk0edsource0y23p672y.kinstacdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/IMG_3230- 1200x750.jpg

Harrington, Theresa. (n.d.-a). How to close schools? Oakland finds out just how tough that can be. EdSource. Retrieved November 17, 2019, from https://edsource.org/2019/how-to-close-schools- oakland-unified-finds-out-just-how-tough-that-can-be/614147

Harrington, Theresa. (n.d.-b). Oakland offers students of closed schools alternatives to merged campuses. EdSource. Retrieved November 17, 2019, from https://edsource.org/2019/oakland- offers-students-of-closed-schools-alternatives-to-merged-campuses/618478

Harrington, Theresa. (n.d.-c). Oakland Unified gets unprecedented help with fiscal practices. EdSource. Retrieved February 15, 2020, from https://edsource.org/2019/oakland-unified-gets- unprecedented-help-with-fiscal-practices/610666

Harrington, Theresa. (n.d.-d). Oakland Unified hires interim CFO to fix fiscal problems as it seeks a permanent financial chief. EdSource. Retrieved February 15, 2020, from https://edsource.org/2019/oakland-unified-hires-interim-cfo-to-fix-fiscal-problems-as-it-seeks-a- permanent-fiscal-chief/614844

Harrington, Theresa. (n.d.-e). Protesters file excessive force claim against Oakland Unified. EdSource. Retrieved February 20, 2020, from https://edsource.org/2019/protesters-file- excessive-force-claim-against-oakland-unified/620576

Harrington, Theresa. (n.d.-f). San Francisco Bay Area parents declare state of emergency over district’s failure to educate black children. EdSource. Retrieved February 20, 2020, from https://edsource.org/2020/san-francisco-bay-area-parents-declare-state-of-emergency-over- districts-failure-to-educate-black-children/622439

49 Harrington, Theresa. (2019a, August 22). Oakland school board could not agree on responses to scathing grand jury report. EdSource. https://edsource.org/2019/oakland-school-board-could-not- agree-on-responses-to-scathing-grand-jury-report/616585

Harrington, Theresa. (2019b, August 30). Oakland superintendent: Closing campuses will lead to improved schools. EdSource. https://edsource.org/2019/oakland-superintendent-closing- campuses-will-lead-to-improved-schools/616934

Harrington, Theresa. (2019c, November 22). Protesters collecting signatures to oust Oakland board member who backed school closing. EdSource. https://edsource.org/2019/protesters-collecting- signatures-to-oust-oakland-board-member-who-backed-school-closing/620437

Harrington, Theresa. (2019d, November 26). Protesters file excessive force claim against Oakland Unified. EdSource. https://edsource.org/2019/protesters-file-excessive-force-claim-against- oakland-unified/620576

Harrison, C., Harwood, J., Lloréns, H., Irizarry Rivera, A., Özden-Schilling, C., & Spinak, A. (2019). Public Electricity: A Digital Roundtable. Power: Infrastructure in America. https://power.buellcenter.columbia.edu/essays/public-electricity-digital-roundtable

Haubenreich, J. E. (2012). Education and the Constitution. Peabody Journal of Education, 87(4), 436–454. https://doi.org/10.1080/0161956X.2012.705145

Henke, J. T. (1986). Financing Public Schools in California: The Aftermath of Serrano v. Priest and Proposition 13. University of San Francisco Law Review, 21(1), 1–40.

Hertz, D. (2016, January 14). The many faces of exclusionary zoning | City Observatory. City Commentary. http://cityobservatory.org/the-many-faces-of-exclusionary-zoning/

Holme, J. J., & Finnigan, K. S. (2013). School Diversity, School District Fragmentation and Metropolitan Policy. Teachers College Record, 29.

Horsford, S. D., & Sampson, C. (2014). Promise Neighborhoods: The Promise and Politics of Community Capacity Building as Urban School Reform. Urban Education, 49(8), 955–991. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042085914557645

Irwin, B., & Seasons, M. (2012). School Closure Decision-Making Processes: Problems and Prospects. Canadian Journal of Urban Research, 21(2), 45–67.

Jack, J., & Sludden, J. (2013). School Closings in Philadelphia. PennGSE Perspectives on Urban Education, 10(1), 9.

Jackson, K. T. (2006). Crabgrass frontier: The suburbanization of the United States (26. print). Oxford Univ. Press. janresseger. (2019, February 26). Oakland’s Teachers Are On Strike: How Charters Have Contributed to the School District’s Fiscal Crisis. Janresseger. https://janresseger.wordpress.com/2019/02/26/19052/

50 Jennifer Bestor. (2019, July 31). Recognizing regional costs in school funding formula is both equitable and affordable. EdSource. https://edsource.org/2019/recognizing-regional-costs-in- school-funding-formula-is-both-equitable-and-affordable/615745

Johnson, A. W. (2013). “Turnaround” as Shock Therapy: Race, Neoliberalism, and School Reform. Urban Education, 48(2), 232–256. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042085912441941

Jones, C. (2012, November 23). Oakland, Piedmont borders at issue. SFGate. https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Oakland-Piedmont-borders-at-issue-4060364.php

Jordan, R. (2015). Does School Choice Affect Gentrification? (p. 14). Urban Institute. https://www.urban.org/research/publication/does-school-choice-affect-gentrification

Julien Lafortune. (2019). School Resources and the Local Control Funding Formula: Is Increased Spending Reaching High-Need Students? (p. 30). Public Policy Institute of California. https://www.ppic.org/publication/school-resources-and-the-local-control-funding-formula-is- increased-spending-reaching-high-need-students/

Justice 4 Oakland Schools. (n.d.). Stop Cycle of Anti-Black Racism. Retrieved November 17, 2019, from https://scontent-lax3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0- 9/69250559_2065505896882621_1839690404484612096_n.jpg?_nc_cat=103&_nc_oc=AQngN jh5JWaw8n1XzTooWapBpsMrwUg8L3RTudDtcQNuUIsTNCFCWaim5HMcInRuuOo&_nc_ht =scontent-lax3-1.xx&oh=29309fb12e65f4ca41f8251787e9f2bd&oe=5E30C932

Katsuyama, J. (2019, November 14). Tension prompts Oakland school board to move meeting, keep public in separate room [Text.Article]. KTVU FOX 2. https://www.ktvu.com/news/tension- prompts-oakland-school-board-to-move-meeting-keep-public-in-separate-room

Kelly, M. G. (2019). A Map Is More Than Just a Graph: Geospatial Educational Research and the Importance of Historical Context. AERA Open, 5(1), 233285841983334. https://doi.org/10.1177/2332858419833346

Khalifa, M. A., Jennings, M. E., Briscoe, F., Oleszweski, A. M., & Abdi, N. (2014). Racism? Administrative and Community Perspectives in Data-Driven Decision Making: Systemic Perspectives Versus Technical-Rational Perspectives. Urban Education, 49(2), 147–181. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042085913475635

Kotok, S., Knight, D. S., Jabbar, H., Rivera, L. E., & Rincones, R. (2019). On Becoming a District of Choice: Implications for Equity Along the United States–Mexico Border. Educational Administration Quarterly, 55(4), 615–656. https://doi.org/10.1177/0013161X18821357

Ladson-Billings, G., & Tate, W. (1995). Toward a critical race theory of education. Teachers College Record, 47.

Lafer, G. (2018). Breaking Point: The Cost of Charter Schools for Public School Districts. In the Public Interest, 38.

51 Larkin, B. (2013). The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure. Annual Review of Anthropology, 42, 327–343. JSTOR.

Lax, Z. (2013). Time’s Up: Applying Teacher Management Skills to Solving Philadelphia’s Problems. PennGSE Perspectives on Urban Education, 10(1), 3.

LeBlanc, R. J. (2013). Guest Editor’s Introduction: The Dismantlement of Public Education in Philadelphia. PennGSE Perspectives on Urban Education, 10(1), 4.

Lewis, S. G., & Naidoo, J. (2004). Whose Theory of Participation? School Governance Policy and Practice in South Africa. Current Issues in Comparative Education, 6(2), 100–112.

Lipman, P. (2011). The New Political Economy of Urban Education: Neoliberalism, Race, and the Right to the City. Routledge. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/harvard- ebooks/detail.action?docID=672396

Love, B. J. (2004). Brown Plus 50 Counter-Storytelling: A Critical Race Theory Analysis of the “Majoritarian Achievement Gap” Story. Equity & Excellence in Education, 37(3), 227–246. https://doi.org/10.1080/10665680490491597

Lurie, S. (2013, October 16). Why Doesn’t the Constitution Guarantee the Right to Education? The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/10/why-doesnt-the-constitution- guarantee-the-right-to-education/280583/

Lytle, J. H. (2013). Philadelphia School District Deconstruction – A Case Requiring Consideration. PennGSE Perspectives on Urban Education, 10(1), 4.

Malik, I. A. (n.d.). Why Is There Another City Inside Of Oakland? Retrieved April 27, 2020, from https://www.kalw.org/post/why-there-another-city-inside-oakland

Marantz, N. J. (2018). Drift and conversion in metropolitan governance: The rise of California’s redevelopment agencies. Journal of Urban Affairs, 40(7), 901–922. https://doi.org/10.1080/07352166.2017.1421434

Marsh, B. (2019, December 18). A tale of two schools—What merging Kaiser and Sankofa says about the state of OUSD. Oakland North. https://oaklandnorth.net/2019/12/18/a-tale-of-two- schools-what-merging-kaiser-and-sankofa-elementary-says-about-the-state-of-ousd/

Matthias Gafni. (2014, December 29). Orinda: School district acknowledges 7-year-old Latina girl as resident. The Mercury News. https://www.mercurynews.com/2014/12/29/orinda-school-district- acknowledges-7-year-old-latina-girl-as-resident/

Matthias Gafni. (2015, January 9). Orinda school district hired private investigators for seven residency issues. The Mercury News. https://www.mercurynews.com/2015/01/09/orinda-school- district-hired-private-investigators-for-seven-residency-issues/

Mayo, K. W. (2015). Legal Aspects of Charter School Oversight: Evidence from California. Fordham Urban Law Journal, 42(3), 671–701.

52 McDermott, K. A. (1999). Controlling public education: Localism versus equity. University Press of Kansas.

McEvoy, J. (2019a, March 29). Oakland Schools Offer Enrollment Choices But Not Everyone Knows How It Works. KQED. https://www.kqed.org/news/11735304/oakland-schools-offer-enrollment- choices-but-not-everyone-knows-how-it-works

McEvoy, J. (2019b, August 13). “It’s All About Race”: Parents Want Say in How Oakland Schools Integrate. KQED. https://www.kqed.org/news/11766985/its-all-about-race-parents-want-say-in- how-oakland-schools-integrate

McEvoy, J. (2019c, August 26). 1,300 More Students to Be Affected by OUSD School Closure Plans. KQED. https://www.kqed.org/news/11769908/second-phase-of-ousd-school-closure-plans-will- affect-1324-students

McGrew, T. (2018). The History of Residential Segregation in the United States, Title VIII, and the Homeownership Remedy. American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 77(3–4), 1013–1048. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajes.12243

Melody Gutierrez. (2015, August 11). Brown signs bills inspired by Orinda school debacle. San Francisco Chronicle. https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/Brown-signs-bills-inspired- by-Orinda-school-6438462.php

Miller, R. (2019, September 9). Segregation Is Worse in Charter Schools: A Q&A with Julian Vasquez-Heilig. Progressive.Org. https://progressive.org/api/content/90850c24-cfef-11e9-b071- 12f1225286c6/

Montojo, N. (2017, September 13). Understanding Rising Inequality and Displacement in Oakland. KCET. https://www.kcet.org/shows/city-rising/understanding-rising-inequality-and- displacement-in-oakland

Morrison, D., Annamma, S. A., & Jackson, D. D. (Eds.). (2017). Critical race spatial analysis: Mapping to understand and address educational inequity. Stylus Publishing.

Murphy, M. (2017). The Economization of Life. Duke University Press.

Murphy, P., & Paluch, J. (2018). Just the Facts: Financing California’s Public Schools. Public Policy Institute of California. https://www.ppic.org/publication/financing-californias-public-schools/

NAACP Legal Defense Fund. (n.d.). Sheff v. O’Neill. NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Retrieved April 21, 2020, from https://www.naacpldf.org/case-issue/sheff-v-oneill/

NAACP Legal Defense Fund. (2019). Where Do We Go From Here? The Movement for School Desegregation and Equity in Hartford, Conneticut.

Nadworny, E., & Cory Turner. (2019, July 25). This Supreme Court Case Made School District Lines A Tool For Segregation. National Public Radio.

53 https://www.npr.org/2019/07/25/739493839/this-supreme-court-case-made-school-district-lines- a-tool-for-segregation

National Center for Education Statistics. (n.d.). Revenues for public elementary and secondary schools, by source of funds and state or jurisdiction: 2016-17. Digest of Education Statistics, 2019; National Center for Education Statistics. Retrieved April 21, 2020, from https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d19/tables/dt19_235.20.asp

National Public Radio. (2019, July 25). PHOTOS: Where The Kids Across Town Grow Up With Very Different Schools. NPR.Org. https://www.npr.org/2019/07/25/739494351/separate-and- unequal-schools

Nelson, S. L., & Williams, R. O. (2019). From Slave Codes to Educational Racism: Urban Education Policy in the United States as the Dispossession, Containment, Dehumanization, and Disenfranchisement of Black Peoples. Journal of Law in Society, 19(1–2), 82–120.

Nikole Hannah-Jones. (2016, June 9). Choosing a School for My Daughter in a Segregated City—The New York Times. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/12/magazine/choosing-a- school-for-my-daughter-in-a-segregated-city.html

Noguera, P. (2003). City schools and the American dream: Reclaiming the promise of public education. Teachers College Press.

Oakland Not For Sale. (n.d.). More info. Retrieved February 21, 2020, from https://oaklandnotforsale.com/more-info/, https://oaklandnotforsale.com/more-info/

Oakland Unified School District. (n.d.-a). Blueprint for Quality Schools Action Plan and Selection Considerations (Revision – June 26, 2019).

Oakland Unified School District. (n.d.-b). Roots International Academy Enrollment Snapshot. OUSD Data Dashboard. Retrieved December 8, 2019, from https://dashboards.ousd.org/views/Enrollment/Snapshot?:embed=y&:showShareOptions=true&: display_count=no&:showVizHome=no&:render=false#7

Oakland Unified School District. (2017). 2018-2020 Fiscal Vitality Plan: Recommendations Responsive to the 2017 FCMAT Fiscal Health Risk Analysis.

Oakland Unified School District. (2018). Community of Schools Plan—Ten Year Vision for the Number of District Schools. https://www.ousd.org/Page/18248

Oakland Unified School District. (2020a, May). Data Dashboard: Enrollment Snapshot. https://dashboards.ousd.org/views/Enrollment/Snapshot?:embed=y&:showShareOptions=true&: display_count=no&:showVizHome=no&:render=false#7

Oakland Unified School District. (2020b, May). Data Dashboard: SBAC Score Comparisons. https://dashboards.ousd.org/views/SBAC/Comparison- SBAC?:embed=y&:showShareOptions=true&:display_count=no&:render=false

54 O’Neill, B. (2012). Of camps, gulags and extraordinary renditions: Infrastructural violence in Romania. Ethnography, 13(4), 466–486. https://doi.org/10.1177/1466138111435742

O’Neill, K. L. (2012). There is no more room: Cemeteries, personhood, and bare death. Ethnography, 13(4), 510–530. https://doi.org/10.1177/1466138111435751

Orinda school district hired private investigators for seven residency issues – The Mercury News. (n.d.). Retrieved April 27, 2020, from https://www.mercurynews.com/2015/01/09/orinda-school- district-hired-private-investigators-for-seven-residency-issues/

Orinda Union School District. (n.d.). INTERdistrict Transfer Guidelines. Orinda Union School District. Retrieved April 28, 2020, from https://www.orindaschools.org/pf4/cms2/view_page?d=x&group_id=1548491631805&vdid=i20 da1s2s51w9

Orinda Union School District. (2019). Registration Instructions. http://orinda- ca.schoolloop.com/file/1517645276614/1356610163662/5124677474537248549.pdf

Parekh, G., Flessa, J., & Smaller, H. (2016). The Toronto District School Board: A global city school system’s structures, processes, and student outcomes. London Review of Education, 14(3), 65– 84. https://doi.org/10.18546/LRE.14.3.06

Pendall, R., & Hendey, L. (2016). Revitalizing Neighborhoods: The Federal Role (p. 44). Urban Institute. https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/85236/revitalizing-neighborhoods- the-federal-role_1.pdf

Philadelphia Students Union. (2013). Statement by the Philadelphia Students Union. PennGSE Perspectives on Urban Education, 10(1), 2.

Picker, L. (n.d.). The Lock-in Effect of California’s Proposition 13. National Bureau of Economic Research. Retrieved May 13, 2020, from https://www-nber- org.libproxy.mit.edu/digest/apr05/w11108.html

Picus, L. O., Goertz, M., & Odden, A. (2013). Intergovernmental Aid Formulas and Case Studies. In Handbook of Research in Education Finance and Policy. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203961063.ch15

Pilo, F. (2017). A Socio-Technical Perspective To The Right To The City: Regularizing Electricity Access in Rio de Janeiro’s Favelas. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 41(3), 396–413. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12489

Quinn, R. (2013). Thoughts on the Power and Promise of Parent Organizing. PennGSE Perspectives on Urban Education, 10(1), 3.

Rabinow, P., & Rose, N. (2006). Biopower Today. BioSocieties, 1(2), 195–217. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1745855206040014

55 Randa Nucho, J. (2017, September 4). Failed Infrastructure Is Failed Politics. Public Books. https://www.publicbooks.org/failed-infrastructure-failed-politics/

Reber, S. J. (2005). Court-Ordered Desegregation: Successes and Failures Integrating American Schools since Brown versus Board of Education. Journal of Human Resources, XL(3), 559–590. https://doi.org/10.3368/jhr.XL.3.559

Reed, S. (2013). A Teacher Activist’s Response to Schools Closing. PennGSE Perspectives on Urban Education, 10(1), 3.

Reich, R. (2014, November 28). Patrolling the Boundaries Inside America. https://robertreich.org/post/103850541800

Reynolds, L. (n.d.). Skybox Schools: Public Education As Private Luxury. 82, 66.

Reynolds, L. (2008). Full State Funding of Education as a State Constitutional Imperative. Hastings Law Journal, 60(4), 49.

Robert Reich. (2014, December 3). Robert Reich: Rich parents are perpetuating racial inequality. Salon. https://www.salon.com/2014/12/03/robert_reich_rich_parents_are_perpetuating_racial_inequalit y_partner/

Roberts, C. (2014, November 28). Orinda School District Hires Private Eye To Kick Live-In Nanny’s Daughter Out Of School. NBC Bay Area. https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/school- district-hires-private-eye-to-kick-live-in-nannys-daughter-out-of-school/123599/

Rodgers, D. (2012). Haussmannization in the tropics: Abject urbanism and infrastructural violence in Nicaragua. Ethnography, 13(4), 413–438. https://doi.org/10.1177/1466138111435740

Rodgers, D., & O’Neill, B. (2012). Infrastructural violence: Introduction to the special issue. Ethnography, 13(4), 401–412. https://doi.org/10.1177/1466138111435738

Rury, J. L., & Rife, A. T. (2018). Race, Schools and Opportunity Hoarding: Evidence from a Post- War American Metropolis. History of Education, 47(1), 87–107.

Rury, J. L., & Saatcioglu, A. (2011). Suburban Advantage: Opportunity Hoarding and Secondary Attainment in the Postwar Metropolitan North. American Journal of Education, 117(3), 307– 342.

Ryan, E. (n.d.). Sheff, Segregation, and School Finance Litigation. NEW YORK UNIVERSITY LAW REVIEW, 74, 47.

Ryan, J. E., & Heise, M. (2002). The Political Economy of School Choice. The Yale Law Journal, 111(8), 2043–2136. Business Premium Collection; Business Premium Collection; Social Science Premium Collection.

Saiger, A. J. (2010). The School District Boundary Problem. The Urban Lawyer, 42(3), 29.

56 Sasada, R., Talkington, J., & Chatmon, C. (n.d.). Superintendent’s Office (2019-2020). 1.

Savitch, H. V., & Vogel, R. K. (2004). Suburbs without a City: Power and City-County Consolidation. Urban Affairs Review, 39(6), 758–790. https://doi.org/10.1177/1078087404264512

Schwenkel, C. (n.d.). The Infrastructure Toolbox: Sense. Society for Cultural Anthropology. Retrieved May 18, 2020, from https://culanth.org/fieldsights/sense

Shiller, J. (2018). The Disposability of Baltimore’s Black Communities: A Participatory Action Research Project on the Impact of School Closings. The Urban Review, 50(1), 23–44. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11256-017-0428-7

Shoked, N. (2017). An American Oddity: The Law, History, and Toll of the School District. Northwestern University Law Review, 111(4), 81.

Siegel-Hawley, G. (2014). Mitigating Milliken ? School District Boundary Lines and Desegregation Policy in Four Southern Metropolitan Areas, 1990–2010. American Journal of Education, 120(3), 391–433. https://doi.org/10.1086/675570

Siegel-Hawley, G., Bridges, K., & Shields, T. J. (2017). Solidifying Segregation or Promoting Diversity?: School Closure and Rezoning in an Urban District. Educational Administration Quarterly, 53(1), 107–141. https://doi.org/10.1177/0013161X16659346

Silverman, R. M. (2014). Urban, Suburban, and Rural Contexts of School Districts and Neighborhood Revitalization Strategies: Rediscovering Equity in Education Policy and Urban Planning. Leadership and Policy in Schools, 13(1), 3–27. https://doi.org/10.1080/15700763.2013.876051

Smith, J. J., & Stovall, D. (2008). ‘Coming home’ to new homes and new schools: Critical race theory and the new politics of containment. Journal of Education Policy, 23(2), 135–152. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680930701853062

Snider, M. (2019, February 28). Broke on purpose—Clash between charter and public school proponents deepens as strike continues. Medium. https://medium.com/laney-tower/broke-on- purpose-clash-between-charter-and-public-school-proponents-deepens-as-strike-continues- cca0bec99e27

Springer, M. G., Houck, E. A., & Guthrie, J. W. (2015). History and Scholarship Regarding U.S. Education Finance and Policy. In H. F. Ladd & M. E. Goertz (Eds.), Handbook of Research in Education Finance and Policy (2nd ed., pp. 3–20). Routledge.

Star, S. L. (1999). The Ethnography of Infrastructure. American Behavioral Scientist, 43(3), 377–391. https://doi.org/10.1177/00027649921955326

Star, S. L., & Ruhleder, K. (1996). Steps Toward an Ecology of Infrastructure: Design and Access for Large Information Spaces. Information Systems Research, 7(1), 111.

57 Star, S. L., & Ruhleder, K. (1994). Steps towards an ecology of infrastructure: Complex problems in design and access for large-scale collaborative systems. Proceedings of the 1994 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 253–264. https://doi.org/10.1145/192844.193021

Stark, K., & Zasloff, J. (2003). Tiebout and Tax Revolts: Did Serrano Really Cause Proposition 13? UCLA Law Review, 801–858.

Stavely, Z. (2016, August 31). Oakland Prides Itself on Being Diverse—Until It Comes Time to Send Kids to School. KQED. https://www.kqed.org/news/11061802/oakland-prides-itself-on-being- diverse-until-it-comes-time-to-send-kids-to-school

Stillman, J. B. (2013, Winter). The Elephant in the Classroom: Why is Diversity So Hard to Manage? Education Next, 13(1), 37–41.

Stone, L. (2004). Crisis of the Educated Subject: Insight from Kristeva for American Education. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 23(2/3), 103–116. https://doi.org/10.1023/B:SPED.0000024431.65970.99

Storch, M. (2014, December 8). Statement by Miriam Storch to Orinda Union School District Board of Trustees. Stand Up for Vivian. http://standupforvivian.blogspot.com/p/miriam-storch- statement-to-orinda-union.html

Stovall, D. (2013). Against the politics of desperation: Educational justice, critical race theory, and Chicago school reform. Critical Studies in Education, 54(1), 33–43. https://doi.org/10.1080/17508487.2013.739192

Stovall, D. (2016). Out of Adolescence and Into Adulthood: Critical Race Theory, Retrenchment, and the Imperative of Praxis. Urban Education, 51(3), 274–286. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042085915618718

Syeed, E. (2019). “It just doesn’t add up”: Disrupting official arguments for urban school closures with counterframes. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 27, 110. https://doi.org/10.14507/epaa.27.4240

Tadayon, A. (2019, November 14). Oakland school board meeting disrupted by protesters again, forcing trustees to retreat. East Bay Times. http://www.eastbaytimes.com/oakland-unified- school-board-holds-meeting-away-from-public-again

Tate IV, W. F. (Ed.). (2012). Research on Schools, Neighborhoods and Communities: Toward Civic Responsibility (1st ed.). Rowman & Littlefield. https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781442204690/Research-on-Schools-Neighborhoods-and- Communities-Toward-Civic-Responsibility

Taylor Jr., O. (2018, April 15). Learn about Oakland’s Economic Divide Today by Peering into the Past. SFChronicle.Com. https://www.sfchronicle.com/news/article/Learn-about-Oakland-s- economic-divide-today-by-12835236.php

58 Taylor, K., Frankenberg, E., & Siegel-Hawley, G. (2019). Racial Segregation in the Southern Schools, School Districts, and Counties Where Districts Have Seceded. AERA Open, 5(3), 233285841986015. https://doi.org/10.1177/2332858419860152

Tiebout, C. M. (1956). A Pure Theory of Local Expenditures. Journal of Political Economy, 64(5), 416–424.

Tieken, M. C., & Auldridge-Reveles, T. R. (2019). Rethinking the School Closure Research: School Closure as Spatial Injustice. Review of Educational Research, 89(6), 917–953. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654319877151

Tillotson, D. (n.d.). Fixing the Prop 39 Facility Fiasco. Great School Voices. Retrieved March 6, 2020, from https://greatschoolvoices.org/2019/05/fixing-the-prop-39-facility-fiasco/

Tilsley, A. (2017, March 23). Subtracting Schools from Communities. Urban Institute. https://www.urban.org/features/subtracting-schools-communities

U.S. Census Bureau. (n.d.). QuickFacts: Orinda City, California. Retrieved April 27, 2020, from https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/orindacitycalifornia/PST120219#PST120219

U.S. Department of Education. (2014, September 19). 10 Fact About K-12 Education Funding [Websites; Publicity]. US Department of Education (ED). https://www2.ed.gov/about/overview/fed/10facts/index.html

US Department of Education. (2014, September 19). Charts—10 Facts About K-12 Education Funding. https://www2.ed.gov/about/overview/fed/10facts/edlite-chart.html#2

Vincent, J. M. (2006). Public Schools as Public Infrastructure: Roles for Planning Researchers. Journal of Planning Education and Research, 25(4), 433–437. https://doi.org/10.1177/0739456X06288092

Vincent, J. M. (2014). Joint Use of Public Schools: A Framework for Promoting Healthy Communities. Journal of Planning Education and Research, 34(2), 153–168. https://doi.org/10.1177/0739456X13513615

Vincent, J. M., & Filardo, M. W. (n.d.). Linking School Construction Investments to Equity, Smart Growth, and Healthy Communities. Smart Growth, 29.

Weber, R., Farmer, S., & Donoghue, M. (2018). Predicting School Closures in an Era of Austerity: The Case of Chicago. Urban Affairs Review, 107808741880235. https://doi.org/10.1177/1078087418802359

Weinraub, A. (2013). Why Teachers Must Join the Fight for Public Education. Now. PennGSE Perspectives on Urban Education, 10(1), 4.

Wilson, A. (2016). The Infrastructure of Intimacy. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 41(2), 247–280. https://doi.org/10.1086/682919

59 Wilson, E. K. (2014). Toward a Theory of Equitable Federated Regionalism in Public Education. UCLA Law Review, 61(5), 1416–1479.

Wilson, E. K. (2019). Charters, Markets, and Universalism. Georgetown Journal on Poverty Law & Policy, 26(2), 291.

Wong, A. (2018, November 28). The Students Suing for a Constitutional Right to Education. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/11/lawsuit-constitutional-right- education/576901/