Marketing schools, marketing cities: Urban revitalization, public education, and social inequality

This dissertation uses a Philadelphia campaign to attract and retain professional families to urban public schools as a lens to examine the role of education—and public sector services in general—in the revitalized cities of the 21st century. The Center City Schools Initiative (CCSI) is rooted in a particular vision of urban prosperity that understands a city\u27s fate as heavily dependent on the number of highly educated workers living and working within its limits. This vision is becoming increasingly prominent in the United States and abroad, as cities focus on revitalizing downtown areas and positioning themselves to compete for mobile capital and labor. The dissertation views CCSI as both a strategy for urban economic growth with national implications and as a response to Philadelphia\u27s particular social, political, and economic context. Designed as an embedded case study, the research uses document analysis, dozens of interviews, and over two years of ethnographic research to examine the origins and evolution of CCSI, public discourse around the policy, and its impact on a local school. With its emphasis on the importance of attracting professional families to the schools, CCSI redistributed educational access in the city by making it more difficult for students from some low-income neighborhoods to access high-performing downtown schools and by increasing schools\u27 dependence on local community resources. It forced stakeholders in Philadelphia to struggle with their own views on urban growth, school reform and equity, revealing the extent to which discourses about the middle class obscure more structural understandings of urban problems. CCSI also put in place market mechanisms that constructed upper-middle-class parents as valued customers and disempowered parents who did not fit that mold. At the same time, though, it brought important new resources to the schools, including highly motivated and skilled professional parents, and enabled active parents to make significant improvements to the schools. CCSI illuminates the new identities being created in American cities at the intersection between market and state, namely the construction of city residents as customers rather than citizens, and the implications this shift has for entitlement to government services, inequality, and collective responsibility