In this article, I follow federal policy mandates and educational policy narratives to trace the resolution to inequality that was constructed post- Brown v. Board of Education, and what this resolution might tell us about the reconstitution of the racial state despite the extension of universal civil rights. I examine how the definition of harm espoused by the U.S. Supreme Court in Brown, which identified harm as internal (or related to the psyche rather than as material), elided the question of resources and allowed for the continuance of race-based inequality in education to be explained as resulting from an embodied inferiority. I suggest that what has come to be termed the achievement gap is indicative the way in which this post- Brown resolution to inequality is articulated. I examine a substratum of the achievement gap—the word gap—that has become an increasing focus of recent education policy initiatives.

In 2009, the New York City Department of Education determined that Brandeis High School would be closed. Far from an anomaly, Brandeis is one among more than a hundred schools that have been closed since the recentralization of the City's school system under Mayoral Control. Education activists and critical scholars of education have described such "sweeps" of school closings and the broader constellation of projects and technologies associated with them as indicative of neoliberal education reform and of the ways that "accumulation by dispossession" (Harvey, 2005) plays out on the U.S. "home front." Despite an increased galvanization of resistance in recent years, the authors interrogate what else we might learn about neoliberal education restructuring (and how we might contest it) by attending to the last years of Brandeis in order to specifically explore the following: 1) how the conditions of dispossession impact resistance from the perspective of school workers, and 2) how the process of dispossession was accompanied by an investment from those with privilege in the public good of education that was contingent upon race-and class-based exclusions.

The relationship between education, state-sanctioned structuring of a differentially valued life, and democracy was supposed to be rectified by Brown v. Board of Education (1954) when universal rights to education were won. Yet how universal rights were structured (as individual choices) has been critical to understanding the ways that a tiered citizenship continues to be guaranteed post-Brown, and embedded within the state. In this article, I examine the articulation of this continuity in the contemporary period. I trace how choice-based policies preclude the very equality of rights they promise as parents of diverse backgrounds make situated rights claims to the shared resource of public schools; and how the irony of the liberal freedom to choose, qualified by inequality, is redoubled as the structures of exclusion that result are obfuscated by narratives that invoke the legacy of the Civil Rights movement. [Inequality, public education, race, rights] 92

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