Philanthropy to the rescue? Detroit’s schools and urban policymaking under austerity

Abstract

As municipal governments in the US struggle under austerity, philanthropic elites have seemingly come to the rescue. Their money has not come without strings attached, however. By leveraging political contributions and donations to non-profits, philanthropists have moved beyond funding services and into the promotion of their preferred policies to cash-strapped municipalities. This has meant that the super-wealthy can now set the terrain of urban policy debates in cities struggling under austerity, ignoring democratic processes and often working to actively co-opt or stifle dissent. Through a study of the politics surrounding an impending bankruptcy of the Detroit public school system in the mid-2010s, this article provides crucial insights into the nature of elite-led urban policymaking under conditions of racialized austerity. Specifically, it focuses on how competing coalitions of liberal and conservative philanthropists used their wealth and influence to define the parameters of the policy debate over the future of Detroit’s schools. In doing so, these coalitions constrained the ability of residents with alternative visions to participate in decision-making processes and promoted a market-based system of schooling that served Detroit students poorly. This result must be understood as facilitated by the city’s context of racialized austerity, as manifested both through the financial crisis facing Detroit’s schools and through the system of emergency management used to take over Michigan’s majority-Black municipal institutions. These findings highlight that as philanthropic funding and influence have grown under conditions of racialized austerity, we must critically examine their effects on policymaking and on systems of democratic accountability.

The political economy of healthcare access and Chicagoland health-oriented non-profit organizations

“…While the infrastructure of civic institutions is valuable, being embedded within the system of the state and part of the third sector, the development of an infrastructure of civic institutions in the suburbs mimicking an urban one could in turn, recreate the same shadows of the shadow state seen with grassroots refugee community organizations, but with mutual aid organizations (Benson, 2022). Further, if this same infrastructure of civic institutions becomes supported heavily by philanthropic organizations, those larger donors can exert similar pressures as the state, but with less oversight from the public (Cohen, 2021). Lastly, as this unfolds in relation to suburban healthcare, relationships with this vulnerable community are crucial, but also at tenuous risk, dependent on the third sector’s larger financial structure, likely facing shrinking resources as the “crisis” is deemed over, and perception of public need moves on (Power and Skinner, 2017; Wolch, 1999).…”

Any Time, Any Place, Any Way, Any Pace: Markets, EdTech, and the spaces of schooling

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