Abstract
In recent years, urban scholars have begun to draw the links between the contemporary school reform movement and the return of the middle class to inner–city neighborhoods. Maia Bloomfield Cucchiara has been at the forefront of attempts to bridge the gap between these research domains, and Marketing Schools, Marketing Cities represents an important culmination of that effort. Drawing primarily on data from participant observation and in–depth interviews with parents, teachers, municipal leaders, and school district administrators, Cucchiara skillfully details one city's campaign to rebrand its public elementary schools in a deliberate attempt to attract and retain professional families with children, and she provides a thorough consideration of both the benefits to the city that result from such marketing drives and the substantial inequalities that can emerge when the preferences of the affluent are privileged above those of working–class families. Along the way, she uses her findings to present broad discussions of issues ranging from the proper goals of urban education policy to the meaning of citizenship in contemporary American society.
The bulk of the book deals with Philadelphia's Center City Schools Initiative (CCSI), an effort unveiled in 2004 by the School District of Philadelphia and the Center City District (a business improvement district in Philadelphia's downtown) for the explicit purpose of persuading professional families to enroll their children in one of Center City's relatively high–performing elementary schools. In deciding to target a marketing campaign directly at upper–middle–class families, the CCSI drew on the assumption that alleviating these families’ concerns over school quality might convince them to remain in the city and dissuade them from taking their cultural capital and tax dollars to the suburbs.
By showing how public school policy was manipulated for the explicit purpose of attracting professional families, Cucchiara delivers a fresh take on an understudied component of contemporary urban economic development. The CCSI took several steps to assuage the fears of middle–class families, including streamlining the application process so that these families would know whether their children had been admitted to a selective public school before they faced the deadline for private school registration; improving the “curb appeal” of downtown schools through physical upgrades to school facilities; and implementing “customer service” reforms designed to make schools more welcoming to affluent families. Perhaps most importantly, the CCSI introduced new admissions criteria that gave a new priority to neighborhood parents, thus making it easier for local parents in wealthy downtown neighborhoods to enroll their children in downtown schools, and simultaneously less easy for poorer families from distant neighborhoods to get their children in. These bureaucratic reforms were accompanied by sustained symbolic efforts to distinguish the prized “Center City schools” from stigmatized “inner–city schools.”
Within the Grant School (a pseudonym), where Cucchiara conducted fieldwork for several years, reforms to the school's image were frequently led by a strong and active group of professional parents who exercised outsize influence within the PTO. Factions emerged in the PTO, pitting mostly white “neighborhood” parents against mostly black “transfer” parents, and it was along these lines that conflicts arose over CCSI policy, middle–class recruitment, and changes to the Grant School's admissions process. Neighborhood parents tended to prevail in these conflicts, as it was clear to the PTO, school district administrators, and municipal leaders that failure to satisfy professional parents would lead many of them to take their children out of the city's public schools, thus jeopardizing the economic development agenda that the CCSI had been established to achieve. The corollary to the proposition that neighborhood parents were the preferred clientele for the CCSI, in the eyes of black parents of transfer students, “was that they and their children were not wanted” (p. 159). Through the lens of the PTO, Cucchiara dissects the inequalities that inevitably emerge when one group is implicitly viewed as more valuable, more important, and more worthy than another within an organization.
While examining the narrow implications of the CCSI for inequality within Philadelphia and its public schools, Cucchiara also offers insights into the ramifications that selective marketing to the middle class can have for urban stratification more broadly. Initiatives such as the CCSI challenge traditional conceptions of public education as a public good provided unconditionally to all by the state. By deliberately expanding access to high–performing public institutions for the affluent, while restricting access for the lower classes, these types of efforts render “those more able to contribute to the city's economy and its institutions also more fully entitled to their citizenship” (p. 195).
The fundamental questions that Marketing Schools, Marketing Cities raises are: (1) how major cities with stigmatized public school systems can attract and retain the hypermobile members of the “Creative Class,” for whom schooling options figure heavily in residential decisions as they age and begin families, and (2) whether such an urban economic development strategy can be pursued without unduly burdening less wealthy residents. The evidence from Philadelphia suggests that providing residents of affluent neighborhoods with privileged access to high–performing schools can work as a mechanism for retaining professionals, but not without simultaneously limiting the opportunities for lower–income students to receive a high–quality public education.
The conundrum for cities revolves around how to utilize schools to develop a thriving middle class without disfranchising the lower classes or undermining the public mission of public schools. Perhaps the most direct and effective way to counteract the stratifying links between neighborhood SES and school quality, while eliminating the threat to cities posed by middle–class flight, would be to adopt regionalist strategies that integrate urban and suburban school districts. Yet Cucchiara admits that this is all but unachievable in Philadelphia (as it is in many large American cities). Feasible and widely applicable solutions to the issues of gentrification and urban inequality are hard to come by. Still, Marketing Schools, Marketing Cities provides an important theoretical and empirical starting point for urban education scholars to think in new and nuanced ways about the links between educational inequality and gentrification, taking into full consideration the significance of the democratic ideal of public schools.