ABSTRACT
These comments capture some of the central issues of Chicago’s accountability system and its differentiated educational “opportunities.” This chapter examines Chicago’s education policies across the school system and the relationship of these policies to the city’s political economy and cultural politics of race. I begin by discussing systemwide implications of accountability, standards, and remediation for teaching and for students’ educational experiences. I also discuss the ideological force of these policies as a regime of surveillance and self-blame. The policies are coupled with a newly differentiated system of educational experiences or “choices” that constitute new forms of internalized tracking within an already highly stratified system. These new forms of educational differentiation increase educational inequality and exclusion, and they are tied to development strategies in the city. A specific case-military high schools-are part of an
ensemble of policies that produce new forms of punishment, criminalization, and regulation of African American and some Latino/a youth. Again, I relate these policies to the larger political economic and cultural context, examining their consequences for the place of African Americans and Latinos/as in the city. In the same fashion, I argue that accountability and stratified schooling are linked with the skills and dispositions required for a stratified labor force. Further, I suggest that these education policies and the cultural politics of race in which they are complicit serve global city development. I conclude with an epilogue on CPS policy after 2001, the end of the Vallas administration.
