People's Benchmarks, People's Sovereignty: New Jersey’s Occupied School Districts
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by Michelle Renee Matisons and Seth Sandronsky
New Jersey pioneered the practice of abolishing democracy in education through state takeovers of mostly minority school districts. “Not only was New Jersey the first U.S. state to implement school district takeover, it has some of the longest occupied districts in the nation.”
People's Benchmarks, People's Sovereignty: New Jersey’s Occupied School Districts
by Michelle Renee Matisons and Seth Sandronsky
This article previously appeared in Counterpunch.
It appears New Jersey never intended to return control to local districts once seized.”
With globalization, the expansion of capitalist production has doubled the planetary work force, and U.S. elites in New Jersey and other “blue and red states” are defunding urban education services and then conveniently refunding education through private market interventions. As corporate America flexes its political power by renting lawmakers at all levels, mass incarceration of the racialized populace has been a key social policy reflecting this trend of globalized class power. Like the War on Drugs that parallels it, the War on Public Schools directs public attention to a singular cause for the class inequality inherent in the capitalist system. Both “wars” masquerade as comprehensive solutions to crime and poverty, fixating on symptoms and not root causes of social problems.
Racialized class power is found everywhere in predatory reform targeting poor urban school districts. Like the War on Drugs, it disproportionately affects poor people of color, but poor urban and rural whites are casualties in both wars too. The bipartisan War on Public Schools picks up and exacerbates social outcomes created by the bipartisan War on Drugs: urban communities continually bear the brunt of a political system unified by racialized class power. Far from withering away, contemporary U.S. capitalism increasingly relies upon the state’s regulatory powers.
Police, prisons and schools in New Jersey municipalities, including deindustrialized Camden, are state sites to control and monetize superfluous populations to capital accumulation. The process used to double the world proletariat in the past 40 years is the same one that designates large swaths of the U.S. populace disposable. White supremacist capital targets inner city populations for displacement (gentrification/ school closure), warehousing (prisons, not job and educational opportunities), and premature illness and death