EdSight

Pauline Lipman's formation as an educational thinker began not in the academy but in the streets and workplaces of late-twentieth-century American political life. After completing a bachelor's degree in English, she spent approximately fifteen years as a labor and community activist, teacher, and participant in communist political movements during the Reagan era, an immersion she regarded not as a prelude to academic work but as its essential foundation. It was this experience of organising alongside working-class and racially marginalised communities that drove her, during the 1980s, to pursue doctoral study as a means of deepening her theoretical understanding of the discourses shaping education reform — not as an alternative to political engagement but as a resource for it. She completed her MA and PhD in Educational Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1993, and published her dissertation as Race, Class, and Power in School Restructuring (1998), a study of how corporate-minded school restructuring affected the learning experiences of African American students. After a brief period at a Philadelphia urban education research laboratory, she returned to the Midwest in 1994 to become an assistant professor in Social and Cultural Studies in Education at DePaul University. In 2006 she joined the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she has served as Professor of Educational Policy Studies, co-coordinator of the Social Foundations of Education doctoral programme, and founding Director of the Collaborative for Equity and Justice in Education (CEJE). Chicago — a city undergoing dramatic neoliberal restructuring through deindustrialisation, gentrification, mayoral control of public schools, and the systematic closure and privatisation of schools in Black and Latinx neighbourhoods — became the central laboratory for her academic and activist work. She is also a co-founder of Teachers for Social Justice and has been directly involved in coalitions opposing school closings, housing privatisation, and the dismantling of community institutions in Chicago's communities of colour.

Lipman's signature theoretical contribution is her analysis of what she calls the political economy of neoliberal urban education — the integral relationship between economic systems, political institutions, culture, and ideology that shapes compulsory schooling in the contemporary United States. In High Stakes Education: Inequality, Globalization, and Urban School Reform (2004) and The New Political Economy of Urban Education: Neoliberalism, Race, and the Right to the City (2011), she argues that the education reforms dominant since the 1980s — standardised testing, charter schools, school accountability, mayoral control, and market competition — are not primarily educational interventions aimed at improving student outcomes but instruments of a broader neoliberal restructuring that remakes cities in the service of capital accumulation. Drawing on the conjunctural analysis of Stuart Hall, the geography of neoliberal urbanism developed by Jamie Peck, Neil Brenner, and Nik Theodore, and Antonio Gramsci's theory of hegemony and “good sense,” Lipman demonstrates that the marketisation of schooling simultaneously serves the interests of real estate developers, financial institutions, and corporate philanthropists, and constructs an ideological environment that privatises the understanding of educational failure — attributing it to individual teachers, schools, and communities rather than to the political and economic structures that systematically under-resource them. Chicago under Renaissance 2010, the plan promoted by Mayor Daley and Chicago Public Schools from 2004, became for Lipman the paradigmatic case of this process: mass school closings in Black and Latinx neighbourhoods were presented as responses to academic underperformance while serving, simultaneously, to clear land for gentrification and to displace communities of colour from the city centre.

A central and evolving dimension of Lipman's work is the argument that capitalism and white supremacy are co-constitutive rather than merely parallel systems of domination — that the logic of capital accumulation fuels and justifies white supremacy as a system of violence and exploitation, and that any analysis of educational policy that separates race from political economy is necessarily incomplete. Her earlier work in Race, Class, and Power in School Restructuring demonstrated that the failure of schools to educate students of colour was rooted not in cultural deficiency but in the wider structures of racial oppression and economic marginalisation. Her later work deepens this analysis: drawing on Ruth Wilson Gilmore's carceral geography, Cedric Robinson's theory of racial capitalism, and the critical race scholarship of Charisse Burden-Stelly and others, Lipman shows how neoliberal school reform deploys racially coded discourse — describing Black schools as “underutilised” and “under-resourced,” framing Black poverty as individual pathology — to legitimate the dismantling of public institutions while obscuring the structural racism at work. The “educational debt” owed to Black and Latinx students — a concept she draws from Gloria Ladson-Billings — is converted, in neoliberal discourse, into evidence of “underachievement” that justifies privatisation, turnaround, and closure: a rhetorical operation that Lipman's work systematically exposes and refuses.

Lipman's engagement with social movements is not a supplement to her scholarly work but its animating core. Her analysis of neoliberal education reform is consistently paired with documentation of the counterhegemonic resistance that Black and Latinx communities, parents, students, and teachers have mounted against school closings, privatisation, and the subordination of schooling to market logic. The Coalition to Revitalize Walter H. Dyett High School — whose 34-day hunger strike in 2015 to resist the permanent closure of Dyett, a school in the historically Black Bronzeville neighbourhood, became a nationally visible act of community self-determination — exemplifies the kind of grassroots movement whose intellectual and political analysis directly informs Lipman's theoretical work. Against the neoliberal framework that restricts the horizon of educational possibility to a choice between market-driven restructuring and a failing status quo, Lipman and her community collaborators articulate a democratic and liberatory vision of education built on four principles: participatory democracy, education for the full development of the human person, equitably funded free public education, and education as a tool for liberation from oppression. This vision insists that schools must prepare people to understand their social and physical reality deeply enough to enter history as actors in transforming it — a formulation that owes as much to the Freirean tradition as to Lipman's own decades of political experience.

Lipman has articulated and practised a distinctive model of activist scholarship — scholarship that is consciously aligned with organised movements in struggle rather than with the academy's own disciplinary logics and career incentives. The Collaborative for Equity and Justice in Education (CEJE), which she co-founded at the University of Illinois at Chicago, partners with community organisations and teachers to produce research that directly serves education organising campaigns: documenting the consequences of school closings for Black and Latinx communities, analysing the fiscal and demographic patterns of Chicago Public Schools' closure decisions, and generating community reports that translate academic analysis into accessible tools for grassroots coalitions. Lipman is explicit about the ethical boundaries this mode of work requires: she refuses to use coalition strategy sessions or community meetings as sites of data collection, insisting that movement work must be shielded from the extractive logics of academic research, and she acknowledges openly the negotiations of race, class, gender, and privilege that collaboration across these differences demands of her as a white woman professional working with communities of colour. Her commitment — articulated with characteristic directness — is that the intellectual resources of the university must be placed in the service of those most affected by the policies being analysed, not circulated within a professional class insulated from their consequences.

A methodological contribution that cuts across all of Lipman's work is her insistence on dialectical analysis as the epistemological framework appropriate to the study of education in a society shaped by class struggle and racial capitalism. Against the dominant tendency in education policy research to treat the urban environment as a natural setting rather than as a product of economic and political forces, and against the technicist discourse of “evidence-based reform” that presents neoliberal interventions as politically neutral improvements, Lipman's dialectical approach insists on situating every educational policy within the contradictions of the system that produces it: between capital accumulation and working-class livelihood needs, between the rhetoric and the reality of neoliberal reform, between the nominal universalism of public education and the racially stratified system it actually delivers. Drawing on Gramsci's analysis of hegemony, she also attends to the ways in which neoliberal education reform gains popular consent — by speaking to some aspects of oppressed communities' “good sense,” offering individual mobility through school choice at a moment when the collective welfare-state model has demonstrably failed — even as it dismantles the structural conditions for collective improvement. This analytical attention to the ideological work of education policy, and to the conditions under which counterhegemonic alternatives can gain traction, constitutes one of the most sophisticated frameworks available for critical educational research.

• Lipman, P. (1998). Race, class, and power in school restructuring. SUNY Press.
• Lipman, P. (2004). High stakes education: Inequality, globalization, and urban school reform. Psychology Press.
• Lipman, P. (2011). The new political economy of urban education: Neoliberalism, race, and the right to the city. Routledge.
• Lipman, P. (2021). School closings: Racial capitalism, state violence, and resistance. In What's race got to do with it? How current school reform policy maintains racial and economic inequality (2nd ed., pp. 129–148). Peter Lang.