Marketing Schools, Marketing Cities: Who Wins and Who Loses When Schools Become Urban Amenities

Discuss real estate with any young family and the subject of schools is certain to come up—in fact, it will likely be a crucial factor in determining where that family lives. Not merely institutions of learning, schools have increasingly become a sign of a neighborhood’s vitality, and city planners have ever more explicitly promoted “good schools” as a means of attracting more affluent families to urban areas, a dynamic process that Maia Bloomfield Cucchiara critically examines in Marketing Schools, Marketing Cities.

 

Focusing on Philadelphia’s Center City Schools Initiative, she shows how education policy makes overt attempts to prevent, or at least slow, middle-class flight to the suburbs. Navigating complex ethical terrain, she balances the successes of such policies in strengthening urban schools and communities against the inherent social injustices they propagate—the further marginalization and disempowerment of lowerclass families. By asking what happens when affluent parents become “valued customers,” Marketing Schools, Marketing Cities uncovers a problematic relationship between public institutions and private markets, where the former are used to leverage the latter to effect urban transformations.

Maia Bloomfield Cucchiara is assistant professor of urban education in the College of Education at Temple University. 

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations and Terms

One A Strategic Opportunity

Two From “Philthadelphia” to the “Next Great City”: Revitalization in a Postindustrial City

Three Institutions of Last Resort: Crisis, Markets, and Stratification in Philadelphias Schools

Four Revitalizing Schools: The Center City Schools Initiative

Five “This Is Not an Inner-City School!” Marketing Grant Elementary

Six “This School Can Be Way Better!” Transforming Grant Elementary

Seven The “Segregated Schools Initiative?” Lasting Consequences of a Short-Lived Project

Eight Citizens, Customers, and City Schools

Appendix A Research Methodology

Appendix B Parents Activities at Grant Elementary

Appendix C List of Formal Interviews by Category or Title

Bibliography

Index