Provisioning public education : infrastructural violence, school districting, and spatialized inequity in the San Francisco Bay Area

Abstract

With an alarming budget deficit and mounting fiscal pressures, Oakland Unified School District made a contentious and familiar decision in 2019- to close and consolidate schools. The ensuing conflict exposed a deeper structural fault line with roots in the racialized plunder that has fueled American prosperity and poverty from its founding. Situating the legal and political history of public education within an infrastructural violence framework, this thesis examines how the United States' system for provisioning schooling has created conditions in which school closures are structurally inevitable in low-income, urban communities of color. I look closely at the boundary between two vastly different but adjacent school districts in the San Francisco Bay Area to argue that the infrastructure of public education enacts violence through its segregation of resources, inequitable distribution of opportunity, and abjection of Black and Latinx students. Under such a framework, school closures emerge as more than the mere consequence of administrative failure, but as the product of a socially constructed and maintained distributional regime.