lashaw 2008

Experiencing Imminent Justice

The Presence of Hope in aMovement for Equitable Schooling

Amanda LashawUniversity of California, Berkeley

Recent scholarship on the affective dimensions of social change has pointed toward hope as an eth-ically promising form of belonging. In this article, the articulation of hope in the context of areform-oriented social movement provides the basis for interrogating the political promise of hope.The author examines the ascent of a movement for small, equitable schools in Oakland, California,to explore the hopes and aspirations of its most ardent advocates. To do this, the author contraststhe movement’s assertion of its equity-centered strategy with the complex race and class hierarchiesthat grounded power relations within the movement. The question that emerges from this discon-tinuity is how reformers come to experience the movement as equitable and unequivocally progres-sive. The author finds that the gap between reformers’ ideals and their material circumstances isbridged by the movement’s ample production of hope.

Keywords: reform; hope; schooling; race politics; progressive culture

Our work is about helping others to see a better future for all young people, andsharing in the responsibility of its realization. It is about creating reliable hope.

Executive director of the Gates Foundation’s Education Program (Vander Ark &Wagner, 2006)

The state can’t solve people’s problems. The failure of liberalism was thinking thatwe could solve people’s problems. We can only create the conditions for people tomake their lives better, in ways that they didn’t think were possible before. That’sbeing in the change business.

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space and culture vol. 11 no. 2, May 2008 109-124DOI: 10.1177/1206331208315931© 2008 Sage Publications

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Executive director of the Center for Educational Equity1

The grand opening of four new small schools was the occasion for a lively pressconference. After a series of sanguine speeches from educators, administrators, andfamilies involved with the conversion of the hulking Fremont High School, inOakland, California, a school board member representing the district stepped to themicrophone for a more subdued salute. He said he wanted to congratulate everybodyon the hard work but wanted to remind people that this was not the first or last ofschool innovations in Oakland. He told the crowd,“what we do is reform after reform.”He said he remembered the new schools started under Marcus Foster (Oakland’siconic, first Black superintendent of schools) more than 20 years ago. He rememberedhow in the 1980s, there was a big focus on career academies and how Fremont’s MediaAcademy became a national model. He remembered helping Fremont implementreforms known as “block scheduling” in the 1990s. And now he was working withFremont on the transition to small schools. As he begrudgingly commended the groupon its work, he said he wanted to remind everyone that they were standing on theshoulders of other people’s work. He conceded that it was okay to do reform afterreform, because these reforms reflect the hopes and aspirations of each generation.

What makes the board member’s lack of ebullience conspicuous is its timing. Theobservation that public schooling in the United States is the site of endless reform wavesis hardly unusual. It is commonplace among teachers, scholars, and policy makers alike.However, sounding a tone of wistful frustration has a customary time and place. Thiswas a time of deliverance. The small-schools movement in Oakland had generatedunprecedented support for the cause of closing the racial achievement gap. It garneredhistoric levels of capital investment, unanimous legal approval and, most important, theactive participation and enthusiasm of the Black and Latino working-class familieswhose fortunes were to be changed by the reforms. The Fremont press conference camein the midst of what appeared to be a giant leap toward racial equity in the school sys-tem. It was a zone of unmistakable optimism at the height of an era of hope.

In this article, I take a cue from the doubting school board member, and I interruptreformers amid a moment of faith. I examine the ascent of the small-schools move-ment in Oakland to explore the hopes and aspirations of its most ardent advocates. Ibegin by contrasting the movement’s assertion of its equity-centered mission with thecomplex race and class hierarchies that grounded power relations within the move-ment. The question that emerges from this discontinuity is how reformers cometo experience the movement as equitable and unequivocally progressive. I find thatthe gap between reformers’ ideals and their material circumstances is bridged by themovement’s ample production of hope. Articulations of hope through the life of themovement help make reformers’ ideals feel closer to realization than they are. Progress,in other words, is experienced as imminence.

The sense of imminent redress accomplished by the movement is not easily detectedin the formal statements reformers made about their goals and probable achievements.The actors and organizations leading the movement did not claim to be racial justicerevolutionaries, nor did they promise to create a new society in which race and classconflict would not exist. Characterized in the rational and strategic terms of reformers’planning documents, the movement takes on a modest, pragmatic appearance. The ideawas simply to give all of Oakland’s families—not only the wealthy ones—choicesamong high-quality schools. That agenda dug no deeper than redesigning schoolorganizations and retraining teachers.



However, the modesty of reformers’ claims must be paired with the utopian tenor oftheir political culture. I was struck by the intensity of reformers’ desires during fieldresearch carried out between 2000 and 2004. Through observations of daily life for move-ment leaders, I witnessed how they pursued their goals with a feverish urgency. In inter-views, planning meetings, and public events, I heard repeated narration of the movement’ssignificance in terms of a deep rupture to the status quo. Despite disavowals at the level oftheir strategy, reformers at the center of the movement—a group that includes non-governmental organization (NGO) professionals, teachers, principals, parents, communityorganizers, foundation officers, and school system administrators—enacted their vocationwith a passion that insisted on the possibility of a radically transformed world.2

Hope and Reform

The importance of passion in social movement is a ripe topic of conversationamong scholars seeking to think beyond the politics of identity. One generative line ofdiscussion has cohered around Baruch Spinoza’s (1982) materialist view of emotion interms of changing physical intensities—what he describes as “affections of the body bywhich the body’s power of activity is increased or diminished, assisted or checked,together with the idea of these affections” (p. 104). This notion of the body’s variablecapacity to “affect and be affected” can be thought of in a social register in terms of col-lective energetic forces that animate and enervate life. In the context of Oakland’ssmall-schools movement, for example, what “moved” cannot be fully named by thelanguages of political economy and cultural practice. The concept of affect pointstoward changing ways of being as a critical dimension of social change.

For Spinoza (1982), increasing the intensity of living is a good in itself to be soughtthrough modes of being based on what he categorized as “joyful” passions such as love andconfidence. Conversely, modes of being shaped by “sad” passions, such as pity or hatred,are defined by a decreasing life force. The political implications of such an ethical stance arenot immediately evident. Recent scholarship on the political import of affect has drawninsight from, among other sources, Friedrich Nietzsche’s ethos of “the will to power” andGilles Deleuze’s (1991) emphasis on an ethics of “becoming,” to posit a politics of everydayliving in which ossified, depleting social situations can be forced open by creative eruptionsof human energy. A common point of departure for thought on affective politics is theview that new forms of politics are to be found in the pursuit of “more being.”

For example, advocates of cultivating hopeful communities have found politicalpotential in hope’s “productive, forward sense of life” (Thrift, 2004, p. 68); its power todimly outline a “something better”; as well as its enactment of a mutuality based ontrust in life (Anderson, 2006, p. 37) and in the cultivation of belonging, sensitivity, andcare that can flow from hopeful living (Zournazi, 2002). In exploring the politicalpotential of hope, many scholars have been clear in distinguishing a focus on the con-tent of what is hoped for—some sort of future ideal—from the quality of the act of liv-ing. Thus, strong claims are made for the ethical difference between optimism andhope. Lear (2006), for example, makes this distinction using Aristotle’s contrastbetween acts that are derived from optimism (actual confidence) and courageous acts(ones that assume risk). The defining quality that Lear ascribes to an act of courageousand “radical” hope is that it faces up to reality (p. 113).

Quite often, the virtue of hope is presented precisely in the terms that Spinoza(1982) sets out for “joyful living” (i.e., “joy as affirmation, an assuming by the body of

T h e P r e s e n c e o f H o p e 111



it potentials, its assuming of a posture that intensifies its powers of existence. Themoment of joy is the co-presence of those potentials, in the context of a bodily becom-ing” [Massumi, 2002, p. 241]). The political insight offered by this lens highlightschanging forms of presence as a “margin of maneuverability” that is too often unac-knowledged in theoretical and practical efforts to define freedom (Masumi, 2002,p. 212). Blomley (2007) makes the point in empirical terms by celebrating the “affir-mative and optimistic zeal” of an association of critical geographers as a counterforceto the utopian impulse at the center of neoliberal capitalism.

In contrast, the mobilization of hopefulness in Oakland most clearly points to aphilosophical stance that regards hope as an impediment to ethical living. If, as I intendto show, the materialization of hope across the small-schools movement directedattention away from immanent race and class hierarchies, and if hope effectivelyenhanced reformers’ ability to tolerate suffering in their midst (by intensifying partic-ipants’ connection to imagined futures), then it is appropriate to view their hope as aform of deception. Such a reading would resonate with Spinoza, Nietzsche and other“pessimistic” philosophers.3 Despite recent deployments, Spinoza (1982) himself cate-gorizes hope as a sad passion, emphasizing its strong ties to fear and denigrating it asa state of ontological suspense. Nietzsche (1986) warns against hope as a deferral of joyand sees it as a prolongation of torment and negation of the will that amounts tofuture living at the expense of life in the present. Schopenhauer (1970) is still morecondemning in his relegation of hope to the ranks of false consciousness: “hope is theconfusion of the desire for a thing with its probability” (p. 31).

Although the Oakland case does provide an opportunity to explore how false hope islived, the pessimistic view may not quite capture the complex combination of ontologicaland political openings and closures effected by the specifically reformist articulation ofhope. Many readers will associate Oakland with the revolutionary hope that spawned theBlack Panther Party there in 1966. The demise of revolutionary modalities and the rise ofreform is a long story—one that turns on violent struggles with agents of the state, on thecrushing anomie of White supremacist America, and on the West coast Panthers’ movetoward electoral politics.4 In the field of education, “liberation schools” became “commu-nity schools.” Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the racial politics of education werereshaped by “White flight” from the school system. By 2003-2004, only 6% of the district’s47,000 pupils were Caucasian.5 Educational change turned away from economic andstructural questions toward identity-based curriculum issues (notably, the move to teachBlack English or Ebonics in the 1980s) and a razor-sharp focus on racial patterns of testscores. Small-schools reforms similarly spoke to relations of inequality by, as one organi-zation liked to put it, “bringing up the bottom without bringing down the top.”

Ethnographic particulars on how a reformist political project moves and is moved byhope may help to focus the search for an ethical grounding to proposals that “hope couldbecome a contestable regulative ideal” (Anderson, 2006, p. 37) or that hope is essential tohuman life and therefore comprises a privileged framework from which to think aboutprogressive politics (Zournazi, 2002). Although literature advocating hope dulyacknowledges the possibility of deceptive or unjust political formations of hope, itrepeatedly points to a fairly obvious and perhaps uninstructive case: namely capitalistand right-wing mobilizations of hope. The example of neoconservative hope, which isdeeply connected to nationalist fear mongering and narrow bourgeois ideals, neatly illus-trates the masquerade of hope-as-deferral of life enhancement of which the pessimisticphilosophers warn. However, if there is an ethically promising link between being hope-ful and being politically just, it will have to be distinguished not from such destructive




hopes but rather from reformist articulations that are intensely attuned to suffering, onthe one hand, and instinctively committed to reductive and conservative senses ofchange, on the other.

In the section that follows, I examine how Oakland’s education reformers distinguishtheir movement from historical failures to produce equity. I then situate their accountof a bottom-up movement in the context of actual ethical practices—practices thatdiverge from their expressed ideals. Next, I analyze the temporal and spatial shape of thehope that united reformers and consider how it may have staved off an ethical crisis forthe movement. I conclude by returning to the question of hope’s political potential.

The Virtues of Equity-Centered Reform

In the fall of 2000, there was so much national buzz about changes happening in theOakland Unified School District that the city could not accept all of the applicants to Teachfor America who wanted placements there.6 That spring, the district had passed a policy tocreate new small schools intended to fill the city with “equitable schools of choice.” In addi-tion to the policy, a raise in teacher salaries and an innovative partnership between com-munity organizers and education reform experts put Oakland in the national spotlight. Ata press conference announcing the latest donation to Oakland’s effort, the director of edu-cation for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation heartily offered his admiration alongwith a check for $9.5 million.“Things are going right for Oakland kids. I don’t see this levelof community involvement anywhere in the country,”he told the crowd.“We’re gonna keepcoming back until every student in Oakland has great life options.”

According to participants and observers, what made Oakland’s small-schoolsmovement different from other efforts to battle the effects of factory-style schooling inlarge, urban districts was its relentless commitment to principles of equity. The policy,for example, called for new organizational designs that would produce personalized,rigorous, and safe learning environments. Although the schools would be open to allstudents, the policy’s vocation was to improve education for the Black and Latinoworking-class students who typically had the lowest test scores and fewest collegeprospects in the district. The policy’s details—from admissions guidelines to academicstandards—made plain that these changes were not meant to enhance the choicesavailable to the wealthy families living in the Oakland hills. In terms that no one hadto spell out, the policy spoke to the needs of “flatlands” families whose childrenattended “overcrowded and underperforming” schools. Its stated purpose was “to closethe achievement gap for under-served students.”

However, the commitment to equity was more often identified with the genesis andleadership of the reforms than with the letter of the policy. For one thing, the originsof the movement in grassroots organizing and parents’ demand for better schools wasseen as a critical reversal of the more typical top-down imposition of reforms. Fromthe perspective of the community-based organization, Oakland CommunityOrganizations (OCO), which represented parents in the Small Schools Partnership, themovement was a victory not only for students but also for their parents. In the wordsof the organization’s cochair, “through OCO we have made absolute systemic changes.We have been able to do things that other cities haven’t been able to do because webrought everyone to the table, especially parents and community. And making theschool district and the city listen to our concerns and start to work for us, which iswhat they’re supposed to do.” OCO not only organized the watershed public action in




which more than 2,000 supporters won policy commitments from public officials butthey also did the listening legwork, through thousands of face-to-face meetings withteachers and parents, which allowed them to confidently say of the small-schoolsagenda, “this is what the community wants.”

The educational expertise piece of The Partnership, represented by the Center forEducational Equity (CEE), was also considered essential to overcoming the inequities anderrors of past reform movements. CEE was the local chapter of a national, university-affiliated school reform network that had for decades championed small schools organ-ized around intellectual mastery. CEE’s access to 25 years’ worth of reform wisdomassured Oakland’s advocates that local changes would be guided by “what the researchsays.” Flatlands residents had seen too many reform waves come and go to have patiencefor experimental solutions to the problems that plagued their neighborhood schools.The educators and consultants on CEE’s staff were seen as “the brains” behind themovement. They could advise the district and community organizers on an array ofcomplex technical questions from how to design the most effective organizationalstructures to which pedagogical practices work for students of color and how teachersmight raise their expectations for students. The Partnership, as it was dubbed, signaledthe reformers’ ideal leadership model for making progressive and sustainable changes:CEE brought concrete, proven models to the community’s demand for better schools.

For CEE,“challenging historical patterns of inequity” was the raison d’être of schoolreform. It wasn’t enough to promote academic excellence. The goal of equitableschooling—“to ensure that all students can reach high standards and that no studentis poorly served due to her/his race, gender, home language, or economic status”—hadto define both the means and ends of reform. To train teachers, they developed pro-grams such as “Inquiry for Equity” and “Leading for Equity, Achievement andDemocracy.” Multiracial alliances were seen as a strategic necessity. In the words of oneCEE document, “We believe the best way to leverage the resources we need is to har-ness the latent talent, resources, and energy that exists in our communities but thatcannot be accessed because of distrust, cynicism and past failure. Our work togetherstands as proof that we can establish partnerships and alliances across the fractures ofrace, class, experience and culture that divide us.” The diversity of CEE’s staff and thecommunity organizers’ multicultural vanguard were widely recognized as indicationsthat common cause was supplanting a history of cronyist politics. The ultimate goal ofequity-centered reform was expressed, in the words of one funding proposal, as“changed lives—lives transformed through the intentional creation of multicultural,multiethnic, multiracial communities where freedom and justice are practiced in pur-suit of learning.” Reformers committed themselves to that goal through daily practicessuch as ensuring that subaltern parents and people of color had directive and vocalroles in daily meetings and long-term projects.

Given all that seemed to be at stake, people in the movement labored with incredi-ble vigor. The nonprofit professionals notoriously worked 70- and 80-hour weeks tocoach emergent design teams. They drew few boundaries around their time andworked at a frenetic pace to accomplish all that was expected of them. Parents andteachers donated innumerable, unwaged hours to the cause, squeezing meetings inbefore and after work, in hallways and on weekends, often sacrificing family responsi-bilities. Reformers did not pace themselves for a marathon. They were in a constantstate of sprint. That urgency made good sense to CEE’s executive director as heexplained to me, “we have reached a point where I can look ahead and I can actuallysee the actual set of events . . . it’s a 3 to 5 year window where this district is gonna tip.




This is gonna tip.” Such statements were far more than rhetorical tools of encourage-ment. The director’s bright face and energetic delivery conveyed an affective intensityand deep muscular attachment.

Before equity could be measured in terms of student test scores, then, communityleadership was the main sign of a principled break from the past. The ongoing partic-ipation of flatlands parents in creating the schools was said to be critical in securingthe effectiveness and the righteousness of the reforms. It was understood that flatlandsparents wanted what middle-class parents had always enjoyed: choices among high-quality schools. For the new schools to be responsive to the needs and values of thecommunity—and not only to the visions of teachers and administrators—communitymembers would have to stay close to the school design process. Beyond getting designsright, many reformers envisioned the transformation of the entire district in terms ofa fundamentally new relationship between public schools and their communities. Oneparent observed, “OCO has empowered parents by keeping them central to the organ-izing process for small schools. They understand that parents need to be involved witheach other and at our children’s schools just as much as our children need us to be.”Parent participation on the new school design teams was seen as a particularly signif-icant interruption of the status quo. During a presentation to potential movement fun-ders, one leader said, with emphatic respect, “What is different about this movement isthat people demanded not only to have better schools, but to sit at the table and designthose schools. The care and ownership that people brought to the table was key to theshift from reproductive patterns to transformative ones.”

Community Leadership as an Ethical Identity

The progressive trajectory of the reforms, so apparent to reformers, begins to blur ifone examines how community leadership operated in the movement’s ethical identityand exerted a certain force on events in Oakland. The story of the movement’s grass-roots origin was perhaps the most consistent and public narrative of what the small-schools movement was all about. It introduced the text of the policy and other officialdocuments. It was recounted at the start of important meetings. It was used to orientnewcomers and observers of the movement. Those in the know traced the roots to agroup of Latina mothers who met at a church on Saturdays to discuss the problems intheir children’s school. As the story goes, they gradually began to see the need for lesscrowded schools. OCO heard concerns voiced across the flatland neighborhoods of thecity and began organizing. They sent a delegation of parents and elected officials to visitexemplary schools in Harlem, New York. Parents and community groups kept meetingand dreaming and lobbying officials. Officials were convinced, asked CEE to draft a pol-icy, and the school board unanimously passed it. The story establishes the reform move-ment’s bottom-up trajectory. It renders marginalized parents as the empowered forcebehind citywide changes. It portrays White power holders heeding their demands.

But there are other stories to tell about the origins of the movement. At least sincethe mid-1990s, CEE had been developing plans for a small-schools project in the SanFrancisco Bay Area. In 1997, they won a foundation grant to develop a network ofschools that could serve as examples to a broad audience of educators and reformers.They were deeply tied to the Harlem schools that were said to have inspired Oakland’smovement. By the time OCO had fomented Oakland parents’ concerns into an audi-ble rumble, CEE was, in fact, already doing the work of the small-schools movement.




It was simply cast at a national and regional rather than local scale. Although theystrained to portray themselves as supporters of community leaders, CEE was arguablythe protagonist of the movement.

CEE quickly became the center of gravity for the design and opening of newschools. As fiscal agent of the Gates donation and architect of the policy, the NGOorganized the confidence of potential supporters and exercised conceptual authorityover the reform process. To be sure, OCO and organized parents were a decisive factorin the movement’s ascent, its national splash, and its success in effecting changes toschooling in the district. What’s not at all evident is that they were the driver behindthe reforms, as it was often said, nor that the movement’s genesis redressed their statusas vulnerable subjects of racial and economic domination.

A second narrative that exalted the agency of an empowered community recounts thecitywide action OCO organized to press for a small-schools policy. Participants tell it asa David versus Goliath story, recalling how Mayor Jerry Brown; Senior State Senator DonPerata; Superintendent George Musgrove; and members of the City Council, SchoolBoard, and Teachers’ Union each said yes, one by one, to all of the parents’ demands.What’s peculiar about the interpretation of victory that surrounds this story is the time-line of events. Eight months prior to the emblematic meeting, district leaders had alreadyasked CEE to draft a policy and had hired a director of Small Schools. The teachers’union had formally signed on as movement collaborators. A mayoral commission for-mally endorsed the concept. Education’s power brokers, in other words, walked into themeeting already convinced. It was the mayor and not the organizers who ended theevening leading the crowd’s chant of the revolutionary slogan, “Sí. Se Puede.”Nevertheless, this story and other glorifications of democratic initiative were regularlyinvoked as evidence of a dramatic reordering of power relations. Just what did this eventand its recollection accomplish, if not pressuring politicians to change their ways? Sufficeit to say, for now, that there is a disjuncture between the stories the movement tells aboutits commitment to equity and the rather more ambiguous principles grounding its polit-ical practices.

The idea of the small-schools reforms as a community-led movement is best viewedas a prominent reification in Oakland’s emergent progressive imaginary. The only realleverage that OCO and their constituents had over the direction of the movement wastheir ability to make a public stink. In light of widespread enthusiasm about the small-schools agenda, parents and officials were far more united than divided, and protestwas hardly necessary. As such, although the words community leadership were every-where, there was a divergence between the ideal of empowerment and the actual needfor subaltern participation. Once the movement had passed from a moment ofdemand to implementation of the policy, it was unclear how parents and organizerscould play a role in setting the agenda for change.

Much less ambiguous, however, was the general marginalization of parents in thebudding school design process. As reformers’ work turned toward the nitty-gritty ofhammering out instructional programs and staffing patterns, teachers took center stage.Parents were less often seen and heard at meetings. Some teams of teachers never suc-ceeded in enrolling parent participants. On other teams, tensions between parents andteachers festered around the exclusive, technical language of the call for proposals.7

Given the racial profiles of the two groups, this entailed a marked whitening of themovement’s front line of action. In light of the association between parents’ central rolein creating the new schools and the urgent goal of interrupting patterns of inequity and“reproduction,” the new reality might have brought the movement to a halt.




Leaders did find the pattern disquieting. Some designers of the process confessedthat they hadn’t yet figured out how to bridge parents’ and teachers’ points of view.Others lamented the pace of things given parents’ need for extra training. Some par-ents were furious, and others simply felt unqualified to contribute. It’s puzzling thatthis turn of events did not prompt OCO to take parents to the streets. In the face ofsuch a crushing reversal of ideals, why did the discourse of community leadership per-sist and not become a symbol of hypocrisy or failed dreams? And what accounts forthe demure tenor of the response? The sense of concern that followed a boldfacedresurgence of top-down decision-making hardly compares with the passion thatunderscored reformers’ assertions about building a new educational culture, “wherefreedom and justice are practiced in pursuit of learning.”

What’s more, from the start, the community was itself racially divided in its rela-tions to the small-schools reforms, giving lie to the promise of dispossessed familiesuniting to solve common problems. Initially, participation was concentrated amongmothers of elementary school children in Oakland’s Latino neighborhoods. Their chil-dren generally attended the most egregiously crowded schools in the district. Althoughthe policy gave priority for admissions equally to children from overcrowded and low-performing schools, the first five schools to open were all located in the Fruitvale—thegeographical metonym of Oakland’s Latino population. “That’s where the energy is,”one reform leader told me. The movement quickly developed a reputation as “a Latinothing,” and it proved difficult, at first, to engage large numbers of Black parents. It did-n’t help matters that smallness was being imposed on two large high schools in pre-dominantly Black neighborhoods of East Oakland. Given the contrast betweenvoluntary and coerced participation and its racial contours, it should have been impos-sible to posit the unified and ideologically homogenous parent body that personifiedthe movement’s “romance of community.”8 However, parents and professionals alikeinvoked the universal good the reforms would bring. As one brochure phrased it, equi-table schools would create conditions in which “every school, every teacher and everystudent will realize their unique gifts, interests and talents.”

The Presence of an Improbable Future

What’s especially striking about the overall discontinuity between the progressiveidentity of the movement and its concrete ethical practices is a temporal slip. Insteadof treating equitable schooling as a set of aspirations that might guide a protractedstruggle, reformers talked and behaved as if inequity’s end were imminent. For exam-ple, rather than seeing parent organizing for new schools as an uneven, uncertain,temporary process filled with moments of both encouragement and disappointment,participants regarded it as an actual “shift from reproductive patterns to transforma-tive ones.” Likewise, the bottom-up practices that distinguished the movement fromprior reforms, such as ensuring that Black and Latino participants had visible andaudible roles in important meetings, were not understood to be expressions of thedesire for a reversal of racist power relations. They were taken to be indicators of areversal in-the-making. Reformers rallied, wept, cheered, and labored as if they could“see the actual events,” as CEE’s director had said, that would turn Oakland into a citywhere poor and rich parents alike choose among great schools. Despite the fractiousand unequal involvement of residents and racial groups, “an organized community”was not regarded as a task to accomplish, rather as a fait accompli. The tremendous




flurry of activity was accorded a clear interpretation: Progress was here and now. All ofthis confidence, it’s worth repeating, flourished in advance of the opening of newschools, long before new measures of the achievement gap could even be taken.

Their optimism, in other words, entailed a collapsing of the future they wished forwith the present they were creating. Where did this sense of imminent freedom andjustice come from? How were the partial and contradictory fruits of reformers’ labormisrecognized as compelling evidence of a righteous path? To the extent that plannedchanges were successfully taking place throughout the district, the results were rathermodest. Groups of Black, Latino, and working-class parents were attending school-related meetings in larger numbers than usual. An influx of philanthropic capital tem-porarily paid for surplus meeting time—though it did nothing to boost the dismalbudget of the school system. Newly-designed school organizations eventually reroutedfunding streams and allowed teachers and students to know each other better. As wehave seen, myriad unplanned changes also took place and often violated cherishedprinciples of racial equity and empowerment. How were such transgressions ignored?The experience of daily frustration and falling short didn’t have to be well articulatedto have weighed heavily on reformers’ big hearts. There was evidence of inequity (how-ever reconfigured) bearing down on their dreams of an educational utopia. And yetthere were few signs of doubt. No scent of despair. There was vigorous, zealous attach-ment to the plausibility of their plans and to the probability of realizing their ideals.How did the imagined trajectory from the achievement gap to equitable schoolinghold together? What was the glue for this utopian–pragmatic zone of social change?How did images of a more equal future carry so much weight in the present?

It was the temporal and spatial presence of hope that gave material heft to the idealsof racial equity. Whereas lived equity still lay precariously in a state of possible future,hope was something you could practically bump into. It materialized across wideswaths of the city in the willingness of subaltern parents to elicit and believe the prom-ises of highly perched decision makers whom experience had taught them to distrust.It circulated in the festive air of the annual small-schools conference and eruptedthrough rousing speeches about “a new civil rights movement.” It burst through theapplause of world-weary adults at the mention of a poor child’s goal of attending lawschool or becoming a doctor. Hope was both the sustenance and output of laboringschool designers who gave voice and body to their dreams in church basements, NGOoffices, and school cafeterias. The Gates Foundation’s optimistic multimillions boostedcollective self-esteem and eased the pain of an economic recession.9 When Oaklandvoters overwhelmingly approved a $350 million bond to build and improve schools,this time-and-place of hope seemed firmly installed. One has only to think of a stockmarket rally to imagine the synergistic effect of these affective, financial, and semanticinvestments on the sense of imminent transformation in the city.

It should be clear by now that such excitement and expectation did not arise auto-matically from the tracks the movement was laying. Contrary to reformers’ account ofexcitement in Oakland, their new and better strategies for closing the racial achieve-ment gap could not explain people’s passionate belief in the reforms’ promise. Themovement had to become what Antonio Gramsci (1971) called “a modern prince.” Ithad to create a “concrete phantasy which acts on a dispersed and shattered people toarouse and organize its collective will” (p. 126). The movement’s ascent did not merelyrely on the institutional power of The Partnership nor become propelled solely by therhetoric of its equity narratives. It had to bring the fantasy of racial equity to life. Thetwo visionaries quoted at the start of this article were keenly aware that arousing and




articulating desires for change were integral to their work. “Being in the changebusiness” entailed “creating reliable hope.”

A proliferation of activities followed the passage of the policy and extended the reachof the movement’s expectant mood. There were public meetings about the nascent schooldesign process and about access to Gates funds. Newly formed design teams popped upall over the city and met regularly to devise their proposals. Sundry meetings to enroll newfunders, functionaries, and researchers became places where the history of the movementwas told and where parents and teachers gave testimonials about their dismal experiencesin the school system and how they had convinced officials to take action. Whereas shar-ing personal pain at a school board meeting rarely led to swift action, parent testimonialsin the movement’s rallies and meetings were associated with short-term triumph. As oneCEE leader put it, “They’ve seen what can happen if they demand good schools.”

A variety of dreaming practices gave immediacy to long-range desires. For instance,brochures, Web sites, and other public communications filled the workspaces of themovement with images of happy and cared-for people of color, including a plethora ofsmiling and studying Black children. Reformers also habitually used the present tense tonarrate desires as if they had already been realized. The syntax of what is called a “visionstatement,” for example, allowed one design team to write, “Mandela [High School] is arigorous, academic environment where students become articulate, skilled, active, caring,critical thinkers,” before the doors to the school had opened. In time, built landscapes alsomaterialized desires in the form of buildings renamed for small schools such as “ASCENDElementary,”“Urban Promise Academy,” and “Youth Empowerment School (YES).” Suchrepresentations sutured a semiotics of racial equity to present places and practices.

The temporal twist engendered by planned dreaming sessions was more visceral.Such sessions were ideally held in the form of a retreat. I sat with the Mandela designteam during 2 days of brainstorming about a biliteracy certification program in theschool they would open the following fall. Promoting the value of languages—andcombating an anti-immigrant sentiment ascending in California—was central to thegroup’s vision of what the principal had described as “the greatest school on earth.”Although everyone involved lived in town, they paid to spend the night at a universityfaculty club. The NGO facilitator of the session told me that the group really wanted“the feeling of being away.” For nearly 12 hours, the team occupied a single, genericmeeting room, and filled the walls with chart paper listing their program ideas. Theoptimum space of dreaming, it seems, was an out-of-place space.

Conjuring the content of an ideal school was, for its part, an experience of being outof time. In a simple sense, retreating from one’s hectic daily life made such meetingsplaces where time stopped. More profoundly, the act of creating a new school—theessential instrument of social reproduction—was something of a sacred experience.Anything was possible inside the space-time of dreaming. A central theme of theMandela brainstorm was the team’s desire to get beyond a superficial approach to mul-ticulturalism. In one teacher’s words, “celebrating everyone’s holidays is not what we’restriving for.” They discussed frustration at having to defend Spanish as a language ofbusiness and art and expressed a commitment to see immigrants’ struggles againstracism as a matter of inspiration, not pity.

Their challenge was to change students’ sense of the relative value of languages. Ata retreat session, they could generate concrete steps to take without facing the burdenof undoing the unequal status of languages in an anti-immigrant society. In the heatof dreaming up ways for students to fall in love with learning languages—foreignnewspapers, pen pals, language mentors, a trip to Louisiana “where French has a whole




different meaning”—they were permitted to simply assert their own, ahistorical values,and thereby transcend the inequitable world. Over the retreat’s two long days, bodiespaced, fidgeted, and yawned. During the few peak moments of creative flow, the roomfelt focused, electric, and light. Another design team I spent time with described thefeeling of making a new school like cleaning the slate of history and starting anew. Byletting imaginations loose in retreat sessions, participants could at once release the ten-sion of living in inequality and renew their faith that equity was possible. More oftenthan not, reality quickly disciplined the content of dreams. The Mandela team had atough year with results that one veteran teacher called “demoralizing.” But dreaminginfused the group’s plans with an emotional memory of possibility and pushed themforward. The same veteran teacher told me, “We haven’t done anywhere near what wewanted. But we haven’t abandoned any of it.”

Hope was successfully produced at different scales of the movement’s practice,within and across bodies, meeting rooms, neighborhood architecture, and regionaland national reform networks. The shifting location of small-schools meetings helpedcirculate the sense of possibility across ever-wider swaths of the city. The meeting tra-jectory suggests the contours of the movement’s persuasiveness. As we have alreadyseen, the sites of heaviest investment in the process—investments of time, labor, andfaith—were the neighborhoods closest to the heart of the Latino-identified Fruitvalesection of Oakland. According to the people in the district office now in charge of“incubating” new schools, when the policy was first being implemented, “we inten-tionally opened schools only where organizing was occurring in order to grow andmaintain a level of energy needed to initiate new reforms.”

Locating public meetings in new places was one way to grow the level of energy. Theannual small-schools conference was especially effective in stimulating and corrallingexcitement in less forthcoming locales. Movement leaders were particularly concernedabout the ossifying Latino identity that bristled against old Black and Latino antagonismsin city politics. Hosting the conference in the western and eastern edges of the city gaveBlack neighborhoods a chance to see themselves as central constituents of the movement.

Uneven identification with the movement did not, of course, follow neatly alongneighborhood boundaries. It was stronger among Mexican Americans, whose power inlocal government had steadily increased, than among more politically vulnerable, recentlyimmigrated Central Americans. It was sturdiest among elementary school parents andsteadily faded with the rising age of students. It was far easier to secure among youngerteachers than among veterans. Teachers from the large high schools—especially thoseforced to convert to small schools—were the hardest to convince. In those schools, enthu-siasm for the reforms took hold in pockets, painfully pitting the willing against those whoopposed the breakup. These patterns point to the conditions that were best suited for theproduction of hope. It flowed most easily among those who had least experience withlocal disappointment and most sense of security about the future before them.

Hope and Judgment

The copious presence of hope may well have counterbalanced and displaced signs offailure and futility lurking in the movement.10 Hope became a significant presence inOakland in three mutually constitutive ways. First, the concrete fantasy of equitableschools aroused and organized diverse impulses for something better into a coordinatedpresence. Parents’ willingness to demand, teachers’ desire to dream, NGO workers’




relentless labor, and the Gates Foundation’s expectation that community leadershipwould deliver a dramatically different reform need not have added up to a movementwith history-making capacities. It was the strategic linking of these proto-hopes witheach other and the state’s policy-making power that made hope recognizable and reli-able. Second, the work of reform expanded the spatial presence of this willingness tobelieve beyond the bodies and offices of the movement’s most faithful. Through themovement’s media representations, shifting meeting sites, circulating narratives, andcitywide call for new school proposals, a sense of possibility could be felt across much ofOakland. As I’ve suggested, the spatial contours of spontaneous and affective investmentreveal some features of the movement’s power. Hope among hills parents, for example,was of little use to the movement. Among flatlands families imagined as the targets of thereforms, some were enrolled voluntarily and others were coerced.11 The resulting geog-raphy of hope both bolstered and troubled the equity fantasy driving the reforms.

Third, many of the movement’s practices—performances of demand, embodieddreaming, articulated vision statements, vivid brochure images and triumphantnarratives—gave unrealized ideals a temporal presence in the form of here-and-nowexpressions of hope. Taken together, the coordinated, spatially expanded and tempo-ral presences of hope facilitated an experience of imminence—the palpable nearnessand realness of reformers’ ideals—that made the improbable future of racial equitybelievable. The CEE director’s conviction that “I can actually see the actual set ofevents . . . it’s a 3 to 5 year window where this district is gonna tip. This is gonna tip,”rested on a scaffold of imagined and material building blocks that could bridge thepresent he lived and the future he wanted.

One of the arguments I am driving toward is that collectively articulated hope hasa time-compressing character. Not only is it future oriented, as philosophers and cul-tural theorists have already argued, but it also brings a desired future into close, mate-rial contact with the present. In Oakland, the movement’s imagery, dramatic action,and planning products shared a physical presence with the feeling of hope. Anderson’s(2006) definition of hope as “a relation of suspension that discloses the future as openwhilst enabling a seemingly paradoxical capacity to dwell more intensely in points ofdivergence within encounters that diminish,” (p. 33) suggests that hope makes fig-urable otherwise unavailable glimmers of maneuverability in a sharply constrainedsocial world, even as it makes that world a bit more bearable.12 A focus on history-making hope adds the view that, when something better is named, intense dwelling inthe present makes strong demands on the future.

A second argument I wish to make is that assessing the political value and effects ofhopefulness requires normative judgment. How does the openness immanent in hopebecome enclosed through the political attachments (identities, resources, forms ofauthority) of social change formations? How does hope catalyze social change ener-gies, and toward what futures are they enrolled? At what cost does the present worldbecome more bearable? As I mentioned earlier, defenders of hope are already attunedto wreckage unleashed by right-wing formations that cultivate hope in the form of afearful deferral of joy, that reduce hope to dreams of upward mobility, and thatunevenly distribute meager hopes within capitalism (e.g., Hage, 2002). The historicaland geographical materialization of hope in Oakland should serve to disrupt thedichotomy between good hope (revolutionary, progressive) and bad hope (right-wing,false) that haunts the philosophical rescue of hope from its status as a “sad” passion. Iwould argue that Oakland’s hopes did attach to meager dreams and quietly affirmWhite bourgeois norms. But they also moved subaltern parents to claim a role in




public schooling and pushed big-time capitalists to fork over many millions of dollars.The movement’s collective hope was both progressive and conservative.

What is perhaps of greatest concern about the way that hope moved reformers inOakland is that it encouraged a future-oriented ethics. It is the deferral of judgment—aparadoxical tolerance for race and class oppression in the midst of a passionate equaliz-ing endeavor—that makes the articulation of hope and reform both strong and danger-ous. A multiracial set of reform leaders, who had invested heavily in the idea of parentleadership, tolerated the marginalization of Latina parents as White teachers dominatedthe new school design process. The celebratory opening of new schools in Latino neigh-borhoods lifted movement spirits even as a district budget crisis led to the painful clo-sure of schools in predominantly Black neighborhoods. By highlighting the experienceof imminent justice, I have sought to describe how reformist hope creates an exceptionaltime space that contextualizes political conduct. Oakland’s reformers worked as if theywere on the eve of revolution, and the coming justice seemingly outweighed their ethi-cally compromised means. Hope must be seen, therefore, not only as a relation of onto-logical suspension but also, potentially, as an accomplice to the suspension of ethics.

Political passions that exemplify a deep respect for being must cut through the falsesense of imminent, radical transformation that strings together reform after reform.Whereas scholarship exploring the ethics of affective politics has clearly advocated radi-cal attention to the quality of presences, the literature is generally wary of judging thepresent. Massumi (2002), for example, associates judgment with moralizing and advo-cates a situational ethics that locates good versus evil in the maximal realization of poten-tial in a given moment. Dangers of moral relativism aside, his philosophy of creativityseems indispensable to combating common sensibilities that life’s patterns are inevitablyetched. On its own, however, this stance enacts a voluntarist position that has not faredwell in political history. To suggest that new social relations can be invented without rad-ical attention to how they are constrained is to ignore half the question of political praxis.The move from a personal ethos of becoming to a politics of collective life enhancementrequires conceptualization of ways of being that destroy the old, not just become the new.

One barrier to the search for such forms of being is the hegemonic notion thatwithout hope, ethico-political life necessarily enters a state of cynicism, paralysis, apa-thy, and doom.13 This unnecessary binary formulation was resolved long ago by theimpressively dynamic Gramscian (1971) motto: ‘pessimism of the intellect, optimismof the will.’ Gramsci exhorts a commitment to action, and he regards the expression ofnegativity and despair immanent in actual life as politically necessary; for him, there isno contradiction. He also makes room for the possibility that being without hopeaffords ethical lucidity and being cynical or full of doom intensifies one’s intoleranceof mounting crimes against humanity. Gramsci’s motto additionally has the virtue ofbalancing hope’s potentially distorting temporal relationship to social suffering. Ifoptimism spurs the will toward creativity, pessimism trains insight with the lessons ofhistory. As many historical revolutions suggest, moving against the past may have moreto do with justice than investing in the future.

Finally, whereas the mantle of hope is readily appropriated by right-wing andreformist political projects—it is “accessible to the enemy camp” as Gramsci (1971)would say—the tension between pessimism/optimism packs an antagonistic punchthat is harder to absorb. Whereas hope may (or may not) forgive and forget sins of thepast, pessimism and optimism relentlessly remember how the land was settled, whichbodies have generated the wealth, whose comfort is legislated, and what stories of suf-fering get heard. One need not sign up for Gramsci’s socialist teleology to remain certain




that social antagonism is central to the ongoing history of being human. Hope may becritical to survival, but learning how to “be against” may be more conducive to collec-tive flourishing. In order to serve both survival and justice, hope must not protectimagined futures at the expense of life in the present.

Notes

1. Excerpted from a newsletter published by The Center for Educational Equity; at theirrequest, I have used a pseudonym to refer to this organization

2. I define the category reformer in terms of particular political sensibilities. AlthoughOakland reformers occupied distinct institutional and social positions, they were united by theintensity of their belief in the promise of small, equitable schools. Students occasionally con-tributed to the design of new schools, but they rarely appeared as actors in the making of thereform movement, which is the focus of this article. Two key distinctions between reformist andradical political cultures in education are the former’s professionalized character and the latter’sactive alliance with youth.

3. The case for a pessimistic tradition in philosophy has recently been made by JoshuaDienstag (2006) in Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit.

4. See Cleaver and Katsiaficas (2001) for this history as analyzed by intellectuals organic tothe movement. For a more academic account, see Rhomberg (2004).

5. The rest were 43% Black, 33% Latino, 16% Asian, and the remaining 2% Filipino, NativeAmerican, and Pacific Islander.

6. Teach for America is an organization that places recent college graduates in understaffedurban and rural schools. It is a widely recognized emblem of young, middle-class idealists whogo into teaching not because it’s a good job but because they “want to make a difference.”

7. Conflict between parents and teachers in the small-schools movement is extensivelyexplored in a dissertation by Dyrness (2004).

8. Miranda Joseph’s (2002) book Against the Romance of Community provides an insightfulcritique of community formations by arguing for their complementary relations with capitalism.

9. Between 2000 and 2004, the foundation donated more than $35 million to the districtand to CEE.

10. I have not had room here to explore the mutually constitutive relations between old fail-ures and new hopes that undoubtedly help illuminate the rise and quality of reforms in Oakland.I have tried to focus here on the movement’s active production of hope and the effects thereof.

11. In a longer presentation of this case, it would be important to explore how these contoursdelineate significantly different forms of investment in the movement.

12. To wit, the Oakland movement animated desires that pushed toward futures other thanthe reformist one it had scripted. One small school was inspired to find its way toward the futureof Malcolm X’s radical legacy until it was peremptorily shut down after 2 years.

13. The literature on hope in particular and affect in general is replete with expressions of thisbinary. In her vibrant exploration of the connections between hope and change, Mary Zournazi(2002) goes so far as to claim that “without hope what is left is death—the death of spirit, thedeath of life—where there is no longer any sense of renewal” (p. 16).

References

Anderson, B. (2006). Being and becoming hopeful: Towards a theory of affect. Environment andPlanning D: Society and Space, 24(5), 733-752.

Blomley, N. (2007). Critical geography: Anger and hope. Progress in Human Geography, 31(1), 53-65.Cleaver, K., & Katsiaficas, G. (Eds.). (2001). Liberation, imagination, and the Black Panther party.

New York: Routledge.




Deleuze, G. (1991). Bergsonianism (H. Tomlinson & B. Habberjam, Trans.). New York: Zone Books.Dienstag, J. (2006). Pessimism: Philosophy, ethic, spirit. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Dyrness, A. (2004). Speaking truth to power: Immigrant parents, progressive educators, and the

politics of change in an urban school. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University ofCalifornia, Berkeley.

Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks. New York: International Publications.Hage, G. (2002). ‘On the side of life’—Joy and the capacity of being. In M. Zournazi (Ed.), Hope:

New philosophies for change (pp. 150-171). New York: Routledge.Joseph, M. (2002). Against the romance of community. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Lear, J. (2006). Radical hope: Ethics in the face of cultural devastation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press.Massumi, B. (2002). Navigating movements. In M. Zournazi (Ed.), Hope: New philosophies for

change (pp. 210-242). New York: Routledge.Nietzsche, F. (1986). Human all too human (R. J. Holland, Trans.). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge

University Press.Rhomberg, C. (2004). No There there: Race, class, and political community in Oakland. Berkeley:

University of California Press.Schopenhauer, A. (1970). Essay and aphorisms (R. J. Hollingdale, Trans.). London: Penguin.Spinoza, B. (1982). The ethics and selected letters. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.Thrift, N. (2004). Intensities of feeling: Towards a spatial politics of affect. Geografiska Annaler,

86B, 57-78.Vander Ark, T., & Wagner, T. (2000, June 21). Between hope and despair. Retrieved February 14,

2006, from www.gatesfoundation.org/Education.Zournazi, M. (2002). Hope: New philosophies for change. New York: Routledge.

Amanda Lashaw is a doctoral student in the Social and Cultural Studies Program ofUniversity of California–Berkeley’s School of Education. Her major research interests includeprogressive politics and culture, ethical identities, nongovernmental organizations, and thework of professional education reformers. Her dissertation on “The Ethics of Optimism” cur-rently dominates her intellectual imagination.




lashaw 2008

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