5    Bootstrapping

On a Saturday morning in December 2014, I attended the Education Innovation Summit with a school full of teachers, administrators, and entrepreneurs. We were hosted in the gym and classrooms of E. L. Haynes Public Charter High School in northwest DC, a gleaming, renovated charter school with classrooms filled with student laptops. Upon signing in, every participant had to consent to being photographed and filmed for publicity materials the organizers, the CityBridge Foundation and the NewSchools Venture Fund¹ (both education reform philanthropies), would produce after the event and during it on social media. I had been clued into the event by a Du Bois teacher who had been previously awarded a CityBridge fellowship. Everyone knew each other from similar events; both teachers and tech entrepreneurs were used to giving their weekends over to work.

Haynes Head of School Jenny Niles, soon to take a position as Mayor Muriel Bowser’s deputy mayor for education, welcomed the 150 or so attendees—about a third of whom, by a show of hands, did not work in a school. She praised the ongoing partnership between charters and traditional public schools in DC and their shared vision of “schools as a unit of change” that could bring the “power of personalized learning” to high-needs students through skilled teachers, well-designed schools, and innovative use of educational technology. The new class of CityBridge fellows, all DC teachers experimenting with digital tools in the classroom, then took the stage to address the power of personalized learning. They compared their students’ fates in the broken US educational system to the frustration of getting served the wrong drink at Starbucks, with the first fellow lamenting that “education is the only system that doesn’t personalize.” Their presentation ended with a slide full of different Starbucks orders, representing different educational services delivered by the same school.

Keynote speaker Jim Shelton, former deputy secretary of education for the Obama administration and current chief impact officer at educational technology startup 2U, continued the theme. He said that slide full of different Starbucks orders was quite a long way off and that educational technology had to fill the gap in the meantime. But he was hopeful, telling us that educators already knew the lessons about disruptive innovation and human-centered design that Silicon Valley was just now evangelizing. “You are on what is called the bleeding edge. It’s a noble place to be.”

Shelton received a standing ovation. Teachers were still discussing it in my next two workshop sessions: on free tools and practical classroom tips—“Take out your cellphones! Last thing you want to hear in a classroom, right?”—for tracking student data. He had praised educators and positioned them as powerful actors in need of tools that fit their ambitions, with knowledge the tech sector could learn from.

The lunchtime panel titled “Inside the Design Sandbox: Two Approaches to Next-Generation Schools” was a different story. The CEO of Matchbook Learning, Sajan George, opened by touting his credentials. As a consultant, he had moved from corporate turnarounds to school turnarounds, overseeing the transformation of New Orleans public schools after Hurricane Katrina (when every school effectively became a charter), as well as DC schools during the Rhee administration. He then started a charter management organization so that he could create his own schools, beginning in Detroit. My tablemates grumbled, and then complained more audibly in the next session, about George’s glib approach to teachers’ unions (“It’s not something you want to start with …”) and structural poverty (“from crisis to opportunity …”). Especially grating for these Black women was his comparison between the charter movement’s persistence and the resolve Martin Luther King Jr. displayed in his Birmingham jail cell.²

The next speaker, Aylon Samouha, education design provocateur with Achievement First, was more warmly received. Still, few teachers understood what they were getting out of his pitches for his charter network’s designs, given his honesty that his schools had money that most did not. But the audience nodded along with both speakers’ core message: the public school model, born of the Industrial Revolution, was sorely in need of an upgrade. This required a fresh injection of digital tools that could personalize student learning and a fresh mindset born of experimental public-private partnerships.

There was no Education Innovation Summit the next year. Instead, CityBridge invited entrepreneurs and teachers to Startup Weekend EDU: Next Gen Schools, where they collaborated on pitches for new types and brands of schools that could solicit investment, scale quickly, and deliver personalized learning.

Converging on Hope

The Education Innovation Summit was a moment where the cultural and organizational links between my field sites became visible. The same Gates Foundation that funded technology procurements for DCPL also funded CityBridge. The same agile management and venture capital investment practices built for startups were pitched to schools. Powerful men (in an audience made up largely of Black women) like Shelton, George, and Samouha moved with ease between these spaces, using the same message to unite them in the same mission. Everyone was clear that the problem of poverty was a problem of technology and, importantly, they did not necessarily need to believe wholeheartedly in that framing to endorse it. It was simply the best option on the table, the framework that best fit the high stakes of their jobs.

What had happened at the summit? Helping professionals, mostly Black women, working in public institutions, were united in their frustration with their organizations—out of date and over capacity. They felt, keenly, the needs of the people they had to serve, but didn’t have the tools to serve them. In came outside entrepreneurs with stamps of approval from liberal foundations, disruptive startups, and the Obama administration. They framed the many different problems facing students as a single crisis of human capital deficits, said schools were unequipped to solve it, and promised new skills and new technologies as solutions.

Occasionally, teachers chafed at the dictates of this new gospel, knowing it did not necessarily fit the material reality of their work. But it was precisely because of that dire reality and their own collective commitment to public service that they were open to the language of the access doctrine, open to a project of fighting poverty through technology, of upgrading their schools in order to upgrade their students. They would commit to this new gospel because they had to; it made things make sense, helping the teachers to understand their overwhelming problems and find actionable solutions to them. They would in turn leave the summit and spread that gospel alongside the practical tips they picked up in workshops; that was the whole job of the CityBridge fellows.³

This chapter explains why this scene and scenes like it keep happening in US cities, drawing comparisons between the previous three chapters to explain what makes the access doctrine attractive and why places like schools and startups keep bootstrapping in an attempt to fulfill that doctrine, even as they acknowledge its repeated failures. Chapter 1 located the birth of the access doctrine in the neoliberal political revolution and its replacement of labor market interventions (i.e., the direct provision of jobs or money to those outside the labor market) with skills training, the climax of which was the Clinton administration’s reframing of the problem of persistent poverty in the information economy as a digital divide. Even as the phrase itself became passé in scholarly circles, the spirit of the digital divide lived on in talk of digital equity, digital inclusion, and the like. Each revision complicated the original, binary, determinist story, but in so doing affirmed its power as the common sense of the day that must be reframed or rebutted. Were the idea of a digital divide not so powerful, there would be no need to critically examine and reexamine it, again and again.

Adopting the access doctrine as an operating philosophy requires a constant process of organizational change, modeled on the ideal type of the startup and its ability to pivot to new ways of doing business: bootstrapping. The remainder of this chapter explores the mechanics behind this process, using the descriptive work of ethnography to create an explanatory model of organizational change. This model has three nonexclusive pathways, explaining the push to bootstrap through (1) the generalization of helping professionals’ narrow demographic experiences as a rubric for systemic change, (2) the bridging organizations that bring the tech sector into greater contact with schools and libraries, and (3) the stress that public institutions concerned with collective welfare face when their mission and the means to fulfill it are unclear, leading to an embrace of confident private sector models. This is what makes the problem of poverty a problem of technology for these organizations, which then go on to teach the rest of us to make those same links.

These pressures to bootstrap cross organizational fields, remaking not just individual professions or organizations but whole institutions of social reproduction. This is bigger than new language in new libraries, or new governance models in schools. The places that teach us how to make a living have been restructured around a new set of priorities. Politicians, entrepreneurs, and philanthropists have pushed schools and libraries to make new kinds of people on the model of the tech sector. These new kinds of people will, the access doctrine teaches, master the uncertainty inherent to the information economy, even if there are not enough tech jobs for them. This is a race-class project, in which the political coalition known in an earlier era as the Atari Democrats remakes cities in their image. Cities competing with each other for tax revenue welcome the change, as do schools and libraries desperate for resources, legitimacy, and clarity. Closing the digital divide becomes their mission because it ensures their survival.

Contained within each pathway to bootstrapping is a reason for its failure and thus the need to keep bootstrapping, each on display at the Education Innovation Summit. First, pathways to individual professional success often rely on sources of support outside those pathways (e.g., wealth, luck) and thus those individual stories cannot scale up, nor can they account for the larger, structural determinants of a training program’s success or failure. Second, schools and libraries aren’t startups and cannot suddenly change their mission or the people they serve; this is why I call what MLK and Du Bois do bootstrapping and call what InCrowd does pivoting. Third, making a problem more tractable does not solve the problem if its causes remain untroubled, and indeed strategic simplification can, by refusing certain needs of the marginalized, worsen the problem.

To explain the sources of the bootstrapping process and its repetition, I draw on neoinstitutionalist theory, which explains processes of organizational convergence—for example, why do so many new libraries look like Apple stores?—through organizations’ search not for greater efficiency, but for greater legitimacy (DiMaggio and Powell 1983). A claim to legitimacy is a claim to one’s rightful place in the social order. This is both a symbolic claim to a particular social role and a claim to the political, financial, or cultural resources needed to fulfill that role. There is a push and pull here between organizations trying to secure legitimacy and the people, offices, or institutions that can help them reach it—all with their own interests. Scott (1991) gives the example of a carpentry training program. It could be defined as occupational training, occupational therapy, or recreation, and each choice will imply a different set of relationships with state regulators, federal grant makers, unions, employers, trainees, professional carpenters, and so on. Each definition will pull the program in a different direction because goals, resources, and approval hinge on those outside institutional connections.

This process played out throughout my fieldwork as new modes of problematization required new tools and new relationships (Callon 1984). Defining the problem of poverty as a problem of technology reshapes the organization and its relationship to internal and external stakeholders. This chapter unpacks that process and what drives it: what incentivizes these changes, what makes them seem sensible and logical solutions to the problem of poverty. By connecting startup, school, and library, we see a phenomenon larger than the intra-field problems the the institutional isomorphism literature generally addresses. After defunding and delegitimizing institutions of social reproduction based on their purported unfitness for the information economy, the state and capital then coerce these institutions into solving problems that they didn’t create and don’t have the tools to address. Because the stakes are so high and the models of success in the tech sector are so unattainable, places like schools and libraries cannot help but fail in their duties. But because those duties are so important to their survival and that of the people they serve, they will inevitably keep trying. Even if the people served are further marginalized in the process.⁴

There are a variety of individual stakeholders in the bootstrapping process, with varying levels of influence on how institutional legitimacy is defined and measured. Some are internal to the organization: conflicted librarians, dedicated teachers, students and patrons making the space their own in the name of play, profit, community, or rest—at least until administrators take notice. Other stakeholders are external. These are the consultants who labeled Du Bois “a turnaround school.” Or the donors and politicians invested in the library’s future and its historic architecture, the “nice White people” for whom librarian Grant said he hated cleaning up the Digital Commons. These are the investors who could call for Travis and InCrowd to pivot. Each of these outside stakeholders exert pressure on the organization and help define its mission.

Organizations are not equally responsive to all stakeholders; indeed, one of the benefits of neoinstitutionalist theory is its specification of who matters in questions of organizational reform and why they matter. Many homeless patrons at MLK, for example, have a tremendous amount of political literacy, learned from years spent negotiating the complex bureaucracies governing their lives. But they rarely participated in hearings on the renovations. The glass walls of the Dream Lab were an important symbolic barrier. Cameron, a homeless activist who often worked out of MLK, said he noticed this pattern throughout the city government’s consultations with the public. “I think that a lot of times city officials know the types of people that are going to be drawn to a certain meeting, and they just intentionally make sure not to reach across the aisle.” The situation was similar in Du Bois school board meetings. All were formally open to the public, but outside attendees were rare. Students never attended, and there were never more than three parents at a given meeting, besides the parent representatives on the board. These parent attendees were, in the meetings I attended, always middle-aged Black women—mothers or grandmothers of students—with years of experience in the public school system or similar bureaucracies. Poor and/or Latinx parents were absent. Organizations that, like Du Bois, operate in permanent beta can make everyone’s perspective valuable data, a constant input that changes operations. But they are rarely optimized to do so, because of routine, ignorance, austerity, or the simple fact that some stakeholders can reward them more than others. And so “there exists, unfortunately, a wide gulf between the experience of participating in the design of something and needlessly being subjected to instability—or being used for merely being a user” (Neff and Stark 2004).

Other institutional levers come in the form not of individual stakeholders or groups of them but administrative bodies that attempt to shape the entire institutional field of education or librarianship. For example, no parent carried the weight of the DCPCSB, which judged Du Bois’s test scores and graduation rates and is ultimately responsible for approving any school’s charter.

Other administrative bodies shape a field through funding. Both in life and in the foundation that he left behind, Andrew Carnegie, for example, greatly influenced the design, placement, and organization of libraries (Harvey et al. 2011) and art museums (DiMaggio 1991). Certain funding agencies play an outsized role in defining the problem of poverty as a problem of technology—the Gates Foundation or Walton Family Foundation, the Department of Education’s Race to the Top grants program, the NewSchools Venture Fund. Libraries and schools desperate to both secure funding and to be seen as active, innovative organizations seek out these grants, resources captured either by the tech sector directly or the tech sector’s way of thinking.

Finally, change within an organizational field can be prompted by professional and credentialing organizations, which shape the practices and ideologies of teachers or librarians. The power of the access doctrine, and the political coalition behind it, crosses these organizational fields, bringing professions like librarianship and teaching together under one new rubric. Recall Becca’s complaint that the transformation of library schools into iSchools replaced service values with technical values or the message from the CityBridge fellows that the right sort of technological thinking could design the perfect, personalized education for every student—just like a Starbucks order.

Bootstrapping Pathways

I have sketched out some of the different stakeholders in the bootstrapping process, the different people and groups that have a say in how MLK or Du Bois pursued its mission of extending access to digital tools and the skills to use them, who prompted changes within the organizations when that mission was at risk. These organizations are more responsive to some stakeholders than others because of the resources and legitimacy they offer. It is now time to mark out these patterns of influence more explicitly. Why do schools and libraries try to solve poverty with digital tools and digital skills, remaking themselves in startups’ image in the process?

There are three primary causes. First, there is the demographic and professional background of teachers and librarians. This is a meritocratic model. Second, there is the pressure exerted by professional organizations that bridge different organizational fields, thus bringing the tech sector into greater contact with schools or libraries. This is technological professionalization. Third, there is the uncertainty that public institutions feel when their goals and the path to them are unclear and successful examples from the private sector are made readily available. This is mission ambiguity. Table 5.1 summarizes these dynamics. Each pathway is essentially coercive—organizations do not receive the resources or legitimacy on offer if they do not take up tech sector models—but they are not often experienced that way. Rather, these simply seem like sensible reforms, best practices to help the people they want to help. The pathways are distinct but nonexclusive. For example, mission ambiguity can make technological professionalization more appealing.

Table 5.1

Causes of bootstrapping

Pathway		Source		Result		Limits
Meritocratic model		Demographics and career history of helping professionals.		Helping professionals believe the skills training that led to their labor market success is broadly replicable.		Training alone does not explain labor market gains, much less income or wealth gains. Metrics used to gauge organizational success are heavily influenced by factors outside the organization’s control.
Technological professionalization		Bridging organizations present active professionals or professionals-in-training with tech sector models.		Technological skills, solutions, and organizational models are readily accessible and in some cases must be followed to secure funding and legitimacy.		Residual ideological and professional commitments to public service within helping professionals and their organizations.
Mission ambiguity		Schools and libraries are underfunded and overcapacity relative to what they are asked to do for students and patrons. Solutions to these problems are unclear, as are the organizations’ ability to solve them.		Internally, focusing on skills training and technology provision clarifies overwhelming problems, making them tractable. Externally, these solutions demonstrate activity and legitimacy to powerful stakeholders who might relieve pressure on the organization.		Simpler problems are not necessarily easier to solve. Schools and libraries do not have the resources or flexibility to pivot like startups.

Meritocratic Model

The first and most obvious link between my three field sites is demographic: the middle-class helping professionals at MLK and Du Bois on the one hand and startup entrepreneurs on the other were largely White, middle-class, college-educated people who immigrated to DC in the hopes of a new job or for a specific, hopeful one. All had bachelor’s degrees.⁵ Many had advanced degrees, especially teachers (master of education) and librarians (master of library and information science), but also founders and nontechnical members of tech (e.g., Travis holds an MBA, Ji an MA in design).⁶

The skills-to-job pipeline appeared to have worked for them. While they understood that discrimination could interfere with the labor market, their experience of it seemed to reveal its natural logic. They worked hard, went to school, picked the right sort of training, and got good jobs. They felt they made the right choices and were rewarded for their hard work, and so it was natural for them to understand the labor market struggles of the people they served—whether in the present or future—as a problem of getting the right education, the right training, the right skills. They were primed to believe in the access doctrine’s mission to help boost the human capital of those on the margins of the information economy. Why not? It appeared to have worked for the helpers. In a Washington Post profile, DC Public Library CEO Richard Reyes-Gavilan insisted that the mantra guiding him through the MLK renovation was that “libraries are not their buildings” but “engines of human capital” (Martell 2016).

These personal histories exert normative pressure within organizations so that librarians, teachers, and entrepreneurs identify the work habits adopted as they rose through college and their profession with the rise itself.⁷ And the organization, implicitly or explicitly, models this for the people it serves; recall the way the hipster contingent became a proof of concept for the Dream Lab—just as much as any machine—and replaced older Black workers in the process, or how the hidden curriculum taught work habits to students at Du Bois. These were ever racialized organizations, wherein whiteness acted as an unofficial credential that both supported professionals’ own advancement and convinced them that the people they served could do the same (Ray 2019).

The class composition of a profession—which is always also its racial and gender composition—thus supported the perception that what worked for one would work for most, even if inheritance, luck, investor interest, or other factors were more powerful than these work habits. In schools and libraries, these helping professionals’ employment and educational histories differed from most, if not all,⁸ of their students and patrons. This is a power relation inherent to the helping professions: the trained train the untrained in their image.

The meritocratic mindset has tight links to the class project that birthed the access doctrine. The Democratic Leadership Council from which Clinton and Gore emerged—alongside other centrist powerbrokers like Scoop Jackson, Richard Gephardt, and Joseph Lieberman—took control of the Democratic Party in part by changing its electoral base. No longer would the party cater to a racially diverse working class and its unions; it would instead focus on mobilizing White suburban professionals. Most important among these were the so-called Atari Democrats, working in tech-sector office parks in areas like California’s Silicon Valley or Massachusetts’s Route 128 corridor (Geismer 2019).

Although not huge in number, these professionals were politically active, frequently profiled by the media (e.g., Wayne 1982), and formed the popular complement to the technology executives who helped shape Clinton and Gore’s agenda. Distrustful of unions and high taxes, the Atari Democrats were often quite active in local civil rights struggles that assured equality of opportunity (e.g., fair housing), but resisted redistributive measures that affected them personally (e.g., local public housing and two-way busing; Geismer 2014). Working in nonunion fields like tech, in which professional certifications and advanced degrees were required for promotion, they built a culture of meritocracy into the new Democratic coalition. Importantly, the politics of individual teachers and librarians in Du Bois and MLK often diverged from this model. The conclusion will return to this point. But as reformers working to reenergize public institutions with legacies of unionized employment, they bore the stamp of the DLC’s now arguably successful race-class project.

It is worth noting that their educational experience was not even typical for their own cohort and that some majority thinking—the tendency to identify your and your peers’ experiences as representative of a larger social reality—was likely at play here. My informants in these professions were overwhelmingly (1) White and 2) in the first half of their postcollege careers, within the twenty-five to thirty-four and thirty-four to forty-four Census age cohorts. But only 36 percent of each of these cohorts and White Americans generally—it is remarkable how consistent that number is across these three different groups—have obtained a bachelor’s degree (Ryan and Bauman 2016). Indeed, during my fieldwork, the BLS (2016) identified the most common educational experience of a twenty-nine-year-old not as having completed college and gone on to a steady career, but as having only completed some college and worked a series of jobs in fits and starts.

So even before they began to work with their students and patrons, the experiences of these professionals appeared to be unrepresentative of their own age and race cohorts. Their atypical biographies may have represented hope in mobility, even as it shaded their thinking about how exactly social mobility works. Irene seemed to catch on to this tic in her teachers’ thinking when she said with her usual sarcasm that “apparently it’s assumed that all White people are successful and whatnot.” When she and her peers at Du Bois, or patrons at MLK, resisted top-down attempts to increase the space’s productivity, they resisted the meritocratic mindset. They were building spaces focused on different values, like pleasure or safety or rest.

Teachers and librarians were often aware of this disjuncture between what worked for them and what might work for others. They knew institutional racism existed at a level beyond individual prejudice, even if they didn’t know exactly how to talk about it or what to do about it. Physics instructor Sam, for example, read overwhelmingly negative comments on a Washington Post story about DC Public Schools students to his own class as a way of motivating them to hustle harder and prove the haters wrong: “The world at large has a negative perception of what you at your best is.” Their cognizance of this gap in part explains why constant organizational change was necessary. The skills-to-job pipeline worked for them. They hoped to extend that opportunity to others and there was no time to waste. But on the other hand, they were, as well-educated liberals, aware of the structural nature of the problem and desperate to somehow solve it. It required an enormous amount of energy to try to close that gap; recall Amanda collapsing after students presented their video games. Nothing may ever be enough, but they had to try something.

Sam or Amanda’s awareness of the structural constraints on student success hint at the limits of a meritocratic model. These limits are perhaps more visible in schools than libraries, given how intensely they measure the students they wish to succeed. Sam surely worked hard to get into Harvard and succeed there, but his parents’ wealth and their PhDs surely helped prepare him for the experience. Given charters’ special focus on students of color in urban school districts, it is sobering to note that Black households headed by a college graduate have 33 percent less wealth than White households headed by high school dropouts. Despite increasingly higher degrees of educational attainment and opinion surveys that show they heavily value education, “for black families and other families of color, studying and working hard is not associated with the same levels of wealth amassed among whites” (Hamilton et al. 2015, 3). Hamilton et al. argue that the assumption that educational attainment drives wealth accumulation is equivalent to assuming that carrying an umbrella causes rain: if there’s any causal effect, it’s more likely in the other direction.

Besides the long-term problem of wealth accumulation—assets owned minus debts owed, the sort of thing that allows you to launch a startup⁹—there is the more local question of the factors influencing educational achievement, typically measured by test scores. Decades of research show a medium to strong relationship between students’ socioeconomic status and their academic achievement (Sirin 2005). Tienken et al. (2017) found they could accurately predict middle-school students’ scores on standardized tests in math and language arts using only three community-level variables: the percentage of families in a community with annual income over $200,000, the percentage of people in a community in poverty, and the percentage of people in a community with bachelor’s degrees.

This is not to say that teachers should just throw up their hands, quit their jobs, and become lobbyists or organizers to solve the real problems,—only that a narrow definition of education as a human capital enhancement mission will fail on its own terms because so much of its success or failure is determined beyond the walls of the training center. This can be difficult to see for White professionals, no matter their good intentions. Why wouldn’t it be? Individualizing their success maintains the faith in both their own merit and that of their institutions.

Technological Professionalization

What stood out most to me about the Education Innovation Summit discussed in this chapter’s opening was the general consensus of how to solve problems in education. Although many long-time public school teachers, primarily Black women, chafed at the business language on stage—sometimes explicitly antiworker—there was no real disagreement in any of the discussions I heard that schools were working on an outdated industrial model and that we could start fixing it through increased personalization achieved via the introduction of third-party educational technology (ed-tech) solutions.

Organizations like the CityBridge Foundation and the NewSchools Venture Fund promote this consensus, bridging different organizational contexts to spread the gospel of the access doctrine. These bridging organizations are not themselves libraries or schools. Rather, as grantors or professional organizations, they train cohorts of teachers and librarians, fund different schools and libraries, and, crucially, utilize the language and ideas of the tech sector. That language and those ideas may come from these bridging organizations simply sharing similar, high-level ideological commitments with the tech sector. They may also, more directly, come from foundations birthed from tech-sector profits (e.g., the Gates Foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Google for Education), from the direct employment of entrepreneurs who worked in or model their work on that of startups (e.g., the summit speakers), or by the simple cross-pollination that comes from training teachers or librarians alongside technologists and entrepreneurs. Men like Shelton, George, and Samouha may not have the specific domain expertise needed to improve a specific school, but their backgrounds in business and technology allow them to cross domains with ease and spread the message of reform (Sims 2017).

Whatever the source, these bridging organizations are engines of professionalization, presenting disruptive, tech-sector models to teachers and librarians, schools and libraries, that redefine what that work means. These models are attractive in part because their adoption is rewarded with different sorts of material (grants, training, technological infrastructure) and symbolic (awards, fellowships, degrees, public acclaim) resources. This then is the second institutional channel through which the pressure to bootstrap is exerted: technological professionalization.

DC’s librarians, teachers, and entrepreneurs are often involved in professional organizations themselves or have their workplaces touched by bridging organizations that bring in ideas and tools from outside their field. These organizations help schools and libraries justify their mission to the public and enhance communication between members—thus exerting normative pressure on individuals’ professional practice. Certain passionate members of the community, such as the CityBridge fellows, become institutional entrepreneurs who take on this bridging work as part of their passionate, personal investment in their career, seeking to make new kinds of schools or libraries (Tracey, Philips, and Jarvis 2011).

Many such professional organizations predate the neoliberal revolution and encourage an older public service logic. For librarians there is, after a year of employment, membership in the union, a local affiliate of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). Members of Eugene’s hipster contingent were generally too new to the profession to learn its politics and participate heavily in the union (Eugene was a noted exception here, participating heavily) and so received more professional guidance from their iSchool networks or interest groups that also connected with civic-minded tech workers, such as Code for DC.

Other organizations are native to the neoliberal revolution, though it would be too simple to describe their emergence as mere epiphenomenon. iSchools are of particular interest here. Recall Becca’s distress when the institution that granted her MLS degree changed its name from the College of Library and Information Services to the iSchool: “You’re going to eliminate ‘libraries’ first of all and then you’re going from Service to Science.” There is a touch of projection here. Science is nowhere in the name. It is referred to as either the iSchool, like its peer institutions in the iSchool consortium or, more formally, the College of Information Studies. But the change was nonetheless real. These institutions have experienced rapid growth in the twenty-first century, often drawing new faculty from the user-facing side of computer science to grow programs in human-computer interaction (HCI) or from the infrastructural side of business schools to grow programs in information management.

iSchools emerged in the 1980s and 1990s as library schools closed, consolidated, or took a chance on expanding with a focus on information technology and information literacy. In their survey of the PhD degrees of current iSchool faculty, Wiggins and Sawyer (2012) found that only 10 percent of PhDs were awarded in library-focused fields and 11 percent in information-focused fields, while 30 percent were in computing fields. For librarians, this means their professional training inevitably touches not just traditional topics in the library sciences but ideas, resources, and people from computer science and electrical engineering, or management and policy (9 percent of faculty PhD degrees in Wiggins and Sawyer’s study). There are new and different people in their classrooms and colleges, as compared to forty years ago. Technology training and business thinking thus became a greater part of the MLIS as part of the field’s own efforts to evolve, survive, and grow.

This dynamic is more apparent with charter teachers in DC, who are, with the exception of a single school, entirely nonunion and often involved in interest groups around their particular subject area (e.g., local math teachers) or more organized professional associations such as Teach for America (TFA) alumni networks, as well as frequent professional development events like the Education Innovation Summit. We’ve discussed the effects of programs like the summit and the CityBridge fellows. A full history of TFA is beyond the scope of the present study, but it is sufficient to say that the organization was founded to recruit high-achieving, largely White students from top-tier universities to teach for two years in underperforming, low-income urban and rural public schools. Its promoters and funders are similar to, and often the same organizations as, the promoters and funders of other education reform efforts reviewed in the previous chapter. TFA’s mission is to close the “achievement gap” between poor, Black and Latinx students and wealthier White students through local teacher placements that occur after a five-week summer training institute (Scott, Trujillo, and Rivera 2016). Both Michelle Rhee and her successor, Kaya Henderson, were TFA veterans. Prior to joining DCPS, Henderson worked in a series of administrative roles in TFA: recruiter, director of admissions, and executive director of DC operations (Osborne 2015).

TFA’s recruitment process means that its summer institute, rather than a traditional education degree program, plays a large role in teaching its teachers how to teach. While Du Bois didn’t employ TFA teachers, or any first-time teachers, plenty of its faculty had still gone through the program in years past and thus retained those values, as well as the professional networks through which TFA connects alums to opportunities for professional development, open jobs, and networking events. Ryan, the seniors’ calculus instructor, and Sam, physics teacher and senior team leader, both came to the profession through TFA.

Ryan was a math major at Haverford before joining TFA to teach in DC. His first posting was the public high school down the street from Du Bois. Ryan was honest: “If there wasn’t TFA, I wouldn’t be teaching.” He had learned about Du Bois’s new high school because TFA had professional development events in Du Bois’s middle school on nights and weekends. Sam pursued an interdisciplinary degree in social studies at Harvard before joining up with TFA to teach in Philadelphia public schools, saying, “I’m happy that I did it. It got me into teaching. I wouldn’t have gotten in otherwise.” But now its work concerned him, not just in classrooms but outside them:

TFA basically tells you that you are amazing and that low-income kids need you and there’s a lot of this thing that sets you up to feel like this sort of white knight that’s coming in and doing great things. Then you start teaching and you suck at it and the distinctions in race and class between your students and possibly us, depending on your background, that’s an issue.

I ended up working in TFA institutes for several summers. I worked as a Corps Member Coach for new members and a school manager for a whole school site. TFA has gotten a lot better at preparing corps members for the reality that they face, giving them some humility around the work that they do. I think that’s good. I think the organization as a whole though is struggling with the idea of … is our job to give people a dose of classroom so they can then go and be a consultant, or something else? There is just an incredible pipeline of people who teach for two years, who taught in TFA and are now running stuff in education. There’s a particular ideology, an ethos there. Some parts of that are troubling for me.

The ideology Sam is referring to is of a piece with the rest of the education reform movement: we need to take apart the broken public schools of the industrial economy and put them back together again in a way that will generate the human capital necessary for the information economy. But it is important to note, as Sam does, that this ideology does not function only, or even primarily, as a way to motivate young, White do-gooders to work for a few years at a lower salary than longer-tenured, better-credentialed local teachers. TFA trains a class of institutional entrepreneurs who move on from the classroom to connect their mission in local schools with work in educational policy or the private sector, making new kinds of social enterprises that bridge public schooling and corporate America. Or they go on to advance their mission in traditional electoral politics, educational policy, or through bridging organizations like CityBridge. In their interview study of TFA alums and corps members, Scott, Trujillo, and Rivera (2016) find that this broader social mission is a primary motivator for participants, over and above the local impact in particular schools or even particular school systems, and a better way of understanding the broad scope of the organization’s impact.

The Broad Academy—one of the wings of the Eli and Edythe Broad Education Foundation, which also funds smaller philanthropies such as the NewSchools Venture Fund—performs a similar function for school administrators, training them in business approaches to managing people and resources. This class of institutional entrepreneurs then bridges the worlds of business and education. Broad shares with the Gates or Walton Family Foundation a general interest in human capital generation and the import of business language into schools: “Grants become investments, programs are ventures, and measures of impact generally involve the ability to scale up an initiative” (Scott 2009, 115).

As of 2020, the top three government officials in DC education—the DC state superintendent, the deputy mayor for education, and the schools chancellor—were all alumni of the Broad Center for the Management of School Systems. Kaya Henderson, deputy and later successor to Michelle Rhee as schools chancellor, touched several of what Scott (2009) calls venture philanthropies. In contrast to the more broad-based, infrastructural approach of earlier foundations such as Ford, venture philanthropies fund a variety of technical, administrative, and curricular experiments, with the expectation that most will fail while a few will generate a significant return on investment—generally defined in terms of test scores—and demonstrate the possibility of scaling up. Since leaving DC city government, Henderson has been a fellow with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s foundation), a superintendent-in-residence with the Broad Academy, and now head of community impact for Teach for All, TFA’s global education portfolio.

These professional networks create normative pressure for homogenous practices within organizational fields (e.g., among fellow librarians, teachers, or techies). And then certain of these networks create similar normative pressure between organizational fields, so that librarians and teachers begin acting like entrepreneurs; although it should be noted that because these models often come with rewards for following them, these normative pressures can have an element of coercion. iSchools, in their curricula and their alum networks, build bridges among tech, business, and the library. NewSchools does this work for schools. Certain philanthropic ventures from the Gates Foundation or Google (e.g., Grow with Google, Google for Education) play this role for both schools and libraries.

You can also see evidence of this interorganizational linkage in the professional backgrounds of charter school administrators and trustees. Du Bois’ board of trustees included two ed-tech executives (one of whom incubated their product at Du Bois), a biotech executive, a local neighborhood commissioner, two executives of national nonprofits, two senior leaders at major education reform philanthropies, three legal professionals, an executive director of a major labor union, a finance professional, and an education consultant who has moved between city governments and organizations like TFA. Lessons about bootstrapping are not delivered solely through helping professionals’ training but through the networks that training creates and through the governance networks that provide support and resources for the flurry of organizational change necessary to meet their social mobility mission. And whether it’s through a short-term fellowship or a longer-term career that leads into business or policy, librarians and teachers passionate about their mission may themselves become institutional entrepreneurs who teach their peers to bootstrap.

In their ambiguous reflections on their own training, Sam and Becca each testified to the limits of this pathway. Both hold to an older public service ideal wherein schools and libraries are vehicles not for human capital enhancement, the training of future digital professionals by current ones, but for the sort of collective welfare that does not necessarily generate returns in the labor market or any other market. This ideal school or library does not have to have actually existed in reality in order to inspire teachers or librarians, just as the ideal startup does not have to have actually existed in order to inspire entrepreneurs or those jealous of their success. It is a horizon upon which mission-driven individuals set their sights and against which they judge themselves. This was also visible in librarians’ ambiguous reflections on porn. Clearly, finding porn is not a marketable skill—even though dodging the various filters and staff required a good deal of digital literacy—but for librarian Rachel, “If they don’t have access to a computer in another spot and it’s an outlet, it doesn’t really bother me.” That many teachers and librarians often approach their job as a calling to public service limits the degree to which technological professionalization can reframe the nature and purpose of those jobs. Every story from every helping professional in this book is riven with this sort of ambiguity.

This public service ideal is not only a matter of a vocational calling. Limits to technological professionalization also emerge from the publics being served and from the rules governing the institutions of public education and public librarianship. Patrons frequently reclaimed the Digital Commons as a place for games, for unsanctioned entrepreneurship, and, most importantly, as a free and open place to find respite from the indignities of a gentrifying city. Rest, and sleep in particular, emerged as a frequent site of conflict over who could use the library and for what—a conflict that could be diffused into different spaces but never fully resolved. It was a site of conflict in part because other means of refusing service to nonviolent patrons were illegal. That DC libraries can only kick out sleeping or violent patrons is in large part due to the 2001 lawsuit brought by homeless patron Richard Armstrong against the system’s 1979 rule to kick out those with “objectionable appearance.” A federal court of appeals ruled that this violated Armstrong’s First and Fifth Amendment rights.

Schools similarly have their public service ideals codified into law, even as long histories of segregation and recent neoliberal innovations show that the ideal is more important to organizational identity than organizational practice. Traditional public schools must welcome all neighborhood students of appropriate age through their doors. Du Bois followed this lead, though of course students had to take the extra step of winning entrance via lottery. Open admissions fly in the face of the human capital frame. Not every investment will bear returns, and so the portfolio must be tightly managed. This may in part explain why over the course of a normal academic year DC charter schools tend to lose students, while traditional public schools tend to gain students, concentrating low-income students in traditional public schools and stretching the resource capacity of those schools—the funding for which is decided on a per-student basis before classes begin (Roth and Perkins 2019). No school can pivot like a startup, but charters can bootstrap better than traditional public schools.

Mission Ambiguity

Finally, schools and libraries face a grave responsibility under the access doctrine—resolving a human capital crisis—but the way to meet that goal is not always clear. This mission ambiguity prompts a search for models, such as those offered through technological professionalization, which are adopted to resolve the ambiguity internal to the organization and demonstrate activity and legitimacy to stakeholders external to the organization. When faced with overwhelming problems—child poverty, homelessness, the achievement gap—and an unclear pathway to their resolution, the comparative success and optimism within the tech sector becomes attractive, particularly when those models are readily available and frequently rewarded.

When Shawn said he’d “always been a computer man,” he was expressing a complex knot of needs, relationships, and aspirations, converging at the computer lab. The Digital Commons was for him, and many others, not just an educational space, but a social space, a play space, a rest space, and more. Overstretched librarians like Grant understood this complex reality, but found it difficult to respond in kind—they did not have the time, training, resources, or institutional remit to provide everything homeless patrons needed or wanted. Messages from the municipal government like “The internet: your future depends on it” were comparatively simpler, and carried not just political legitimacy but the promise of additional resources. It’s no surprise those bootstrapping messages won the day and came to dominate the institution’s thinking.

The normative pressure exerted by the racial and class identities described earlier—where social mobility through skills training makes sense to a specific cohort of White professionals—here intersects with a clear mimetic pressure: schools and libraries understand their charge but not how to pursue it, and so they seek out models. Even the operationalization of that mission into specific goals is a matter of much debate (e.g., librarians’ uncertainty over the internet porn question, teachers’ contentious relationship with phones). Turning the problem of poverty into a problem of technology resolves this ambiguity, creating a series of actionable if-then proposals: learning to code leads to jobs, training to code leads to funding.

At school and in the library, the practical definition of success was contested. While Du Bois was dedicated to getting every student into the college of their choice, there was much debate, as the first class of seniors approached graduation, as to whether that was fair to each student and their hopes and dreams. That some students wanted to proceed directly to the workforce did not fit Du Bois’s definition of success. Debate over what success meant in the library played out in its spatial politics, rearranging where people and machines went and how they were connected. When pressed, teachers and librarians always admitted that there are no easy answers to what they can and should do about poverty. They saw the scale of the problem every single day and were for the most part humble about their own power. But they needed answers in order to continue their work. Librarians must know who gets more or less time on a computer. Teachers must know what to do about the student texting in class.

Examples are thus extraordinarily valuable. They suggest scripts for day-to-day operations and pathways to prove legitimacy and activity to powerful outside stakeholders such as parents, donors, and state review boards. Such examples are forthcoming from the tech sector, whether those examples are found in the media, via bridging organizations, or within the workplace. These examples might occupy the same space in which librarians and teachers work (e.g., the Dream Lab coworking spaces or the DC Tech demo series that brought hundreds of entrepreneurs to MLK every month). They might come from training spaces shared by both sectors (e.g., iSchools). Or they might be presented to personnel by powerful members of their professional networks (e.g., the Education Innovation Summit keynotes). These hopeful examples of social mobility—for individuals and organizations—inspire organizational changes meant to mimic those examples, even if, as most tech insiders readily admit, the majority of startups fail and shut down in the first year—something most would consider unacceptable for schools or libraries.

These examples are especially important in times of institutional flux, uncertainty, and looming illegitimacy. Recall the budget crisis for DC Public Library in the early 2000s and the clear messaging from library leaders today, especially Reyes-Gavilan, that the flagship central branch was a national embarrassment, positioned awkwardly in a now-booming downtown commercial zone. Or the pressure teachers and students at Du Bois felt to get to graduation because that first class of seniors were prototypes or, in Irene’s words, “lab rats” for the school’s mission. At the end of the year, consultants delivered bad news about the results of that prototyping process.

With this sort of pressure bearing down and the organization’s purpose and identity at stake, following outside examples often means following the money and the political support that will keep an imperiled organization alive. Local pressure is often based in the mundane politics of city budgets, test scores, and comparisons with more well-heeled peers. For schools especially, those politics are grim. The US federalist system, combined with long histories of residential segregation, means there is significant inequality between school districts and between different states with different funding formulae (e.g., the relative importance of local property taxes versus state funds; see Moser and Rubinstein 2002).

Venture philanthropists step into the financial gaps created by these inequalities and deliberately widen the legitimacy gap between the public service institutions of the industrial economy and the bootstrapping institutions of the future. In a 2005 op-ed in the Los Angeles Times entitled “What’s Wrong with American High Schools,” Microsoft founder and Gates Foundation cochair Bill Gates, now arguably the most powerful man in education policy, wrote:

Our high schools are obsolete.

By obsolete, I don’t just mean that they are broken, flawed and underfunded—although I can’t argue with any of those descriptions.

What I mean is that they were designed 50 years ago to meet the needs of another age. Today, even when they work exactly as designed, our high schools cannot teach our kids what they need to know.

Until we design high schools to meet the needs of the 21st century, we will keep limiting—even ruining—the lives of millions of Americans every year. Frankly, I am terrified for our workforce of tomorrow.

Gates went on to argue that it’s not just tools or curricula that are broken, but schools’ expectations. He supported extending the most challenging curricula to all students, something like Du Bois’s AP for All program. He proposed a program consisting of national graduation standards for workforce readiness, the relentless measurement and publication of school performance, and the takeover or shutdown of “failing” schools. Venture philanthropists like Gates are happy to intervene in local politics to ensure their examples are followed. Michelle Rhee raised around $200 million from private donors to fund a broad restructuring of how DC hired, rated, and promoted teachers (Biddle 2009). When Adrian Fenty lost the mayoralty to Vincent Gray, foundations threatened to pull $64.5 million of that funding unless Rhee was maintained (Turque 2010). Kaya Henderson’s promotion satisfied them.

Once it is judged on its productivity, education becomes an immensely risky endeavor. Maintaining funding for everything you want to do and making a plan for student success that will, against all structural barriers, not just bear fruit years down the road, but bear fruit that can be measured and scaled up—this is difficult, uncertain work. Uncertain work in an environment where the template of public education is not only underfunded, but repeatedly delegitimized. These precarious organizational conditions force schools into entrepreneurial fundraising cycles: schools are starved of political and economic resources, they see venture philanthropists naming their funding priorities, and so schools reshape themselves to meet these priorities in order to get funding (Lipman 2015). Indeed, Du Bois had dedicated fundraising staff for exactly this purpose, and despite the school’s racial justice values, it was not hard to see top philanthropic priorities throughout the school—especially in its heavy use of educational technology and its focus on year-over-year improvement in test scores.

US public libraries have a long history of engaging with philanthropy, going back at least as far as industrial titan Andrew Carnegie’s library-building mission. Today, the successor to Carnegie’s mission is, again, Gates, whose foundation funds grants to provide libraries with computers and internet infrastructure in an attempt to close the digital divide. There are important parallels to Carnegie’s mission to subdue labor unrest through the dispersal of “useful knowledge” and Gates’s mission to wire every library in order to connect patrons to job opportunities and education (Harvey et al. 2011; Stevenson 2010). Postrecession slumps in state and local budgets meant that alternative funding sources, especially philanthropic ones, became increasingly essential for keeping public libraries afloat (Agosto 2008). Stevenson (2009) argues that in technology policy specifically, this results in public libraries adopting the Gates Foundation’s definition of the digital divide and its solutions for it, over and above what librarians themselves might prefer (e.g., proprietary rather than open-source software becomes the default).

Even if they’re not involved with fundraising, professionals find themselves repeatedly presented with the example of tech companies that garner the sort of support from state and capital that teachers and librarians can only wish for. The school turnaround expert who raised some teachers’ hackles at the Education Innovation Summit had had a successful corporate career, then a successful career as consultant to public school districts, before finally trying his hand at charter management. At the same event, Jim Shelton framed his disruptive ideas in the context of his move from deputy secretary of education to 2U’s chief impact officer—after a year in which 2U produced $83 million in revenue (though no profit) and had a very successful initial public offering that left its valuation at approximately $1.4 billion (Kolodny 2014). For relatively lower-paid, overworked professionals in libraries and schools in search of clear answers to overwhelming problems, these examples are not only available but meaningful.

The limits to this pathway are similar to those for technological professionalization. First, simpler problems are not necessarily easier to solve—particularly when the source of the problem sits outside the organization. For example, while a focus on professionalization may resolve the question of whether or not someone can sleep in the library, it does not change the fact that many, many people need a place to rest during the day and that there is little public space remaining in the city, particularly during extreme weather, that they can enjoy. Reducing ambiguity resolves personal or organizational questions about how to proceed—which is important, the work must continue—but that is not the same as solving the problem.

Second, while tech-sector examples are attractive, schools and libraries have different constraints on their mission. They can’t pivot like startups. This contrast is clear even just in the three organizations studied here. Where the environment of economic uncertainty pressured each one of my field sites, only InCrowd could pivot with confidence. Its mission was comparatively simple: sell subscriptions, increase revenue to the point that going public or being acquired by a larger rival becomes viable. This is not easy, by any means. A lot of blood, sweat, and tears are involved. But despite the difficulty, there is a clarity to the end goal that makes the pivot easier. Increasing revenue and investment provides the resources to cushion the pivot. Unprofitable products can be dropped, employees can be laid off.

In contrast, schools and libraries often have non-negotiable success metrics imposed by external stakeholders (e.g., graduation rates, test scores). Although philanthropies can set organizational agendas under austerity, their investments do not generate financial returns that can be put back into the organization, nor will they ever match the sheer scale of the investment capital seeking returns in tech. And of course, while InCrowd was free to pursue fundamental changes to its business model from consumer to enterprise software, the same level of flexibility is not possible in schools and libraries because of public expectations and institutional constraints. Even a charter school will not, over the course of an academic year, shift its focus from STEM to language immersion; too much internal and external consultation is required. Despite the widespread acknowledgment that a renovation was needed, MLK’s took years to approve—much less fund.

Conclusion: Competing Institutional Cultures

The neoliberal revolution reframed the human cost of deindustrialization and the information economy’s increasing labor market bifurcation as an issue of human capital deficits, resolved on the one hand through the education, technology provision, and deregulation that extends opportunities for competition and on the other hand through the expansive carceral solutions that punish or cage those who refuse to compete correctly This chapter showed why this story is so eagerly embraced by the organizations fighting poverty, themselves increasingly imperiled by the long-term effects of a shrinking welfare state and the more local effects of urban austerity. While they readily admit that the problems they face are much bigger than new tech or new training can address, that story and the concomitant restructuring it demands garners these organizations new resources, new political legitimacy, and new clarity in their operations. To train the workforce of tomorrow is to assert that there is no tomorrow without those trainers.

The access doctrine cannot succeed as propaganda, no matter how persuasive it might be. For this sort of political common sense to take hold, it must become a part of everyday life, explaining the present historical conjuncture and offering a path to the good life within it. Drawing connections among startups, schools, and libraries, we have found three distinct but overlapping pathways whereby schools and libraries and the people working within them turn the problem of poverty into a problem of technology and begin the process of rapid and repeated organizational change—bootstrapping—required to act on this problem definition. First, the racial identity and professional history of helping professionals leads them to empathize with the skills-training mission because it appears to have worked for them. Second, bridging organizations spread these ideas and bring models from the tech sector into schools and libraries. Third, the scale of their mission and the uncertainty inherent to both that project and the general economic environment in which it is pursued make the examples provided by the tech sector more salient.

Bootstrapping, then, does not just name the changes that these organizations enact based on the model of startups. It also names the theory of change within these organizations, the motivations driving these changes and what results participants in them hope they will bear. We have also seen that each pathway to bootstrapping comes with a set of limits that constrain organizational possibilities, particularly in comparison with the idealized flexibility of startups. Many of these limits emerge as a result of older public service ideals held by teachers or librarians, enforced by students or patrons or built into the legal and physical infrastructures of schools and libraries. It is precisely because bootstrapping is a cultural force, and not just a recipe to follow, that each time organizational aspirations butt up against these limits, a new round of changes is pursued. The stakes are too high, both for the organization and the people it serves, to do otherwise.

With this in mind, I want to close this chapter by suggesting that bootstrapping is a new institutional culture, a supraorganizational script for the work of social reproduction: how to make people and teach them to make a living. This institutional culture is practiced by teachers and librarians at the level of individual organizations, providing both opportunities for action and limits to them. It is communicated and endorsed by people and groups that move between these organizational fields, providing legitimacy and resources to schools and libraries. And it provides a script for many different schools and libraries, a story about what the school or the library as an institution should be in the twenty-first century.¹⁰ It is preached by the powerful representatives of larger social structures—witness Clinton’s message that “what you earn depends on what you learn”—but this does not obviate the individual agency of these teachers and students or librarians and patrons (Ifill 1992). Rather, bootstrapping provides a way to understand how their individual choices are empowered or hindered by particular organizations and their particular political-economic location. Here, the work of making people and teaching them to make a living shifts in response to broader changes in capitalist production

It is important to define bootstrapping as a new institutional culture in part because limits on bootstrapping emerge from a different, older institutional culture centered on public service and collective welfare. We saw it in action whenever librarians justified the sleep or porn they knew was not permitted in the computer lab, or when teachers resisted the discipline they were increasingly encouraged to visit on students and their phones. This institutional culture set a mission of public resource provision beyond the vagaries of the market, with the organizations themselves built to last in the same form for many decades because that mission would never go away. Public service organizations are shock absorbers for predictable economic downturns and stewards of a national cultural vision—however exclusively or violently that is defined in practice—that extends beyond any given cycle of recession and recovery. They are archives and safehouses, points of public care built as public goods. Their bootstrapping successors are training centers and resource banks, targeted investments built of public-private partnerships. The two competing institutional cultures, as observed at MLK and Du Bois, are summarized in table 5.2.

Table 5.2

Competing institutional cultures

		Public service		Bootstrapping
Political era		Keynesianism		Neoliberalism
Funding streams		State and local taxes		Diminished taxes, supplemented by competitive grants
Orientation to peer organizations		Nodes in state and local networks		Inter- and intraregional competitors
Orientation to people served by the organization		Safe space		Training space
Orientation to technology within the organization		Public good		Vector for competition
Orientation to poverty		Provide support		Provide skills
Sources of practitioner training		Colleges of education and library science		Colleges of education and education-preparation providers such as TFA; iSchools
Pace of organizational change		Regular, usually by state mandate		Frequent, as a matter of survival

This typology likely applies to other institutions of social reproduction that have been similarly remade through information technology in the service of the access doctrine: social work, higher education, community development, and so on. Both institutional cultures are ideal types, visions of what these organizations should be. No single organization is completely run on one rubric (Besharov and Smith 2014). Bootstrapping and public service necessarily overlap in practice. People take what they need from each script (Friedland and Alford 1991). Because the former succeeds the latter, bootstrapping necessarily builds from the materials and practices of public service organizations; recall that Du Bois was literally built inside a shuttered public school.

And in practice, each vision is compromised by political struggle. Long histories of racial segregation make it clear that rarely has the public service institutional culture in schools and libraries actually served everyone. Today, schools and libraries and similar spaces continue, in many cases, to be sites of discipline and violence against some students, especially working-class Black and Latinx students (Shedd 2015). Public service might motivate some of this, as an attempt to “save” these kids—one source of Sam’s uneasiness with TFA as discussed earlier—and it might motivate other teachers to create safe spaces for them, as Clara and Principal Carroll so often did.

Nor are these institutional cultures only compromised from above. The daily resistance of students and patrons was one thing that prevented the bootstrapping mission from being realized in Du Bois and MLK. Their resistance was not necessarily based in a philosophy of public service; rather, they took what they wanted and needed so that they could flourish within these bootstrapping spaces. It is important to recognize the political power of students or patrons and that this power does not necessarily comport to the terms of White professionals’ own internal struggles. Rather, students and patrons strategically utilized one institutional culture or another at different times to elicit support from a teacher or librarian or to avoid their scrutiny.

Nevertheless, bootstrapping provides a powerful driver of organizational change, replacing an older public service culture in the process. It is here that the problem of poverty becomes a problem of technology for the people who are trying to solve that problem. It is here that the access doctrine is taught and learned and circulated within these organizations. It is here that the terms of social reproduction are reset, with schools and libraries following startups’ examples and passing them on to the people they serve. It is here that we learn that we must learn to code, or else. And it is here that the people whom these institutions were built to serve are further marginalized in the process, because these institutions must bootstrap to save themselves.

In this way, bootstrapping resembles processes of predatory inclusion observed in settings like consumer credit and for-profit education: the extension of long-withheld opportunities or resources to marginalized groups who seek social mobility, but on terms that disadvantage them in the long term and eventually reproduce inter-group inequality (Cottom 2017; Seamster and Charron-Chénier 2017). But unlike subprime home loans or for-profit college degrees, the opportunities offered on the terms of the access doctrine do not only marginalize those seeking social mobility, they harm the very institutions offering those opportunities. Organizations like schools and libraries may find momentary security through bootstrapping, but only if they are prepared to sacrifice their values, overextend their employees, accumulate debt, change their mission, and revise any other piece of their identity or operations as necessary. The stakes of their mission are so high that every option must be on the table. In this way, it is not just that welfare state institutions within neoliberalism prey on the people they serve, though that does happen, especially in contexts where revenue can be generated or where administrative capacity has been shifted to more carceral ends (Gilmore 2007; Gilmore and Gilmore 2008). Rather, in the process of including the marginalized and offering them access, organizations like schools and libraries will often prey on themselves; an exercise in self-cannibalization meant to appease the external stakeholders on which desperate institutions rely and to motivate the internal stakeholders from whom so much is demanded.

The access doctrine emerged from a particular political project at a particular moment in history. Deindustrialization, the defeat of organized labor, and the violent substitution of the welfare state with the carceral state—all are engines of immiseration, the human toll of which stubbornly persisted in the supposed plenty of the information economy. All were simplified as a digital divide between those with the human capital necessary to succeed and those who needed the right tools and skills to reach that level. Next, we return to that structural perspective, above the everyday fray of organizational life, to conclude this investigation and reflect on the political purpose the access doctrine continues to serve within this particular stage of capitalism.

Notes

1. 1. CityBridge initially focused on global health before pivoting to education. Since the period covered here, the nonprofit split from its original founders to focus solely on education. The foundation focuses its school grants and teacher fellowships on DC public and charter schools, positioning itself as an entrepreneurial successor to local education reformers. They build on “the pioneering human capital reforms led by Michelle Rhee and Kaya Henderson in DCPS and from stand-out charter performers, like KIPP, DC Prep, and Two Rivers, whose work proves every day that the achievement gap can be closed.” Like many venture philanthropists, their language and approach—“incubating, launching, and transforming schools and projects that will deliver on the talent and potential inherent in children, especially those disinherited by poverty or race”—is borrowed explicitly from the tech sector. See https://citybridge.org/about-us/.

   NewSchools works nationally and explicitly operates as a venture capital fund modeled after its founders’ experiences in the tech sector. They “were among the first and largest investors in public charter schools and the first to identify and support multi-site charter management organizations, which launch and operate integrated networks of public charter schools.” (See http://www.newschools.org/about-us/our-history/.)

2. 2. It is not uncommon for education reformers to compare the neoliberal process of education reform with Black freedom struggles. As Scott (2013) explains, these comparisons primarily serve to recast the story of the civil rights movement as one of individual struggles to secure individual rights to vote, shop, or choose a school. By removing these struggles from the context of Black political collectives, the neoliberal individualization of education policy is granted moral legitimacy and political urgency.

3. 3. My use of the term gospel here is quite deliberate, a guiding principle that cannot be disproven and which inspires listeners to spread it further. In this usage, and throughout this book, I am indebted to Cottom’s (2017) exploration of the education gospel, a parallel phenomenon to the access doctrine that motivates the growth of the for-profit education sector (e.g., Phoenix, Strayer). Not just a sales pitch from for-profits or their financiers, the education gospel explains the poor labor market chances of working-class, particularly Black, American adults in terms of low educational attainment and justifies for-profit schools as a solution to this problem, not just despite but because of these schools’ high costs—which, paradoxically, legitimates their degree offerings. This student population is often locked out of traditional avenues of higher education and, absent a robust welfare state and the sort of wages that would ensure a reasonable standard of living, welcome the advances of the heavily advertised for-profits that meet them where they are and help design degree programs that fit their working lives. Like the access doctrine, the education gospel explains how everyday, well-meaning people embrace a neoliberal project attempting to remake or destroy the very institutions they treasure as safe havens and guiding stars. Not because they are fooled, but because they must.

4. 4. Many thanks to Victor Ray for helping me think through this point specifically and this literature more generally.

5. 5. Teacher demographics across DC (including charter and traditional public schools, with dedicated data on the former difficult to acquire) roughly match what I observed in Du Bois. The overwhelming majority (75 percent) are women, and a slight majority (52 percent) are Black (OSSE 2019). If anything, there was a higher proportion of White teachers in Du Bois during my time there than there was in DC as a whole.

   Demographic data for DC public librarians are harder to come by. At the national level, 2009–2010 American Community Survey data showed that 85 percent of public librarians are White, with that number dropping to 73.3 percent for library assistants (who do not have the MLIS). Seventy-five percent of the US population identified as White in the 2010 census (ALA 2010). If anything, I suspect DC’s public librarians were more racially diverse, specifically with more Black librarians, than these national data indicate. But I have no systemic data to support this claim.

6. 6. In contrast to its self-produced image as a haven for iconoclast dropouts such as Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg—dropouts from Harvard, to be clear—tech-sector job openings are more likely to list educational requirements than employers at large (Weber 2016). Chavez’s (2017) case study of software engineer hiring at one Silicon Valley firm also demonstrates that hirers penalize foreign-born applicants with the necessary educational credentials and listed technological skills because of a perceived lack of “fit” with the culture of the US firm, a finding that would seem to contradict the data in Weber 2016. However, Silicon Valley’s reliance on elite educational credentials and its willingness to ignore those credentials in favor of nativist arguments for fit both reveal a refusal to actually engage in the meritocracy the sector professes to embrace. When the chips are down, it’s not what skills you have—it’s which school you went to and what sort of parties you attend.

7. 7. The imposition of this local meritocratic mindset onto larger social systems by White professionals is not dissimilar to how Ho (2009) describes investment bankers enforcing the local rules of financial institutions—long hours, frequent layoffs—in other spaces of economic life. In both cases, privilege is mistaken for hard work, not because hard work is absent but because its unceasing presence occludes larger structural factors. In both cases, there is a class project to enforce the rules of the game on other people who didn’t even know they were playing.

8. 8. One of the friendly fixtures of the Digital Commons was an older man who had previously taught at a local university but was now living rough. He spent much of his day reviewing books on Renaissance art and constitutional law, a good citizen of the library who still frightened some visitors who were not regulars with his constant, low-level self-talk. Many other homeless patrons had completed college or attempted some of it and dropped out. I have no comprehensive data on homeless patrons’ educational attainment.

9. 9. A 2017 survey of DC startups found that 15 percent were initially funded by founders’ savings, 14 percent by friends and family, 19 percent through revenue, 9 percent through angel investors, and 9 percent through credit cards (Zuckerman et al. 2017). A mix of other, smaller funding sources (e.g., incubators, traditional loans) make up the remainder.

10. 10. This conceptualization of institutional culture is heavily indebted to Thornton and Ocasio’s (1999, 2008) approach to “institutional logics,” particularly in their understanding of institutional logics as a metatheory that can explain social life at multiple levels of analysis, built on both material and cultural foundations, providing an overarching story without erasing individual agency or historical contingency. It also shares some similarities with Boltanski and Thevenot’s (2006) approach to individual economic justifications of worth. I avoid using the term institutional logics for two reasons: First, because this chapter’s model for organizational change is based on another branch of neoinstitutionalist theory (institutional isomorphism), which occurs at a lower level of analysis. Second, because I diverge from Thornton and Ocasio in my commitment to grounding that model for organizational change within a broader, structural theory of feminist Marxist political economy, which was discussed in the introduction and chapter 1 and which will be returned to in the conclusion. Institutional logics is thus both too big and too small a theoretical lens for this project’s specific needs.