“Show Everyone that the House is on Fire”: Organizing for Educational Justice in Washington, D.C.

This qualitative study investigates how the policy ecology of one urban center, Washington, D.C., shapes opportunities for advocacy, patterns of interaction, and the strategies actors use to influence local education policy decisions. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 54 community-level advocates, we find that participants leveraged relationship-based strategies to attempt to influence education policy change. However, actors’ perceived influence is limited to particular arenas and constrained by the city's governance structure. We argue that these constraints limit which actors can exercise their “right to the city” in ways that reflect spatialized patterns of race, class, and power.