In this article, Murphy, Strothers, and Lugg, focus on one urban center, Newark, as an illustrative case study of how New Jersey's brand of neoliberal politics has shaped the political agency of those who live in the communities served by New Jersey's public schools. The city, like other New Jersey locales, has had a long history of political corruption, which occasionally touches the public school district (Anyon, 1997). The city has also long been treated with disdain by the state's political elites--regardless of the political party in control--thanks to its racial and economic composition: non-white and poor (Anyon, 1997; U.S. Census, 2010). Political power in New Jersey is split across urban and suburban locales, with electoral control resting largely in the white, affluent suburbs. Newark's school district has been under state control since 1995. The long and increasingly punitive nature of state involvement has led to local unrest, particularly during the Christie administration, complete with open insubordination by principals and student strikes. Given these data challenges, the authors employed a novel queer methodology--scavenging--to gather data. The authors report these results: (1) The nature of politics in New Jersey, with its neoliberal cronyism, translates into a challenging, and oft-times a scary, educational environment for public schools; (2) The prolonged and creative resistance of educators, community leaders, local scholars, and students shows it is possible to shift educational policymaking away from political cronies and back to the communities New Jersey's public schools serve; and (3) It was also possible to unearth this story in the midst of such entrenchment and erasure by employing unconventional methodological tools and by reviewing what counted as data vis-à-vis "scavenging." By accessing records of historically and politically marginalized populations such as the residents of Newark, where these records were presented, "scavenging" for data might even be a preferable, if a methodologically unruly, path.