ERIC Number: EJ795160
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2007
Pages: 26
Abstractor: ERIC
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0737-5328
EISSN: N/A
Schooling in Disaster Capitalism: How the Political Right Is Using Disaster to Privatize Public Schooling
Saltman, Kenneth J.
Teacher Education Quarterly, v34 n2 p131-156 Spr 2007
In this essay, the author suggests that worldwide disasters are providing the means for business to accumulate profit. From the Asian tsunami of 2005 that allowed corporations to seize coveted shoreline properties for resort development to the multi-billion dollar no-bid reconstruction contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan, from the privatization of public schooling following Hurricane Katrina in the Gulf Coast to the ways that No Child Left Behind sets public schools up to be dismantled and made into investment opportunities--a grotesque pattern is emerging in which business is capitalizing on disaster. Despite the fact that attempts to privatize and commercialize public schools proceed at a startling pace, privatization increasingly appears in a new form that Naomi Klein calls "disaster capitalism" and that David Harvey terms "accumulation by dispossession." The author discusses his belief that the political right is capitalizing on disaster from Chicago's Renaissance 2010 to the federal No Child Left Behind Act, from educational rebuilding in the Gulf Coast of the U.S. to education profiteering in Iraq. The new predatory form of educational privatization aims to dismantle and then commodify particular public schools. This conservative movement threatens the development of public schools as necessary places that foster engaged critical citizenship. At the same time it undermines the public and democratic purposes of public education, it amasses vast profits for few, and even furthers U.S. foreign policy agendas. (Contains 75 notes.)
Descriptors: Public Schools, Public Education, Privatization, Federal Legislation, Educational Legislation, Political Attitudes, Social Systems, Corporations, Natural Disasters, War, Educational Vouchers, Charter Schools, Teacher Education, Foreign Countries
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Opinion Papers; Reports - Descriptive
Education Level: Elementary Secondary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Illinois; Iraq; Louisiana
Identifiers - Laws, Policies, & Programs: No Child Left Behind Act 2001
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A