Kenneth J. Saltman

Schooling in Disaster Capitalism: How the Political Right Is Using Disaster to Privatize Public Schooling.

Around the world, disaster is 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 multibillion dollar no-bid reconstruction contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and from the privatization of public schooling following Hurricane Katrina in the Gulf Coast to the ways that No Child Left Behind sets public school up to be dismantled and made into investment opportunities—a grotesque pattern is emerging in which business is capitalizing on disaster. Naomi Klein has written of, … the rise of a predatory form of disaster capitalism that uses the desperation and fear created by catastrophe to engage in radical social and economic engineering. And on this front, the reconstruction industry works so quickly and efficiently that the privatizations and land grabs are usually locked in before the local population knows what hit them.2

Coda: Obama’s Betrayal of Public Education? Arne Duncan and the Corporate Model of Schooling

Since the 1980s, but particularly under the Bush administration, certain elements of the religious right, the corporate culture, and the Republican right wing have argued that free public education represents either a massive fraud or a contemptuous failure. Far from a genuine call for reform, these attacks largely stem from an attempt to transform schools from a public investment to a private good, answerable not to the demands and values of a democratic society but to the imperatives of the marketplace. As the educational historian David Labaree rightly argues, public schools have been under attack in the last decade “not just because they are deemed ineffective but because they are public.”1 Right-wing efforts to disinvest in public schools as critical sites of teaching and learning and govern them according to corporate interests is obvious in the emphasis on standardized testing, the use of top-down curricular mandates, the influx of advertising in schools, the use of profit motives to “encourage” student performance, the attack on teacher unions and modes of pedagogy that stress rote learning and memorization. For the Bush administration, testing has become the ultimate accountability measure, belying the complex mechanisms of teaching and learning. The hidden curriculum is : that testing be used as a ploy to de-skill teachers by reducing them to mere technicians; that students be similarly reduced to customers in the marketplace rather than as engaged, critical learners and that always underfunded public schools fail so that they can eventually be privatized.

Creative Associates International: Corporate Education and “Democracy Promotion” in Iraq

This article illustrates how global corporate education initiatives, though profit-motivated, sometimes function both as an instrument of foreign policy and as a manifestation of a broader imperial project. According to neoconservative scholars as well as their critics, the events of September 11, 2001, allowed the implementation of premade plans to radically reshape the United States National Security Strategy to pursue more aggressively and openly global military and economic dominance and to force any and all nations to submit to a singular set of American values. With the declaration of military response, the United States invaded first Afghanistan (in 2001) and then Iraq (in 2003), in part, on the justification that these were fronts in the so-called ‘‘War on Terror.’’ Following both invasions, the United States, through the Agency for International Development (USAID), contracted with a private for-profit corporation, Creative Associates International, Incorporated (CAII) to lead the rebuilding of education. School buildings, textbooks, teacher preparation, curriculum planning, administration—all would be implemented by CAII directly or by firms subcontracted by CAII. In 2003, the company came under close scrutiny by congress and the press for receiving its Iraq contracts without competitively bidding for them. The no-bid contract with CAII was one of a number of no-bid contracts benefiting U.S. corporations including Bechtel (which has been subcontracted by CAII to build schools), Haliburton, and others that profited from rebuilding in Iraq.

Corporate schooling meets corporate media: Standards, testing, and technophilia

Educational publishing corporations and media corporations in the United States have been converging, especially through the promotion of standardization, testing, and for-profit educational technologies. Media and technology companies—including News Corp, Apple, and Microsoft—have significantly expanded their presence in public schools to sell hardware and curriculum products such as tablets and learning software aligned with the Common Core State Standards. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (funded with profits from Microsoft) promoted financially and politically more than any other force the Common Core State Standards that sought to advance the testing and standardization agenda (Layton 2014). As well, the four largest educational test and textbook publishers—Pearson, McGraw-Hill, Houghton-Mifflin, and ETS (Educational Testing Service)— lobbied legislatures to promote the Common Core State Standards and other testing products, and they have commercially promoted their own products that respond to the changes for which they have lobbied. These four massive educational publishing corporations have spent more than

Neoliberalism and Corporate School Reform: “Failure” and “Creative Destruction”

20 million to influence states and the federal government to pass legislation supporting standardized testing, the standardization of curriculum, and other “reforms” for which these companies produce digital and traditional materials (Persson 2015; Strauss 2015a). The money invested in influencing politicians is a pittance compared to the

The Strong Arm of the Law

2 billion that these companies annually earn (Strauss 2015a). Media/technology corporations partner with education corporations, as in the partnerships between Microsoft and Pearson and Apple and Pearson, to produce Common Core products. The Apple Pearson project made headlines when the

Gambling with the Future of Public Education: Risk, Discipline, and the Moralizing of Educational Politics in Corporate Media

1.3 billion contract with the Los Angeles Unified School District ended in disaster, with the FBI raiding boxes of product as they launched an investigation into no bid contract corruption. The raid revealed that the technology had gone largely unused, with the exception of students hacking the tablets and accessing the open internet. Media and education companies seek to profit not just from digital and traditional texts and testing, digital and traditional test preparation, and related

JUNK-KING EDUCATION

In the United States, corporate school reform or neoliberal educational restructuring has overtaken educational policy, practice, curriculum, and nearly all aspects of educational reform. Although this movement began on the political right, the corporate school model has been heralded across the political spectrum and is aggressively embraced now by both major parties. Corporate school reformers champion private sector approaches to reform including, especially, privatization, deregulation, and the importation of terms and assumptions from business, while they imagine public schools as private businesses, districts as markets, students as consumers, and knowledge as product. Specifically such privatization takes the form of contracting out management of schools to privately managed charters or for-profit educational management organizations (Byrnes 2009; Miron 2011; Miron and Urschel 2010; Molnar, Miron, and Urschel 2010; Peterson and Chingos 2009), putting in place voucher schemes or neo-voucher scholarship tax credits (Welner 2008), expanding commercialism, imposing corporate ‘‘turnaround’’ models on schools and faculty that often involve firing entire faculties and administrations (most recently, Chicago and Philadelphia have shuttered unprecedented numbers of neighborhood schools and fired an enormous number of teachers and staff), reducing curriculum and pedagogy to narrow numerically quantifiable and positivist test-based forms, the creation of so-called ‘‘portfolio districts’’ that imagine districts as a stock portfolio and schools as stock investments (Saltman 2010a, 2010b), reorganizing teacher education and educational leadership on the model of the MBA degree while privatizing both, and the elimination of advanced degrees and certification in favor of pay for test performance schemes such as value-added assessment (Baker et al. 2010; Saltman 2010c).

Dancing With Bigotry

‘The Strong Arm of the Law’ seeks to explain how the identification with military power that is produced through corporate mass mediated spectacles such as bodybuilding threatens democratic identifications. What is more, the militarized body aims at ever-greater control over the physical world yet results only in evergreater estrangement from it. The article begins by illustrating the martial dimensions of the bodybuilder’s body. Then, it reveals the extent to which the built body promises safety, security, and freedom while contributing to the militarization of civil society – a process at odds with democratization. Next, it demonstrates the logic behind the bodybuilder’s identification and appeal as not merely soldier but weapon. The article concludes by raising the possibility of imagining the democratized body.

Why Henry Giroux's Democratic Pedagogy is Crucial for Confronting Failed Corporate School Reform and How Liberals like Ravitch and Darling-Hammond are Making Things Worse

This article discusses how representations of individual discipline and risk-taking in mass media inform the broader public discourses about public education and the public sector generally. Such representations and narratives about individual discipline and risk-taking often function in mass media as moral imperatives of consumer culture. Such moral imperatives of consumer culture not only replace a civic morality of political engagement more consistent with democratic ideals and participatory culture but also typify and even stimulate the shifting of politics onto a moral register and language that has characterized neo-liberal ideology, third way post-politics, and that informs contemporary US politics, especially evident during the ‘War on Terror.’ The article discusses these matters through the media spectacle of a Utah woman who permanently tattooed an advertisement for a casino on her face to pay for her sons private school tuition and through the gambling problem of former Secretary of Education and educational entrepreneur William Bennett.