Reviewed by David Gabbard
October 15, 2008 Kenneth J. Saltman’s new book, Capitalizing on
Disaster: Taking and Breaking Public Schools (2007),
published by Paradigm, breaks new ground in challenging and
critiquing corporate involvement in schooling and education, as
he dissects the most powerful educational reforms of today, and
highlights their relationship to the rapid rise of powerful think
tanks and the new brand of edu-business groups. Over the past
several decades, there has been a strong movement towards the
privatization of public schooling through business ventures.
While at the beginning of the millennium, this privatization
project looked like it was on its way out, as both the Edison
Schools and Knowledge Universe floundered. Unfortunately,
privatization is back and stronger than ever!
Criticisms of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) as more than a
well-intended, but under-funded attempt to overcome the
“soft bigotry of low expectations” and improve
American education have finally reached the mainstream media.
Claudia Wallis opens her article in the June 8, 2008 issue of
Time magazine by stating what has long been obvious to
many of us: There was always something slightly insane about No Child Left Behind. . . . For one thing, in the view of many educators, the law's 2014 goal — which calls for all public school students in grades 4 through 8 to be achieving on grade level in reading and math — is something no educational system anywhere on earth has ever accomplished. Even more unrealistic: every kid (except for 3% with serious handicaps or other issues) is supposed to be achieving on grade level every year, climbing in lockstep up an ever more challenging ladder. This flies in the face of all sorts of research showing that children start off in different places academically and grow at different rates. (Wallis, 2008). In part, it was this insanity of NCLB that led many of us to
insist, as Wallis puts it, “that No Child Left Behind was
nothing more than a cynical plan to destroy American faith in
public education and open the way to vouchers and school
choice.” (Wallis, 2008). Citing Susan Neuman, who served as Assistant Secretary for
Elementary and Secondary Education during George W. Bush’s
first term, Wallis’s reportage substantiates those
criticisms. While separating herself, Bush, and former Secretary
of Education Rod Paige from this view, “there were others
in the department, according to Neuman, who saw NCLB as a Trojan
horse for the choice agenda — a way to expose the failure
of public education and ‘blow it up a bit,’ she says.
‘There were a number of people pushing hard for market
forces and privatization.’” (Wallis,
2008) For all of its merits, Wallis’s reportage would lead the
average citizen to believe that cooler heads have prevailed
within the U.S. Department of Education, that Secretary of
Education Margaret Spellings has helped insulate our system of
public education from those wishing to “blow it up.”
Taking Neuman’s account of things at face value, Wallis
creates the impression that Spellings has rescued public schools
from those wishing to capitalize on its destruction through
privatization by moving NCLB toward a growth model “instead
of demanding lockstep, grade-level achievement.” In this
sense, Wallis’s reportage perpetuates the mainstream
media’s persistent lack of deep-level, investigative
journalism so necessary to our civic life and active democratic
decision-making. As Cornel West has argued, While an essential mission of the news organizations in a democracy should be to expose the lies and manipulations of our political and economic leaders – and surely many media watchdogs devote themselves to that task – too much of what passes for news today is really a form of entertainment. So many shows follow a crude formula for providing titillating coverage that masks itself as news. (West, 2004, p. 36). In Capitalizing on Disaster: Taking and Breaking Public
Schools, Saltman offers us an excellent example of what a
more civically responsible brand of journalism would look like
while at the same time offering a theoretically astute, nuanced,
and accessible sociological analysis of the contemporary state of
public schooling. On matters of “market forces and privatization” in
education, no one has focused more sustained critical scrutiny
than Saltman. Capitalizing on Disaster, his latest
single-authored book, follows on the heels of his Edison
Schools: Corporate Schooling and the Assault on Public
Education (2005), Strange Love: Or How We Learned to Stop
Worrying and Love the Market (2002, co-authored with Robin
Truth Goodman), and Collateral Damage: Corporatizing Public
Schools – A Threat to Democracy (2000). He has also
edited or co-edited works dealing with the same themes, including
Schooling and the Politics of Disaster (2007) and
Education As Enforcement: The Militarization and
Corporatization of Schools (2003). Moreover, Saltman has been
following the corporatist assault on public education for nearly
a decade. While Wallis demonstrates what West identifies and critiques
as the mainstream media’s sentimental nihilism
– the willingness “to sidestep or even bludgeon the
truth or unpleasant and unpopular facts and stories, in order to
provide an emotionally satisfying show” (West, 2004).
Capitalizing on Disaster sidesteps nothing. To the
contrary, Saltman takes great care to document three different
scenarios revealing how, even while efforts to promote
privatization through various voucher plans and charter schools
have suffered serious setbacks, “overt attempts to
privatize and commercialize public schools continue at an
alarming rate” and in “a new form that coheres with
what [Naomi] Klein terms ‘disaster capitalism’ and
what David Harvey describes as ‘accumulation by
dispossession.’” (p. 1) Therein lies the greatest
strength of Saltman’s latest offering.
Responding to Saltman’s book, Professor Gerald Bracey poses
the question, “What do Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq War
have in common? They both represent ‘golden
opportunities’ to replace destroyed public school systems
with private corporations… Kenneth Saltman clearly shows in
his angry and powerful new book, while these two examples are
exceptional situations, they characterize the right’s modus
operandi for radical social engineering--the public to private
conversion--of the public schools.” (Bracey, 2008).
Capitalizing on Disaster offers a compelling addition to the
literature of the role that schooling plays in reproducing social
relations for capital. Saltman explains that in order for
continued economic growth the private sector is increasingly
pillaging the public sector including public schooling. However,
this is being done specifically towards populations rendered
redundant in an increasingly dual economy. Specifically poor and
working class public schools are targeted for privatization and
commodification to make these students into an economic
opportunity while the schools in privileged communities retain
the role of turning out leaders and workers for the economy. The
discussion is extremely valuable for situating these educational
trends within broader national and global economic, political,
and cultural transformations. Capitalizing on Disaster is especially relevant in
light of the new face of educational privatization which is
replacing public schooling with educational management
organizations (EMOs), vouchers, and charter schools at an
alarming rate. In both disaster and non-disaster areas, officials
designate schools as failed in order to justify replacement with
new, unproven models. Saltman examines how privatization policies
such as No Child Left Behind are designed to deregulate schools,
favoring business while undermining public oversight. Examining
current policies in New Orleans, Chicago, and Iraq,
Capitalizing on Disaster shows how the struggle for public
schooling is essential to the struggle for a truly democratic
society. Saltman’s mission, in this book, focuses on documenting
three examples of how disaster becomes big business, particularly
when destruction creates opportunities to profit from education.
In the first example, he points to how business has capitalized
on a natural disaster, Hurricane Katrina, to promote the
privatization agenda in New Orleans. In the second example, he
documents how a man-made disaster, war, has created vast
for-profit educational venture in Iraq. Finally, Saltman examines
how Chicago’s Renaissance 2010 has harnessed the most
destructive powers of NCLB and tied them to other equally
destructive initiatives to create a broader neoliberal agenda for
gentrifying the city. Here, Saltman takes a cue from Naomi Klein’s (2007)
notion of the rise in 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”
to introduce his first chapter. Smash and Grab: Schooling in Disaster
Capitalism Eviscerating Neuman’s suggestion that Margaret Spellings
has rescued schools from those intent on privatizing them,
Chapter One discloses the U.S. Department of Education’s
role in taking advantage of the destruction of New Orleans and
other communities along the Gulf Coast to impose what Saltman
characterizes as “the largest-ever school voucher
experiment for the region and nation.” (p. 5) Thanks to
the catastrophic effects of Katrina, particularly in the
poverty-stricken sections of the city such as the lower
9th Ward, this experiment required no special effort
to “blow up” the public schools before proceeding.
Saltman does point out, however, just prior to the storm the
Louisiana state legislature had defeated a bill that would have
provided publicly funded vouchers to support private and
religious schools. In the wake of Katrina, supporters of that
legislation and other advocates of privatization began echoing
the same meme: the destruction of New Orleans schools presented a
new “golden opportunity” to advance their agenda; the
realization of a publicly funded voucher scheme would be a
“silver lining” in the otherwise dark cloud that had
descended on the city and region. What Saltman presciently identifies in Capitalizing on
Disaster is clearly intensifying. Just this past week,
New York Times reporter Paul Tough (2008) wrote that New Orleans
Gov. Bobby Jindal, will pay for nearly 900 New Orleans
elementary-school students to attend private and parochial
schools this year. But that the more significant lever of change
in this troubled city is the charters — schools that get
public money and are overseen by a government entity but are
managed by an independent board. In New Orleans, Gov. Bobby Jindal, the
state education superintendent Pastorek, and New Orleans School
Superintendent Paul Vallas all say they expect charters to expand
their presence in the district, to a point where 75 percent or
even 90 percent of the city’s schools are charters. So
over the long haul these management enterprises like Recovery
School District (R.S.D.) become an instrument that evaluates
existing schools, supports existing schools, recommends the
closure of schools and recommends the best operator to come in
and take over, or the best operator to come in place of that
school. As the head of RSD, Gary Robichaux, explains, “We
put people in business, and we take people out of
business.” (Tough, 2008). C.A.I., Inc: Corporate Schooling and Democracy Promotion in
Iraq Speaking to the expanding role of for-profit corporations in
enacting right-wing foreign policy and exporting right-wing
domestic educational policy overseas, the second chapter
illustrates how a U.S. company called Creative Associates
International, Incorporated (CAII), made millions on no-bid
contracts while engaging in educational rebuilding that includes
fostering the educational privatization agenda. Saltman argues
that the human-made disaster of the Iraq war has been a vast
moneymaking opportunity not only for companies such as
Halliburton and Bechtel but also for educational profiteers. More
significantly, he traces the history of CAII to reveal a marked
pattern of not only profiteering from its associations with
government agencies but also exporting a corporate model of
schooling and education that undermines the democratic potential
of schools by teaching people to understand themselves as
atomized workers and consumers who should seek to advance their
own economic self-interest by aligning those interests with the
interests of the corporations that employ them. In this sense,
CAII’s educational initiatives overseas teach people to
equate and confuse capitalism’s economic individualism with
the political liberty and active civic engagement of democratic
governance. Renaissance 2010 and NCLB: Breaking and Taking Schools and
Communities In this third chapter, Saltman examines how Chicago’s
Renaissance 2010 essentially written by the Commercial Club of
Chicago(a civic improvement club that also promotes
Chicago's economic development) and being implemented by the
Chicago Public Schools where 85% of its students are poor and
nonwhite, is planning to close 100 public schools and then reopen
them as for-profit and non-profit charter schools, contract
schools and magnet schools, bypassing the important district
regulations. Saltman adds that critics of the plan view it as
“urban cleansing” that locks out local residents.
Against this back drop Saltman takes on No Child Left Behind
which he writes sets schools up for failure by making it
impossible demands for continual improvement. Saltman also elaborates on the privatization agenda of
Renaissance 2010 by showing how it is being pushed by the
longstanding and concerted efforts of business groups as well as
the neoliberal ideology they embrace. He also shows how
Renaissance 2010 belies a racialized economic grab to profit from
public housing and public schooling and to seize real
estate-public school closings and reopenings are a tool in
displacing the poor and taking land. In addition he illustrates
how renaissance 2010 also exemplifies a shift in educational and
political governance in a highly undemocratic direction.
Conclusion Putting a fine point on it this issue, Saltman contends that
right wing movements of capitalizing on disaster should not be
exclusively understood as a coordinated effort of rich rightists
and ideologues (though in part this conclusion is unavoidable
when faced with the evidence presented herein). This movement, he
goes on to say, must be understood in relation to the broader
political, ideological, and cultural formations most prevalent at
the moment-namely neoliberalism and neo-conservativism. He urges
that this rightwing movement imperils the development of public
schools as crucial sites for engaged critical democracy while
undermining the public purposes of public education and amassing
vast profits for few and even furthering U.S. foreign policy
agendas. Saltman concludes by suggesting a number of hopeful
strategies for strengthening public schools as part of an effort
to build a public and critical form of democracy. As a result, Saltman continues making his mark as one of most
articulate critics of contemporary education policy by providing
rigorous analysis and deep theoretical insights without losing
his readership with unnecessary jargon.Capitalizing on
Disaster is essential reading for scholars who want to
understand the most recent trends of educational reform but also
lends itself as a classroom text. It would by complemented in a
teacher education course by Naomi Klein’s The Shock
Doctrine and David Harvey’s A Brief History of
Neoliberalism to comprehend and contest the radical social
transformations going inside and outside
education. Perhaps more than in any of his previous works,
Capitalizing on Disaster demonstrates that the
“cynical plan to destroy American faith in public education
and open the way to vouchers and school choice” did not
begin and, in all likelihood, will not end with NCLB, but
represents merely one component of the far broader and deeper
agenda of neoliberalism. References Bracey, G ( 2008). Backmatter, Capitalizing on
Disaster, by Ken Saltman. Paradigm Publishers. Harvey, D. (2005). Brief History of Neoliberalism.
Oxford University Press. Klein, Naomi. (2007). The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. NY: Metropolitan Books. Tough, P., (2008). A Teachable Moment. The New York Times, August 17, 2008. Retrieved August 20, 2008 from http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/17/magazine/17NewOrleanst.html?_r=1&pagewanted=1&Magazine-Preview:-A-Teachable-Moment&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&oref=slogin Wallis, C. (2008). No Child Left Behind: Doomed to Fail?,
Time Magazine, June 8, 2008. Retrieved August 20, 2008
from
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1812758,00.html West, C. (2004). Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism. (New York, Penguin). About The Reviewers David Gabbard, PhD David Gabbard has earned national and
international recognition for his work in critical educational
policy studies and democratic educational theory.
Along with five
published books, his record of scholarly production includes over
fifty articles and book chapters. The first edition of his
Knowledge and Power in Global Economy: Politics and the
Rhetoric of School Reform received the Critic’s Choice
Award from the American Educational Studies Association in
2001. Professor Gabbard has also worked with Ken Saltman (DePaul
University) in the production of Education as Enforcement:
The Militarization and Corporatization of Schools , E. Wayne
Ross (University of British Columbia) in producing Defending
Public Schools: Education Under the Security State and Alain
Beaulieu (University of Sudbury) in co-editing Michel Foucault
and Power Today. Professor Gabbard also co-founded and
co-edits Public Resistance: An Academic Journal to Confront
the Lies of the Right with Karen Anijar-Appleton (Arizona
State University). He currently serves as Program Coordinator for
the Marxian Analysis of Society, Schools, and
EducationSIG of the American Educational
Research Association. Sheila Macrine, PhD Sheila Macrine is a professor of teacher education.
She has
been a school psychologist and a reading specialist. Her research
focuses on connecting the cultural, political, institutional and
feminist contexts of institutional and personal contexts of
pedagogy and learning theory, particularly as they relate the
social imagination and progressive democratic education. These
issues are examined on many levels including educational theory
and pedagogy; reform and policy; and classroom teaching. She is
currently studying political and cultural forces at work in
national education policy and is also studying beliefs systems
among early childhood and elementary teachers. |
Tuesday, July 1, 2025
Saltman, Kenneth J. (2007). Capitalizing on Disaster: Taking and Breaking Public Schools. Reviewed by David Gabbard, East Carolina University
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