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

Abstract

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.)