KennethQuarterly, J. SaltmanSpring 2007 Teacher Education
Schooling in Disaster Capitalism: How the Political Right Is Using Disaster To Privatize Public Schooling1 By Kenneth J. Saltman Introduction 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 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 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
Kenneth J. Saltman is an associate professor in the Department of Education Policy Studies and Research of the School of Education at DePaul University, Chicago, Illinois.
Despite the fact that attempts to privatize and commercialize public schools proceed at a startling pace,3 privatization increasingly appears in a new form that Klein calls “disaster capitalism” and that David Harvey terms “accumulation by dispossession.” This article details how in education the political right is capitalizing on disaster from Chicago’s Renaissance 131