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Capitalizing on Disaster: Taking and Breaking Public Schools. Kenneth J. Saltman. Herndon, VA: Paradigm Publishers, 2007. 184 pp.
Kenneth J. Saltman's book, Capitalizing on Disaster: Taking and Breaking Public Schools, investigates the growing trend in privatization and deregulation of U.S. public schools; it demonstrates the way right-wing institutions, or think tanks, have taken advantage of recent natural and human disasters to expand the market into previously inaccessible spaces such as public education. These trends have led to the closing of public schools and the concomitant corporate takeover by educational management organizations (or EMOs), charter schools and vouchers. In this manner, the accumulation by dispossession objectives are promoted as opportunities for poor and working-class communities to have better schooling choices following the identified "failures" and closing of their schools.
Saltman successfully links the broader political, ideological, and cultural formations of neoliberalism and neoconservatism to explore the manner in which public schools are dismantled to initiate for-profit charter and deregulated public schools. He draws on evidence from the educational rebuilding in New Orleans (post-Hurricane Katrina), Iraq, and Chicago's Renaissance 2010 project. Saltman debunks myths about the overall benefits of charter schools as alternatives for working-class and poor communities who have faced the dismantling of their schools because of their inability to meet strict accountability guidelines, most recently stipulated by the...