Changing Politics of Education: Privitization and the Dispossessed Lives Left Behind

Description

The authors persuasively argue that the present cascade of reforms to public education is a consequence of a larger intention to shrink government. The startling result is that more of public education's assets and resources are moving to the private sector and to the prison industrial complex. Drawing on various forms of evidence-structural, economic, narrative, and youth-generated participatory research-the authors reveal new structures and circuits of dispossession and privilege that amount to a clear failure of present policy. Policymaking is at war with the interests of the vast majority of citizens, and especially with urban youth of color. In the final chapter the authors explore democratic principles and offer examples essential to mobilizing, in solidarity with educators, youth, communities, labor, and allied social movements, the kind of power necessary to contest the present direction of public education reform. Cover Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Table of Contents Acknowledgments Introduction 1 The Radical Restructuring of the State and the Dissolution of the American Economy 2 Restructuring the Teaching Workforce: Attack Rhetoric and Disinvestment as Effective Education Reform in an Era of Economic Decline 3 Charter Schooling and the Deregulation and Capitalization of Public Education Assets 4 Dispossession Stories 5 High-Stakes Testing and the Racialized Science of Dispossession 6 Circuits of Dispossession and Accumulation in a Nation of Swelling Inequality Gaps 7 Contesting Public Education: Austerity and the Intensifying Fight for a Collective Future References Index About the Authors