From Public Schools to Privatization
From Public Schools to Privatization provides an in-depth and up-to-date critical analysis of the marketization and privatization of urban public schools in the United States. Drawing on critical race policy analysis and ethnographic methods, this book examines the gap between urban teachers’ daily experiences of marketization and the policy discourses of politicians, policymakers, and reformers used to rationalize market policies. Tracing the arc of marketization from the rise of neoliberal market-based education policies in the 1980s to the present, the book also situates ethnographic vignettes of teachers’ work lives and teacher testimonies in their historical, political, and economic context to show how broader racialized political economic forces have shaped teachers’ work. Ultimately, this book argues that both major political parties in the United States have embraced marketization and that, in the current moment, we are experiencing an effort to dismantle public education entirely through privatization. Nevertheless, the author suggests that there is hope in the resistance of urban teachers, social justice unionism, and the promise of organizing a broad multiracial, pro-democracy, pro-worker social movement.
Kathleen Nolan is a lecturer and the assistant director of English language arts in the Program in Teacher Preparation at Princeton University.