ABSTRACT
In the United States, private corporations have (historically) always transacted with, and profi ted from, selling supplies and equipment to the public schools. Likewise, those same private interests were always able to count on the security state to manage schools as instruments for disciplining members of the domestic population into the proper behaviors and attitudes that would increase their use value as human capital and their docility as “good citizens.” Though countervailing ideas on the purposes of education have circulated since the time of Thomas Jefferson, they never threatened to seriously alter the traditional role of compulsory schooling in America’s market society. That changed, however, in the 1960s, when multiple sectors of the general public (those associated with the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the environmental movement, the labor movement, the peace movement, and others) recognized and acted to realize the
democratizing potentials of education. As a result of the efforts of these various groups, schools and universities, from the perspective of entrenched business interests, began “allowing too much freedom and independence of thought, and that cannot be tolerated in a ‘democracy,’ because it might lead to consequences” (Chomsky, 2004). Beginning in the early 1970s, multiple sectors of that same business community began taking steps to overcome these defi ciencies in the educational system, restoring the statesponsored system of compulsory schooling to its traditional role. Those steps have entailed a variety of tactics (e.g., vouchers, tax tuition credits, charter schools) for “liberalizing” education for promoting a broader strategy ultimately designed to bring the management of schools (decision-making power over curriculum and modes of instruction) under the control of private corporations (Hursh, 2008a; Ross and Gibson, 2007; Saltman, 2001, 2007, 2008; Saltman & Goodman, 2002; Saltman & Gabbard, 2003). Privatizing the management of schools, of course, will also provide the added advantage, following the dominant pattern that we see in the defense, biotechnology, medical, and insurance industries, of socializing the costs of schooling while privatizing the profi ts.
