ABSTRACT
The state is using the structural crisis of capitalism to accelerate neoliberal restructuring of public education in the USA. Seeing an opportunity to gobble up the public sector for private gain, fractions of capital, venture philanthropists, and neoliberal ideologues have seized on the fiscal crisis of the state to attack teacher unions and further marketize public education. While these moves are legitimated through discourses of ‘school failure’ and framed as ‘reforms,’ the cultivation of consent is dialectically related to the deployment of coercive state power – disenfranchisement, expropriation of public goods, and state abandonment. Driven by intertwined logics of capital and race, African-American and Latino urban communities that are largely superfluous to corporate/financial interests and excluded from state investment are targets of a strategy to dismantle public education and essentially abandon its role in social reproduction. The state is selectively disposing of
public schools and abolishing elected governance bodies in urban school districts, stripping them of democratic processes of school governance. School closings, takeovers by education management organizations, expansion of privately run charter schools, and mayoral control of school systems are the order of the day.
