ABSTRACT
This chapter talks about the story of neoliberal educational reform in one urban school district, Cincinnati, Ohio, in the 1990s, which was spearheaded by leaders in the business community. It focuses on one inner-city high school in the district serving primarily poor black youth and, even more specifically, on one project in the high school to create a school-within-a-school "interdisciplinary team". The chapter argues that although the interdisciplinary team was able to open up some critical space in the school, this space was severely restricted by what Felix Guattari has called the "semiotic machines" of transnational capitalism, which in the age of neoliberal hegemony have been "de-territorialized" from the economic sphere and "re-territorialized" in various public spheres, including public education. Neoliberalism represents itself as purely rational and scientific, grounded in managerial "science" and economics, which means that the "priesthood" of neoliberal educational policy consists of those who speak in one of these two disciplines.
