ABSTRACT
The neoliberal solution to the crisis of American education is always the same: privatize the schools. The neoliberal project found a home in the never-ending school reform efforts. The school and the classroom became the symbolic and material home of white racial and economic insecurity. Elite whites in Alabama were the most anxious and ambitious in their privatization plans. The Beatty Plan was the first plan to privatize schools in Alabama. It was proposed before there was verdict in the Brown decision. Austerity emerged as a parallel strategy during the debates over the school privatization acts in Alabama. The legislative framework for privatizing schools was in place by the late 1950s, but the privatization of schools was not a universal feature of southern education on the eve of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. School vouchers are a form of school privatization where the state uses public money to indirectly subsidize traditional private schools.
