The Shock Doctrine & Education Reform

I've written about this in other places and the model holds.  Think about the chorus of folks (Republican and recently Democrats) all suddenly in unison that "public education is broken." Flagrant in the disregard of data in a so-called data-driven age drives the drum beat but the question remains: how profits from all of this?   Check out the article, but come back to Newteacher to share some ideas....

The "Shock Doctrine" comes to your neighborhood classroom: Corporate reformers use the fiscal crisis and campaign contributions to hype an unproven school agenda

BY DAVID SIROTA

"Let's hope the fiscal crisis doesn't get better too soon. It'll slow down reform." -- Tom Watkins, a consultant, summarizes the corporate education reform movement's current strategy to the Sunday New York Times.

The Shock Doctrine, as articulated by journalist Naomi Klein, describes the process by which corporate interests use catastrophes as instruments to maximize their profit. Sometimes the events they use are natural (earthquakes), sometimes they are human-created (the 9/11 attacks) and sometimes they are a bit of both (hurricanes made stronger by human-intensified global climate change). Regardless of the particular cataclysm, though, the Shock Doctrine suggests that in the aftermath of a calamity, there is always corporate method in the smoldering madness - a method based in Disaster Capitalism.

Though Klein's book provides much evidence of the Shock Doctrine, the Disaster Capitalists rarely come out and acknowledge their strategy. That's why Watkins' outburst of candor, buried in this front-page New York Times article yesterday, is so important: It shows that the recession and its corresponding shock to school budgets is being  used by corporations to maximize revenues, all under the gauzy banner of "reform."

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