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Abstract
Building upon critical education policy studies of crisis, disaster, and reform, this essay develops a theory of recovery that further elaborates the nature and operation of ‘crisis politics’ in neoliberal education reform. Recovery is an integral process in capital accumulation, exploiting material, and subjective vulnerability in order to bridge crisis to crisis. Capitalizing on crises, neoliberal reformers position privatization as the mechanism of recovery. Rather than acknowledge their complicity in creating crises, neoliberals externalize the demands of recovery onto schools, teachers, and students. This essay calls for critical educators, social justice advocates, and communities subjected to crises to refuse the neoliberal terms of recovery and to affirm the collective potential to break the cycle of crisis and recovery so intrinsic to capitalist accumulation. Although this essay emphasizes the dialectic of crisis and recovery in United States education policy, this lens is relevant across a variety of national and transnational contexts.
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Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Greg Bourassa, Noah De Lissovoy, Jenna Hanchey, Frank Margonis, Alex Means, Larry Parker, and Ken Saltman for their invaluable comments and feedback on various drafts of this article. He would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their attentive readings and their generous suggestions to improve the manuscript.
Notes
1. De Lissovoy (Citation2008) uses the term ‘Trojan horse’ to describe the neoliberal accountability movement, which he argues is ‘designed to pry open the doors of the schoolhouse to private capital, as the humiliation of low-performing schools sets the stage for radical choice-oriented options’ (92). In the case of Race To The Top – one concrete example of a ‘recovery’ reform – this metaphor is particularly appropriate for the very reason that Race To The Top is offered in purportedly good faith, rather than as the top-down austerity measure that it truly is.