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Kahn continuedfrom previous page mary piece of educational policy, the No Child Left Behind Act, itself serves to destroy school systems such that they become more exploitable targets for the rate-of-return profit-minded private sector. Saltman first illuminates how the Right used Hurricane Katrina to push through the largest ever school voucher experiment and to generate the system -wide adoption of private, unregulated charter schools in New Orleans. This resulted in corporations hovering like vultures over the GulfCoast, swooping in to grab publicly-funded reconstruction projects and to help dispossess and cleanse the area of poor and African American residents. Shockingly, the book points out that even as the nation was openly grieving forthe devastated area, business pundits and wealthy elites alike were busy opining that the "silver lining" in the situation was that the region's underperforming public schools could finally be reformed by a private voucher scheme backed by tax dollars. "The Bush administration, so slow to provide federal emergency aid to residents, was nonetheless quick to respond to extensive media criticism. . .with $488 million designated for school vouchers," Saltman grimly concludes. But, worse yet, he further points out that little of the money earmarked by Congress for emergency school contracting ever even made it to Louisiana, which is perhaps Saltman's most startling revelation ofcorporate corruption. Chronicling the cronyism and pork-barreling by FEMA and government officials at all levels, Saltman tells a sordid tale of how communities in New Orleans were asked to perish, while almost a billion dollars in congressional disastereducational aid was quietly funneled elsewhere and companies like Alvarez & Marsal and Akima, the latter with its connection to former Secretary ofHomeland Security, Tom Ridge, were hired such that they might reap windfall profits and worsen the situation on the ground. Saltman's narrative next traces the US government 's interest in decimating democratic educational initiatives and in reconstructing schools in accordance with market logic in Iraq. Particularly, Saltman demonstrates thatjustas the public became rightfully outraged when Dick Cheney's former company, Halliburton , garnered billions of war dollars through its seemingly endless array of no-bid government contracts, so too does the monetary graft doled out to Creative Associates International, Inc. deserve to be met with concern. Chiefly, Saltman outs that the full range of US Agency for International Developmentsponsored "democracy promotion" activities (wink, wink) that CreativeAssociates International has been paid to carry out in post-invasion Iraq, Afghanistan, and in countries like Haiti, are highly spurious and damaging. To evaluate what is really going on here, Saltman believes, is to recognize how ideologies of neoliberal marketization and neoconservative empire building now work together as part of the global decentralizing and outsourcing ofeducation by the US wherever it seeks to develop and peddle its economic, political, and cultural interests. Finally, Saltman interrogates the ways business groups like the Commercial Club of Chicago and the Metropolitan Planning Council replicate a form of New Orleans's racialized land grabs in Chicago through the strategic removal of public housing and education in the name of the Renaissance 20 10 urban renewal plan. As Saltman explains, the federal No Child Left Behind Act plays a central role in this process by setting impossible standards for the already underserved inner-city public schools in Chicago (and across the nation). The result has been for these schools to be further weakened, declared failures by corrupted political interests, closed and reopened in less desirable areas, thereby displacing those who rely upon them. This allows for communities to be rebuilt as dilapidated public schools become replaced with a bevy of privatized charter, contract, and "performance" schools designed to succeed by appealing to a wealthier clientele with more cultural and economic capital to expend therein. The No Child Left BehindAct serves to destroy school systems. Saltman closes Capitalizing on Disaster with some thoughts on how those in favor of radical democracy, global justice, and a form of public schooling consonant with "the traditions of critical pedagogy, critical theory, cultural studies, feminism, progressive education, and critical cultural production " should respond to the current crisis of democratic schooling. On the one hand, he enumerates a variety oflegislative and policy reforms designed to strengthen the...

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