Capitalism’s Educational Catastrophe

The authors analyze the «crisis» in U.S. urban education through visceral narratives of social control while resisting the tendency to make the United States the epicenter of educational «reform» analysis. The book is optimistic in sharing what might be done to inspire the mass withdrawal of consent not only to regimes of high-stakes standardized testing, but to the entire edifice of neoliberal imperialism.

Ricardo D. Rosa is a scholar-activist who earned his PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth. He co-chairs the national organization and the S.E. Massachusetts and R.I. Coalition to Save Our Schools. Joao J. Rosa is the Executive Director of the Pedro Pires Institute for Cape Verdean Studies at Bridgewater State University. He is an International Curriculum Advisor to the University of Cape Verde and a member of the National Commission on Languages. He is also the author of Ricardo and Joao are co-authors of released in 2011 by Peter Lang.

«Capitalism's Educational Catastrophe and the Advancing Endgame Revolt! is a brilliant analysis and call to arms against those market driven forces that are turning schools into adjuncts of corporate power. This book is insightful, passionate, beautifully written, and essential reading for anyone who is concerned about schooling as a foundation for critical thought, agency, and democracy.» (Henry A. Giroux) «This important work is an angry book, but objectively angry, documenting how an educational system ostensibly designed to benefit students has been bent to serve the priorities of the economic elite in North America and internationally. In showing that «it is possible to imagine other worlds», it does for education what Naomi Klein’s has done for climate change.» (Gabor Maté M.D., Author, , Co-author, ) «Ricardo and Joao Rosa's impassioned and sweeping call to conscience exposes neoliberalism’s intentions and designs, revealing the pervasiveness and destructiveness of a racialized capitalism that accumulates through dispossession. This searing indictment is counterbalanced by their active call to mobilize historical memory in the service of social democratic alternatives as part of a re-envisioning of the kind of education and curriculum that can effectively stand up to this assault via the formation of progressive – indeed, radical – subjectivities.» (Angela Valenzuela, author, Subtractive Schooling: U.S.-Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring and professor, College of Education, University of Texas at Austin)

«Capitalism's Educational Catastrophe and the Advancing Endgame Revolt! is a brilliant analysis and call to arms against those market driven forces that are turning schools into adjuncts of corporate power. This book is insightful, passionate, beautifully written, and essential reading for anyone who is concerned about schooling as a foundation for critical thought, agency, and democracy.» (Henry A. Giroux) «This important work is an angry book, but objectively angry, documenting how an educational system ostensibly designed to benefit students has been bent to serve the priorities of the economic elite in North America and internationally. In showing that «it is possible to imagine other worlds», it does for education what Naomi Klein’s has done for climate change.» (Gabor Maté M.D., Author, , Co-author, ) «Ricardo and Joao Rosa's impassioned and sweeping call to conscience exposes neoliberalism’s intentions and designs, revealing the pervasiveness and destructiveness of a racialized capitalism that accumulates through dispossession. This searing indictment is counterbalanced by their active call to mobilize historical memory in the service of social democratic alternatives as part of a re-envisioning of the kind of education and curriculum that can effectively stand up to this assault via the formation of progressive – indeed, radical – subjectivities.» (Angela Valenzuela, author, Subtractive Schooling: U.S.-Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring and professor, College of Education, University of Texas at Austin)

Contents: Charting the Neoliberal Nightmare and the Moral Outrage – Capital Movement and Global Displacement: Curricular Fatalities in the Age of Neoliberalism - the Case of Cape Verde – Performance Contracting and Supplemental Educational Services: Other Altars of Neoliberal Language Deception and Citizen Salvation – Education by Corporate Priorities, Youth Minds and Bodies under Arrest, and the Complexities of Resistance and Resignation – Raising Disquieting Questions in the Struggles Against Urban Violence – The Advancing Endgame Revolt! Dialogues with Activists and Community Organizers in the Trenches.