From Public Schools to Privatization

Urban Teachers on the Front Lines

Kathleen Nolan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2026
• eBook ISBN:
  9781040626511
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Teaching Methods

From Public Schools to Privatization provides an in-depth and up-to-date critical analysis of the marketization and privatization of urban public schools in the United States. Drawing on critical race policy analysis and ethnographic methods, this book examines the gap between urban teachers' daily experiences of marketization and the policy discourses of politicians, policymakers, and reformers used to rationalize market policies. Tracing the arc of marketization from the rise of neoliberal market-based education policies in the 1980s to the present, the book also situates ethnographic vignettes of teachers' work lives and teacher testimonies in their historical, political, and economic context to show how broader racialized political economic forces have shaped teachers' work. Ultimately, this book argues that both major political parties in the United States have embraced marketization and that, in the current moment, we are experiencing an effort to dismantle public education entirely through privatization. Nevertheless, the author suggests that there is hope in the resistance of urban teachers, social justice unionism, and the promise of organizing a broad multiracial, pro-democracy, pro-worker social movement.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsement Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• 1 Worked to death: the disappearing urban public school teacher
• 2 Marketization and teachers’ work: from ANAR to the present
• 3 Obama-era urban school turnaround: incoherence and the making of the resistant teacher
• 4 The evolution of the neoliberal marketization of urban education
• 5 The rise of authoritarian marketization
• 6 Teachers’ unions: the challenges
• 7 Reflections on the death and rise of the urban public school teacher
• Methodological appendix
• Index