Economic crisis, accountability, and the state’s coercive assault on public education in the USA

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae, and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand, or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material. This article examines education accountability as a mechanism of coercive neoliberal urban governance in the USA. Drawing on Gramscian theory of the 'integral state' as the dialectical synthesis of coercion, consent, and resistance, the author argues that as the crisis gives the state less room to win consent, it intensifies coercion as a strategy of governance. The author discusses three aspects of coercive state responses to the crisis in relation to education: (1) can-nibalizing public education as a site of capital accumulation; (2) imposition of state austerity regimes and selective abandonment of education as a mechanism of social reproduction and legitimation in African-American communities that have become zones of disposability; and (3) governance by exclusion of African-American and Latino communities through school closings, state takeovers of elected governance bodies, and disenfranchisement. Systems of accountability are integral to this process as they make schools legible for the market, mark specific schools and school districts as pathological and in need of authoritarian governance, and justify minimalist schools in areas of urban dis-posability. This paper concludes with the potential of emergent resistance to dominant neoliberal education policy and argues that breaking with the framework of accountability and testing is critical to a counter-hegemonic alternative. Introduction The state is using the structural crisis of capitalism to accelerate neoliberal restructuring of public education in the USA. Seeing an opportunity to gobble up the public sector for private gain, fractions of capital, venture philanthropists, and neoliberal ideologues have seized on the fiscal crisis of the state to attack teacher unions and further marketize public education. While these moves are legitimated through discourses of 'school failure' and framed as 'reforms,' the cultivation of consent is dialectically related to the deployment of coercive state power – …