Disaster of Resilience

Kenneth J. Saltman is Professor of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago, USA. He is the author of The Alienation of Fact: Digital Educational Privatization, AI, and the False Promise of Bodies and Numbers (2022), The Swindle of Innovative Educational Finance (2018) and The Politics of Education, 2nd edition (2018). He is a fellow of the National Educational Policy Center and a Fulbright Chair in Globalization and Culture.

• Introduction: The Politics of Resilience and Disaster1. Microschools, UberEd and the Dropout Recovery Industry2. From Venture Philanthropy to Digital Privatization: New Schools Venture Fund, Leap Innovations and the Selling of Digital Student Resilience3. Democracy International, Inc.: Selling Resilience and Education in the Global Influence Peddling Industry4. Trauma-Informed Pedagogy, Grit, and Biometrics: The Denial of Educational Politics and Racial Politics 5. Student Resilience, Social Emotional Learning, Testing as Teaching, and the Displacement of Intellectual TraditionsConclusion: From the Disaster of Resilience to Becoming Resilient to ResilienceReferences Index

Teachers, students and parents are required to be excitedly resilient in the face of radical reforms that are destroying their relationship with each other in schools and communities. Saltman shows in detail the relationship between seemingly benign interventions about bodies and practices, and the unfolding disasters occurring as a result of the relocation of responsibility to the private world of the individual. Thisbook is shockingly important for understanding and explaining the dismantling of public education.