“Turnaround” as Shock Therapy

“Turnaround” strategies of educational reform promise that school closure, reconstitution, privatizing, and reopening them will bring miraculous results. Questioning the implications, this article situates “turnaround” strategies locally, following the closure of a predominantly minority high school in 2008, in Austin, Texas. The neoliberal reforms, intending to “clean the slate” and privatize school management, constituted “shock therapy.” The school’s closure also reflected an increasingly punitive approach to state-based support systems. Furthermore, although the state articulated the closure as a benefit to students, the community experienced closure as a type of social and civic death.