Kenneth J. Saltman is Professor of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago. His scholarship examines educational policy, politics, privatization, technology, democracy, and critical pedagogy. Across more than two decades of work, he has developed critical analyses of how schooling is shaped by broader economic, political, and cultural struggles.

Since the late 1990s, Saltman’s scholarship has been at the forefront of studying the neoliberal restructuring of public education. His early work analyzed the corporatization of schooling, market-based reform, commercialization, militarization, venture philanthropy, and the democratic consequences of corporate school reform. These studies examined how public institutions were reorganized through market logics, managerial control, and private influence.

Over time, his sustained focus on privatization led increasingly to the study of digital educational privatization. Beginning in the mid-2010s, Saltman’s scholarship turned to the role of data-driven platforms, educational software, surveillance systems, smart technologies, and artificial intelligence in reshaping schooling. His recent work argues that many contemporary AI initiatives intensify earlier forms of privatization by transforming learning into data production, expanding corporate control, and narrowing democratic authority over education.

A recurring feature of Saltman’s scholarship is its effort to bridge traditional policy analysis with critical theory and cultural studies drawing on scholarship across the humanities and critical social sciences. His work examines the values, assumptions, and ideologies embedded in educational policy and practice while exploring possibilities for democratic education, critical literacy, and emancipatory social change.

Saltman received his PhD in Curriculum and Instruction from Pennsylvania State University in 1999 and an Honors Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy from McGill University. Prior to joining the University of Illinois Chicago, he taught at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, DePaul University, and St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Before entering academia, he taught ESL in Prague and Pusan, South Korea.

He has received several book awards and a Fulbright Research Chair. His recent books include AI Schools and the New Child Labor (2026), Smart Drugs, Attention Doping, and Screen Addicts (2025), The Politics of Education: A Critical Introduction (3rd edition, 2025), The Disaster of Resilience (2023), and The Alienation of Fact (2022).