The New York Times' Nicholas Kristof recently weighed in on a previously unreported – and highly exaggerated – phenomenon he wants Americans to consider as "fiscal cliff" negotiations come to a head in Washington: a brand new kind of social security income (SSI) disability fraud. He alleges that parents in poor areas may systematically remove children from literacy programs in order to keep that SSI disability check coming in every month. Kristof provides neither research nor anecdotal evidence supporting the claim, but he nevertheless thinks Americans should seriously consider the very real problem, especially as we think about slashing social safety net provisions this month.

Kristof is no stranger to earnest "social good" trolling. He's known for applying the white man's burden of social consciousness to the world's problems, especially when it comes to rescuing sex workers (he really wants to rescue sex workers). This time, his theme is saving the children: "Almost anytime the question is poverty, the answer is children."

The argument is one more expression of a familiar refrain we've heard this year as congressional Republicans have called on Democrats to curb US debt by cutting social services rather than raising taxes on the rich. And though the 1990s saw panicked reports of parents drugging their children to make them seem disabled, the disability profiteer angle in this particular incarnation is brand new. That is, it stems as much from bipartisan neoliberal approaches to "tough love" education reform as from conservative "welfare queen" dogma.

Market-based education reform in the US is a symptom of neoliberal thinking in which all of life, including government services like education, must be run according to business principles. This means that schools should be subject to market forces. "Failed schools" need not be improved, but closed – and successful schools should be rewarded with perks and money. Parents are cast as consumers, and schools judged based on parental choice and testing standards. Testing standards, meanwhile, make no allowances for learning disability, social circumstance or anything else. Every student is held to the same standard as other children in the district: demonstrate arbitrary academic growth or you fail.

But it's not just students who are permitted to fail. Schools are. School closure was introduced at the federal level by the Bush administration-backed No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, which mandated extensive "restructuring" beginning in 2007 for schools failing to make adequate yearly progress. This could include mass teacher/staff firings, as well as school closures. Zealous elected officials like New York City's Michael Bloomberg, anxious to undo teacher unions and perhaps keen to attract grant money from pro-charter organizations like the Gates Foundation, have enthusiastically jumped on the closure bandwagon to replace less profitable traditional public schools with privately managed non-union charter schools. Incidentally, charter schools can often turn away students with disabilities, who are relegated to defunded, nearly abandoned traditional public schools.

School closures have increased dramatically under President Obama's administration. And so far, the legacy of Obama's Race to the Top! initiatives has been to streamline No Child Left Behind, not lessen its devastating impact on public education.

Neoliberal education reform is the ideology behind a laundry list of complicated and widely misunderstood educational trends like charter schools, voucher programs, school choice and teacher union scapegoating. It is often touted as a "no excuses" movement that gets beyond what conservatives have called "the soft bigotry of low expectations". Cognitive disabilities that impair reading and mathematics test performance are not registered as legitimate "excuses" for low scores.

The logic? It helps students with disabilities to remove any "safety net" that once accompanied their educational trajectories. This is of course counterintuitive – the suggestion is that subtracting resources and assistance from a vulnerable population will somehow advance equality. And the market logic is considered so airtight that growing research suggesting reform has failed has barely registered with the public.

But it's precisely Kristof's logic too: to help students with disabilities by taking SSI disability benefits away from their parents. Get rid of that "culture of dependency" conservatives talk about, and force vulnerable students to sink or swim. The way to do it? While education reform advocates like to blame students and teachers, Kristof takes it to the next scapegoat: blame poor thieving parents.

Obviously they're not using that disability assistance for anything disability-related like tutoring, supplemental programs or extra medical expenses. Obviously not. Damned "welfare queens".