How public are America's public schools? They may be tax funded and free, but the effects of market-based policies, exclusionary governance, insufficient funding, and structural inequities impair schools' ability to prepare future citizens, workers, neighbors, and stewards of the planet. Gyurko offers a fresh look at the "publicness" of American education through historical accounts, scholarly research, first-hand reporting, and political analyses. Chapters on funding, governance, standards, accountability, and equity show what must be done to better identify and strengthen the shared aims of public schools. Novel insights explain how even controversial topics like charter schools, testing, teacher tenure, and unions can be part of a broad "Publicization Project." Champions of public education will find a compelling vision and achievable roadmap that moves the country beyond decades of privatization. Publicization is an essential introduction to major debates of past decades with a hopeful vision of what it means to be an educated American.
Book Features:
Speaks directly to political controversies affecting education including school choice, book banning, the "reading wars," board elections, critical race theory, and teacher unions.
Offers first-hand, never-before-reported accounts of high-profile efforts involving prominent political players including AFT president Randi Weingarten, former U.S. education secretary Arne Duncan, former NYC mayors Michael R. Bloomberg and Bill de Blasio and schools chancellor Joel I. Klein, Success Academy CEO Eva Moskowitz, former PBS correspondent John Merrow, KIPP cofounder David Levin, late philanthropist Eli Broad, small schools founder Deborah Meier, and historian and activist Diane Ravitch.
Provides pragmatic recommendations that cross political divides,including a fresh look at charter schools, the role of unions and collective bargaining, parent involvement in school decision-making, standardized testing, and equity-advancing reforms.
Gathers the history of education ideas, thinkers, and past reforms to provide new generations of educators with a cogent summary of what has come before to inform what comes next.
Contents (Tentative)
Acknowledgements
Foreword
Introduction
Privatization's Antidote: PUBLIC-ization
The Public Good
Criteria of a "Public" Education
A Political Project
What Makes a School "Public"? Some Personal Perspectives
A Primer, a Memoir, and a Playbook
The Exclusion Test
Part I: Criteria
1. Funding
Private Interests Remain Entrenched
The Strengths and Limits of Judicial Remedies
A Question of Fairness
2. Facts and Beliefs
School Choice, Private Beliefs, and the Risk to Public Goods
The State's Disreputable History in "Making" Americans
The Risk of "Working it Out at the Polls"
Facts as a Measure of a School's Publicness
3. Governance
A Framework for Democratic Education
Getting Politics Out of Education
Private Interests Fill the Void
"Exit" Is Not "Voice"
Putting Politics Back Into Education
Rules of the Road
Following the Rules of the Democratic "Game," Over and Over
Trust Over Time Versus Winner-Takes-All
Pressure Politics: How Do We Know?
4. Standards and Testing
A Nation at Risk and the Rise of Standards
Taxes Versus Accountability
Economics Invades Education
A Reformers' Connecticut Adventure
The Wrong Lesson to Draw From a Modest Victory
5. Accountability
The Profession's Obligations
Pre-Professional Accountability
The Polity's Responsibilities
Employment Accountability
School-Based Commitments
Student Performance
How Will You Know, John?
6. Equity
Defining Equity
Structural Inequity From "The Cult of Efficiency": The Industrial Paradigm of Schooling
A Brief History of Progressive Alternatives to the Industrial Paradigm
The Industrial Paradigm Re-Wrapped: The "Cult of Innovation"
For Consideration: An Intellectual-Emotional Paradigm
Intellectual Capacities
Emotional Capacities
The Intrinsic Equity of an Intellectual-Emotional Paradigm
A Political, Not an Educational, Problem
Part II: Cases
7. Charter Schools
The Publicness of Charter School Funding
The Publicness of Charter School Curriculum
The "Charter School Compact" and Its Complicity in the Industrial Paradigm
Competition and the Conservative Agenda
Charter Schools and the Teacher Unions
Making Charter Schools More Public
"Invisible" Versus "Helping" Hands: Community-Based Charter Schools
Charter Schools and the Progressive Agenda
Finding Common Ground in the Common Good
8. Teacher Unions
Education Portfolios and Competition at the Apex of Education Policy
Out Reforming the Reformers: The United Federation of Teachers
The Creative Entanglements of Union-Run Charter Schools
A Mixed Result
A Crash Course in in Labor History, Politics, and Practice
Mission Accomplished? The Role of Teacher Unions in Making Schools More Public
Next-Stage Teacher Unionism
9. Conclusion
What If It Comes Out "Wrong"?
Making a Movement
Endnotes
Index
About the Author
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