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作者

来源

JOURNAL OF URBAN AFFAIRS,Vol.41,Issue3,P.417-419

语言

英文

关键字

作者单位

Wichita State University

摘要

Recent strikes and protests by teachers in West Virginia, Oklahoma, and other states have once again called attention to the profound political struggles at stake in the nation’s effort to educate its young people. Though the appointment of billionaire school reform champion Betsy DeVos as U.S. Secretary of Education has provoked a renewed intensity among teachers and other public education advocates over the past two years, the ideological and fiscal concerns involved in these intense battles are not new. The past four decades—a period marked by the publication of A Nation at Risk, the introduction of charter schools, the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act, the rise of reform-focused philanthropists and think tanks, the implementation of intense testing regimes and strict disciplinary policies, waves of school closures amidst ever-tightening municipal budgets, and the retreat from the nation’s effort to desegregate its public schools—have left public school teachers, unions, public education advocates, and millions of students and families (particularly those in underresourced urban schools) feeling constantly besieged. How can teachers, parents, and academics who are skeptical of these powerful reform efforts respond effectively and proactively to support their local public education infrastructure?The Fight for America’s Schools: Grassroots Organizing in Education, the aptly titled volume edited by Barbara Ferman, provides a helpful roadmap, cogently laying out the issues at stake and delivering an honest, clear-eyed assessment of the opportunities and challenges facing educators and activists hoping to challenge the potent school reform regime. It will prove useful to activists working to support public schools, as well as to school administrators, elected officials, and scholars interested in understanding how bold and sweeping reform efforts have been contested, implemented, and received on the ground by those most directly impacted.This volume emerged from ongoing conversations among a working group of education scholars at institutions in the Philadelphia region. As a result, the empirical case studies that make up the four middle chapters of the book focus on reform efforts in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. In Chapter 2, Stephen Danley and Julia Sass Rubin compare grassroots efforts to resist public school closures, charter school expansions, and state takeovers in Newark and Camden. They conclude that stronger coalition-building among activists and support from powerful public officials like Mayor Ras Baraka resulted in greater success for Newark’s resistance, compared to Camden’s. Chapter 3 brings the story to Philadelphia, as Elaine Simon, Rand Quinn, Marissa Martino Golden, and Jody C. Cohen highlight the coming together of parent-, union-, and church-based coalitions, which worked to pressure public officials to resist charter school expansion, called attention to unequal and inadequate resources in Philadelphia public schools, and promoted the election of pro–public school candidates to public offices. Barbara Ferman uses Chapter 4 to investigate parent resistance to high-stakes testing by examining “opt-out” movements in Philadelphia and its affluent Main Line suburbs. She discusses both the potential for city–suburb coalition-building in opposition to this testing regime and the racial and spatial tensions that can inhibit such cooperation. In Chapter 5, Julia Sass Rubin profiles Save Our Schools NJ, a statewide volunteer organization of New Jersey parents who have effectively mobilized via social media and in-person rallies to support the state’s public schools and to shepherd pro–public school legislation through the state legislature.These four case studies are bookended by introduction and conclusion chapters written by Ferman, in collaboration with coauthors Nicholas Palazzolo and Susan DeJarnatt. Whereas the empirical chapters in the middle of the book deliver important insights about specific successes and failures among grassroots efforts in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, these introduction and conclusion chapters broaden the perspective to generalize about the challenges facing public schools and their advocates across the nation today. These chapters are very valuable, because the case studies themselves—though thorough, well written, and intriguing—are very locally specific. Readers from other parts of the country may have difficulty keeping track of all of the local politicians, towns, laws, and organizational acronyms, and they may struggle to identify the relevance of the case studies for their own research and practice.In Chapter 6, Ferman draws on the results of the case studies to elaborate some generalizable “lessons from the grass roots.” She emphasizes that local activism is critical for shaping policy, because the local level “is where the workability of policy is tested” (p. 116). Though educational policy debates have frequently been nationalized in recent years, families still tend to be most concerned with their local schools. Translating local passion into sustained policy success, Ferman asserts, requires forming strong and durable organizations, forging collaborations between groups that may not always have compatible interests (e.g., between parent groups and unions or between urban and suburban residents), and maintaining visibility through publicity campaigns and social media.The book closes with a chapter by DeJarnatt and Ferman that defends the democratic mission of public schooling. Building on the principles that “education is, and must be preserved as, a collective good; that it should be responsive to the needs of the groups most directly impacted by education; and that it must contain a civic purpose” (p. 132), DeJarnatt and Ferman decry the rising influence of market logic within public schooling and reaffirm the status of education as a public good. They recommend the development and deployment of an alternative model of school reform based on an ideology of educational equity, which could serve to counteract the power of proponents of market-oriented reform.Though the ambitious agenda laid out in the book’s concluding chapter is reasonable (and, according to public opinion polling cited by the authors, politically popular), realizing the goals of their “equity framework” will prove exceedingly difficult. There is a bit of a disconnect between the empirical evidence laid out in the case study chapters and the discussion of political implications contained in the book’s conclusion. Despite some significant successes in turning back charter school expansions, opting out of standardized tests, and energizing activists, the case studies that make up the core of The Fight for America’s Schools suggest that the well-resourced and powerful educational reform lobby has not been substantially hampered by these grassroots efforts.In other words, the fight for America’s schools is not a fair fight. This volume’s case studies of resistance efforts in Pennsylvania and New Jersey will serve as useful examples for educators and activists working to promote and protect public education in their own communities. However, as DeJarnatt and Ferman acknowledge, “While grassroots activity is essential for increasing awareness, enhancing visibility, and building community, it is not sufficient” (p. 145). Ensuring the continued democratic promise of public education at the local level will likely depend on substantial national-level ideological shifts among philanthropists, state and federal elected officials, and the judiciary. The Fight for America’s Schools offers important contextualization regarding the political terrain, as well as effective models of activism that can provide starting points for scholars, educators, and activists working to expand and sustain the battle for educational equity.