Publicization: How Public and Private Interests Can Reinvent Education for the Common Good

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.

Table of Contents:
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

About the Author :
Jonathan Gyurko is a nationally recognized education leader. He was an official at the NYC Department of Education and the United Federation of Teachers, and he served on the board of Dream Charter Schools. Gyurko was the inaugural Harber Fellow in Educational Innovation at Wesleyan University and is president and cofounder of the Association of College and University Educators.

Review :
"Gyurko treats both sides of the political spectrum with respect and approaches topics with positive assumptions, creating space for genuine dialogue about whether we really want public schools and how to get them." -- "AASA School Administrator" "Jonathan Gyurko's belief that the ultimate goal of education is eudaimonia, Aristotle's articulation of human flourishing, is a welcome contrast with most contemporary books on education reform and a North Star to which many educational traditions can orient themselves." -- "Education Next"