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 years 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.

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.