Publicization

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.

“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

“A compelling, insightful, and eloquent assessment of one of America’s foremost public policy challenges—how do we strengthen the publicness of our schools? Gyurko’s insider account should be mandatory reading for educators, parents, policymakers, and elected officials alike as they work across the six domains of funding, facts and belief, governance, standards and testing, accountability, and equity to enhance the publicness and improve the quality of our schools. The time for Gyurko’s ‘Publicization Project’ is now!”
—Charlie Rose, former General Counsel, U.S. Department of Education

“Simultaneously passionate and pragmatic, Publicization is a rich exploration of why public schools are so valued and what it will take to make them live up to their promise in the face of direct and indirect threats. Jonathan Gyurko knows what he’s talking about, and he talks about it in a way that is straightforward, engaging, compelling, and clear.”
—Jeffrey R. Henig, professor of political science and education, Teachers College, Columbia University

“In Jonathan's book, Publicization, I found the potential for creating a more inclusive approach, an approach that rises above petty politics and brings a refreshing look at how we can create a system that meets the needs of children that we're all looking to serve…. Jonathan outlines key dimensions for public education, focusing on funding, governance, accountability, and equity. These elements are critical to fostering schools that not only educate but also sustain our democracy, serve our economy, and promote social cohesion.”
—Victor Capellan, founder, Rhode Island Education Collective and former senior advisor, Rhode Island Commissioner of Education

Contents

Acknowledgments  xi

Introduction  1
Privatization’s Antidote: Publicization  3
The Public Good  4
Criteria of a “Public” Education  5
A Political Project  6
What Makes a School “Public”? Some Personal Perspectives  9
A Primer, a Memoir, and a Playbook  11

The Exclusion Test  13

Part I: Criteria

1.  Funding  19
Private Interests Remain Entrenched  21
The Strengths and Limits of Judicial Remedies  23
A Question of Fairness  28

2.  Facts and Beliefs  29
School Choice, Private Beliefs, and the Risk to Public Goods  30
The State’s Disreputable History in “Making” Americans  31
The Risk of “Working It Out at the Polls”  33
Facts as a Measure of a School’s Publicness  34

3.  Governance  37
A Framework for Democratic Education  38
Getting Politics Out of Education  41
Private Interests Fill the Void  42
“Exit” Is Not “Voice”  45
Putting Politics Back Into Education  46
Rules of the Road  48
Following the Rules of the Democratic “Game,” Over and Over  49
Trust Over Time Versus Winner-Takes-All  51
Pressure Politics: How Do We Know?  54

4.  Standards and Testing  57
A Nation at Risk and the Rise of Standards  57
Taxes Versus Accountability  59
Economics Invades Education  61
A Reformer’s Connecticut Adventure  64
The Wrong Lesson to Draw From a Modest Victory  66

5.  Accountability  67
The Profession’s Obligations  69
Preprofessional Accountability  73
The Polity’s Responsibilities  75
Employment Accountability  76
School-Based Commitments  79
Student Performance  83
How Will You Know, John?  86

6.  Equity  87
Defining Equity  88
Structural Inequity From “The Cult of Efficiency”: The Industrial Paradigm of Schooling  89
A Brief History of Progressive Alternatives to the Industrial Paradigm  93
The Industrial Paradigm Rewrapped: The “Cult of Innovation”  94
For Consideration: An Intellectual-Emotional Paradigm  94
Intellectual Capacities  95
Emotional Capacities  97
The Intrinsic Equity of an Intellectual-Emotional Paradigm  100
A Political, Not an Educational, Problem  101

Part II: Cases

7.  Charter Schools  107
The Publicness of Charter School Funding  108
The Publicness of Charter School Curriculum  110
The Charter School “Compact” and Its Complicity in the Industrial Paradigm  112
Competition and the Conservative Agenda  114
Charter Schools and the Teacher Unions  115
Making Charter Schools More Public  117
“Invisible” Versus “Helping” Hands: Community-Based Charter Schools  118
Charter Schools and the Progressive Agenda  121
Finding Common Ground in the Common Good  131

8.  Teacher Unions  132
Education Portfolios and Competition at the Apex of Education Policy  132
Out-Reforming the Reformers: The United Federation of Teachers  134
The Creative Entanglements of Union-Run Charter Schools  138
A Mixed Result  140
A Crash Course in Labor History, Politics, and Practice  141
Mission Accomplished? The Role of Teacher Unions in Making Schools More Public  142
Next-Stage Teacher Unionism  157

9.  Conclusion  161
What If It Comes Out “Wrong”?  163
Making a Movement  165

Endnotes  167

Index  201

About the Author  212