Engaging education policy from kindergarten to college
 
Author Tyler S. Branson argues that education reform initiatives in the twentieth century can be understood in terms of historical shifts in the ideas, interests, and governing arrangements that inform the teaching of writing. Today, policy regimes of “accountability” shape education reform programs such as Common Core in K-12 and Dual Enrollment in postsecondary institutions. This book reopens the conversation between policy makers and writing teachers, empirically describing the field’s institutional/historical relationship to policy and the ways teachers work on a daily basis to carry out policy. Federal and state accountability policy significantly shapes classrooms before teachers even enter them, but Branson argues the classroom is where teachers leverage disciplinary knowledge about writing to bridge, partner with, support, and sometimes resist education policies. 
 
Branson deftly blends policy critique, archival analysis, and participant observation to offer the first scholarly treatment of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Washington Task Force as well as a rare empirical study of a dual enrollment course offered in a high school. This book’s macro-and-micro-level analysis of education policy reveals how writing teachers, researchers, and administrators can strengthen their commitments to successfully teaching their students across all levels of education, while deepening their understanding of the ways education policy helps—and hinders—those commitments. 
 

In February 2018, 35,000 public school educators and staff walked off the job in West Virginia. More than 100,000 teachers in other states—both right-to-work states, like West Virginia, and those with a unionized workforce—followed them over the next year.  From Arizona, Kentucky, and Oklahoma to Colorado and California, teachers announced to state legislators that not only their abysmal wages but the deplorable conditions of their work and the increasingly straitened circumstances of public education were unacceptable.  These recent teacher walkouts affirm public education as a crucial public benefit and understand the rampant disinvestment in public education not simply as a local issue affecting teacher paychecks but also as a danger to communities and to democracy. 

Strike for the Common Good gathers together original essays, written by teachers involved in strikes nationwide, by students and parents who have supported them, by journalists who have covered these strikes in depth, and by outside analysts (academic and otherwise).  Together, the essays consider the place of these strikes in the broader landscape of recent labor organizing and battles over public education, and attend to the largely female workforce and, often, largely non-white student population of America’s schools.

"One hundred years ago, children were kept out of school to be used as a cheap factory workforce; today, they are kept in school to become a cheap workforce in the factories of the future."

Seduced by the language of the market economy, those making decisions about education today argue that market strategies promote democratic educational reform, when really they promote market reform of education. Michael Engel argues against this tendency, siding with  democratic values -- which encourage openness, creativity, social awareness, and idealism, whereas market values uphold individual achievement, competition, economic growth, and national security.

Behind the facade of progressive rhetoric, advocates of these corporate models have succeeded in imposing their definition of school reform through federal and state policy makers. As a result, communities lose control of their schools, teachers lose control of their work, and students lose control of their schools, teachers lose control of their work, and students lose control of their futures. Engel attacks the increasing dominance of market ideology in educational policy and extends his critique beyond such trends in school reform as vouchers, charter schools, and "contracting out" to include issues such as decentralization, computer technology, and standards.

The debate over privatization amounts to ideological warfare between democratic and market values. The question is not so much about "school choice" as it is about the values Americans want at the root of their society. Unprecedented in its value-based challenge to the threat of market ideology to educational policy, The Struggle for Control of Public Education is a sophisticated call for a return to community-controlled schools and democratic values. This argument offers theoretical and practical models crafted in the contemporary feminist and social reconstructionist tradition. Readers interested in the study of educational  policies, philosophy, and policy will find this book engaging.

Offering the first systematic, comparative examination of the origins of teachers’ unions in two countries—France and the United States—Teaching Marianne and Uncle Sam shows how teachers’ unions came into existence not because of the willful efforts of particular actors, but over the course of decades of conflict over the proper role of professional educators in public politics.

Nicholas Toloudis traces teacher unionism back to the first efforts of governments to centralize public education. He carefully documents how centralization created new understandings of the role of teachers in their societies and generated new sources of conflict within teachers’ corps. Using rare archival source materials, Toloudis illustrates how these internal conflicts became salient in teachers’ battles with governments over their legitimate right to exist as collective claim-makers within the polity.

In the series Politics, History, and Social Change, edited by John C. Torpey

How the Great Recession revealed a system of school choice built on crisis, precarity, and exclusion

 

What do universal rights to public goods like education mean when codified as individual, private choices? Is the “problem” of school choice actually not about better choices for all but, rather, about the competition and exclusion that choice engenders—guaranteeing a system of winners and losers? Unsettling Choice addresses such questions through a compelling ethnography that illuminates how one path of neoliberal restructuring in the United States emerged in tandem with, and in response to, the Civil Rights movement.

 

Drawing on ethnographic research in one New York City school district, Unsettling Choice traces the contestations that surfaced when, in the wake of the 2007–2009 Great Recession, public schools navigated austerity by expanding choice-based programs. Ujju Aggarwal argues that this strategy, positioned as “saving public schools,” mobilized mechanisms rooted in market logics to recruit families with economic capital on their side, thereby solidifying a public sphere that increasingly resembled the private—where contingency was anticipated and rights for some were marked by intensified precarity for poor and working-class Black and Latinx families.

 

As Unsettling Choice shows, these struggles over public schools—one of the last remaining universal public goods in the United States—were entrapped within neoliberal regimes that exceeded privatization and ensured exclusion even as they were couched in language of equity, diversity, care, and rights. And yet this richly detailed and engaging book also tracks an architecture of expansive rights, care, and belonging built among poor and working-class parents at a Head Start center, whose critique of choice helps us understand how we might struggle for—and reimagine—justice, and a public that remains to be won.

 

 

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In recent decades a growing number of middle-class parents have considered sending their children to—and often end up becoming active in—urban public schools. Their presence can bring long-needed material resources to such schools, but, as Linn Posey-Maddox shows in this study, it can also introduce new class and race tensions, and even exacerbate inequalities. Sensitively navigating the pros and cons of middle-class transformation, When Middle-Class Parents Choose Urban Schools asks whether it is possible for our urban public schools to have both financial security and equitable diversity.
           
Drawing on in-depth research at an urban elementary school, Posey-Maddox examines parents’ efforts to support the school through their outreach, marketing, and volunteerism. She shows that when middle-class parents engage in urban school communities, they can bring a host of positive benefits, including new educational opportunities and greater diversity. But their involvement can also unintentionally marginalize less-affluent parents and diminish low-income students’ access to the improving schools. In response, Posey-Maddox argues that school reform efforts, which usually equate improvement with rising test scores and increased enrollment, need to have more equity-focused policies in place to ensure that low-income families also benefit from—and participate in—school change.