The Death of Public School
How Conservatives Won the War Over Education in America
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
A Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist shows how conservatives have pushed for a revolution in public education—one that threatens the existence of the traditional public school
America has relied on public schools for 150 years, but the system is increasingly under attack. With declining enrollment and diminished trust in public education, policies that steer tax dollars into private schools have grown rapidly. To understand how we got here, The Death of Public School argues, we must look back at the turbulent history of school choice.
Cara Fitzpatrick uncovers the long journey of school choice, a story full of fascinating people and strange political alliances. She shows how school choice evolved from a segregationist tool in the South in the 1950s, to a policy embraced by advocates for educational equity in the North, to a conservative strategy for securing government funds for private schools in the twenty-first century. As a result, education is poised to become a private commodity rather than a universal good.
The Death of Public School presents the compelling history of the fiercest battle in the history of American education—one that already has changed the future of public schooling.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pulitzer winner Fitzpatrick's informative debut outlines the recent history of public education reform, detailing the intellectual underpinnings and political wrangling behind successive movements for school privatization. Beginning in the 1960s, she notes, school vouchers and similar programs were developed to "sidestep" integration, allowing white students to opt in to segregated private schools in the South, an idea that spread across the country but "remained deeply unpopular"—and rarely implemented—because of how it would have diverted taxpayer dollars to Catholic institutions. (Catholic intellectuals, like political scientist and Jesuit priest Virgil Blum, became strong proponents of voucher systems.) In the 1990s, charter schools and their promise of "school choice" became a far more successful method of diverting resources from public education. Promoted in a 1988 speech by Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers, the concept of a charter—a small, experimental "school within a school"—caught on like "wildfire," according to Fitzpatrick. Rather than functioning as teaching laboratories, however, most charters were coopted by the forces of privatization and established as "competitors of the traditional public school"; by 1993, Shanker was referring to charters as a "gimmick." Meticulously drawn from years of archival research, this is a lucid and thorough study of a hot-button issue.
