The education wars A citizen's guide and defense manual

The "very existence of public schools" is being threatened, according to this essential overview of recent right-wing attacks on the teaching of material concerning race, gender identity, and sexuality. Journalist Berkshire and education policy scholar Schneider (co-authors of A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door) contend that such attacks are merely the latest iteration of the right's longstanding agenda to privatize public education. By slandering public schools as radically left-wing, activists hope to siphon off students into charter schools and private Christian academies, starving the public education system of funding, according to the authors. Emphasizing that a common education is crucial to a healthy democracy, Berkshire and Schneider argue that broad resistance to what can otherwise seem like a niche culture war issue is necessary. Treating education as a public good critical to society's well-being is also the best resistance strategy, suggest the authors; by pushing back against individual parents asserting overweening authority in the classroom as undemocratic, leftists can effectively counter right-wing bluster over "parental rights." Berkshire and Schneider do a fabulous job highlighting hypocrisy (e.g., right-wingers harp on public schools' subpar test scores as a means of pushing more students into private schools--where many states don't track test results at all) while concisely cataloging the billionaires and think tanks funding this fight. It's an invaluable primer on what's motivating the public education culture wars. (July)

A history of the nation's cultural conflicts over public education and a call to action in our current one. "Today's efforts to root out 'woke' indoctrination from schools are also a warmed-over version of a panic we've seen before," write Berkshire and Schneider, co-authors of A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door, who draw a line from the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial to the present day. Calling the specifics of these eruptions "distractions," they argue that "the real policy goal…is to dismantle public schools as we know them." The stakes are high. Berkshire and Schneider walk readers through the history and philosophy of American public education, offering an overview of past controversies before focusing on today's particularly virulent iteration, when education has become a galvanizing political issue. They focus on religious-freedom arguments, so-called parental rights, and calls to "fund students, not systems" as separate prongs in a concerted effort to privatize public schools via school vouchers or educational savings accounts. Little of this will be news to readers, but the authors bring to their argument both passion and pragmatism. It's hard to resist their urgency: "Efforts to replace public education with a privatized, sectarian, pay-your-own-way model aren't just aimed at schools--they're aimed at the larger vision of equality and multi-ethnic democracy." Even as they sound the alarm, they offer hope, locating it in grassroots organizing and pointing to successful local and statewide resistance to efforts to undermine public schools. They balance lofty idealism--"Schools are often the most inclusive and democratic institutions in our communities....As such, they are seedbeds of democratic life"--with data that supports their argument that privatization results in poor educational outcomes. While the practical promise of the subtitle is never actually realized, readers will come away inspired and, hopefully, energized. A useful book for all who believe in American democracy. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.