Description:
Toward a New Common School Movement is a bold and urgent call to action.
The authors argue that corporate school reform in the United States represents a failed project subverted by profiteering, corruption, and educational inequalities.
Toward a New Common School Movement suggests that educational privatization and austerity are not simply bad policies but represent a broader redistribution of control over social life-that is, the enclosure of the global commons. This condition requires far more than a liberal defense of public schooling. It requires recovering elements of the radical progressive educational tradition while generating a new language of the common suitable to the unique challenges of the global era. Toward a New Common School Movement traces the history of struggles over public schooling in the United States and provides a set of ethical principles for enacting the commons in educational policy, finance, labor, curriculum, and pedagogy. Ultimately, it argues for global educational struggles in common for a just and sustainable future beyond the crises of neoliberalism and predatory capitalism.
Review Quotes:
"The authors argue that curriculum standardization, high-stakes testing, tight control of teacher actions, and privatization through promoting charter schools and for-profit education institutions devalues genuine education, the central activity necessary for a stable democracy, while not providing either the social or pedagogic benefits claimed by its advocates...Summing Up: Recommended. General readers, upper-division undergraduate students, and above."
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