Giving Compass' Take:

• This book review examines the author's presentation of case studies in which grassroots activism in education led to change.

• Could your local school system benefit from grassroots activism?  What is the role of philanthropy when it comes to education reform?

• Interested in the case studies mentioned in the book? Learn more about education reform across the U.S.

In The Fight for America’s Schools: Grassroots Organizing in Education, editor Barbara Ferman and her colleagues provide compelling case studies of teachers, parents, students, activists, and other constituent groups advancing democratic schooling in the face of prevailing market-based, neoliberal headwinds.

Centered on efforts to fight against school closures and top-down mandates in New Jersey and Philadelphia, the book explores how different groups of people became involved, what their efforts looked like, what forces they fought against, and what allowed some groups to achieve their goals while others failed.

The authors analyze key factors that define grassroots activism, including the role of race, “business unionism,” and venture philanthropy. In Chapter Two, Stephen Danley and Julia Sass Rubin recount the efforts of grassroots coalitions in Newark and Camden, New Jersey to block the implementation of Governor Chris Christie’s educational reform agenda. Further, they draw conclusions about the factors that led activists in Newark to be successful while the efforts in Camden were not.

The Fight for America’s Schools provides vital illustrations of coalition-building and community organizing taking place to defend democratic public schooling from privatization efforts.

However, the book could have benefitted from a deeper analysis of the role of race, both in the market-based reform being challenged as well as in the grassroots movements themselves. As race is the first factor presented by Ferman and Palazzolo in Chapter One, the book’s overall engagement with it is less frequent than expected.

On the whole, this timely book is illuminating, hopeful, and delivers on its goal of providing examples of how grassroots organizing in different contexts is pushing back against neoliberal school reform.

Read the full book review by Rebecca Cooper Geller & Karen Hunter Quart at Teachers College Record.