Wendy Lecker is a civil rights attorney who writes frequently for the Stamford Advocate. In this column, she reviews two important books: One shows how deeply embedded public schools are in our democratic ideology, the other describes that coordinated assault on the very concept of public schooling. The first is low professor Derek Black’s Schoolhouse Burning, the other is A Wolf at the Schoollhouse Door, by journalist Jennifer Berkshire and historian Jack Schneider.
Lecker writes:
In his scrupulously researched book, Derek Black emphasizes that the recognition that education is essential to democracy predated public schools and even the U.S. Constitution. He describes how the Northwest Ordinances of 1785 and 1787, which applied to 31 future states, mandated funding and land for public schools, declaring that education was “necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind.” Education was not explicitly included in the U.S. Constitution. However, after the Civil War, the United States required Southern states guarantee a right to education in their state constitutions as a condition for readmission. Northern states followed suit. State education articles were based on the notion that education was necessary to citizenship and democracy.
These lofty ideals were often not matched by reality. Enslaved African Americans neither had their freedom nor education. However, African Americans recognized early on that education was the key to full citizenship, and fought for the right to equal access and treatment for all. For Black, the struggle of ensuring equality in public education is intertwined with the struggle for political equality.
Black posits that attacks on public education throughout American history are attacks on democracy itself. Recent events prove his point. For example, Rutgers’ Domingo Morel showed that when majority African-American elected school boards won gains such as increased school funding, states took over those school districts, neutralizing the boards’ power. Northwestern’s Sally Nuamah found that in Chicago, where there is no elected school board, the city’s closure of 50 schools in one year despite protest by the African-American community decreased political participation by that community afterward.…
“A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door” complements “Schoolhouse Burning” by detailing the specific mechanisms those who attack public education have employed in recent years. In this eminently readable book, the authors describe the “unmaking” of public education and the players behind this effort. They explain how the attacks on public schools are part of a larger effort shrink government and in general what the public expects from the public sphere. One target is the largest part of any education budget: teachers. Anti-public education advocates have pushed cutting state spending on education, attacking job protections, de-professionalizing teaching, weakening unions and promoting failed educational ideas like virtual learning- where teachers are replaced by computers. These “unmakers” also aim to deregulate education, including expanding unaccountable voucher and charter schools.
Schneider and Berkshire demonstrate that attacking public education has also torn at the social fabric of America. Attacking unions weakened the base for democratic electoral support. Deregulation resulted in the gutting of civil rights protections for vulnerable students in charter and voucher schools.
Put them both on your Christmas-Chanukah-Kwanzaa shopping list. They are important wake-up calls.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Diane, you read so much and so quickly. Here’s my last plea of 2020 for you and your reader’s to read Roxanna Elden’s “Adequate Yearly Progress.” Best Ed Reform satire I have ever read. You would finish it in a day. I implore teachers here to read it. If you’re like me, you’ll be laughing out loud…and passing copies on to your colleagues. (I hope it goes without saying that I don’t know Ms. Elden or have any connection to her book, but I’m grateful for her story.):
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53010290-adequate-yearly-progress
“Both books note how it has been the activism of communities most excluded that has most often made public education live up to its ideals. These courageous efforts have a parallel in the recent presidential election, where African-American, Latinx and Native American voters overcame voter suppression efforts, secured Joe Biden’s victory, and safeguarded the integrity of our electoral system. As these books show, those in power owe it to these citizens and everyone else to ensure the vitality of two institutions that are the bedrock our democracy — voting and public education.”
Thanks for this excellent review. I found the last paragraph very appropriate for our current political situation. I am so hoping that the Biden administration will keep its promises.
. . . and so over the last 50 years, the poor teacher, whose professional education is about teaching students, walks into the public school classroom . . . but unknowingly also into a politically-charged situation, aimed at diminishing their entire field including the “public” in “public education, . . the systematic denigration having also reached common assumptions that are pervasive, but come to the surface in the surrounding culture . . . in attitudes and in offhand comments here and there.
Teachers have become squeezed from every direction, and still they love teaching our kids. CBK
I have been mindful, during the pandemic, to buy only necessities. These two books are clearly necessities.
Democracy is always under attack and only rarely does anyone care enough about the public good to stand up against big industry to save it. Allowing education to be turned into an individual pursuit of business competencies developed by industry would be a monumental weakening of the social contract that holds together the free world. It’s not unions versus astroturf groups; it’s a sustainable future versus an unsustainable future.