Jack Schneider

Jennifer Berkshire

A trenchant analysis of how public education is being destroyed in overt and deceptive ways--and how to fight back "There's no more time for tinkering around the edges." --Betsy DeVos, 2018 "Rethink School" tour Betsy DeVos may be the most prominent face of the push to dismantle public education, but she is in fact part of a large movement that's been steadily gaining power and notching progress for decades--amassing funds, honing their messaging, and crafting policies. While support for public education today is stronger than ever, the movement to save our schools remains fragmented, variable, and voluntary. Meanwhile, those set on destroying this beloved institution are unified, patient, and well-resourced. In A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door, Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider, co-hosts of the popular education podcast Have You Heard, lay out the increasingly potent network of conservative elected officials, advocacy groups, funders, and think tanks that have aligned behind a radical vision to unmake public education. They describe the dogma underpinning the work of the dismantlers and how it fits into the current political context, giving readers an up-close look at the policies--school vouchers, the war on teachers' unions, tax credit scholarships, virtual schools, and more--driving the movement's agenda. Finally they look forward, surveying the world the dismantlers threaten to build. As teachers from coast to coast mobilize with renewed vigor, this smart, essential book sounds an alarm, one that should incite a public reckoning on behalf of the millions of families served by the American educational system--and many more who stand to suffer from its unmaking.

The Dismantling of Public Education and the Future of School

A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door

Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door

Excellence For All: American Education Reform, 1983-2008 examines the history of school reform in the United States over the past quarter-century. Specifically, the work examines an approach to educational change best characterized by the phrase "excellence for all"—an equity-focused policy phenomenon uniquely situated for the policymaking context of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The idea of promoting excellence for all students united a broad enough coalition to pursue a truly national reform effort and captured the imaginations of leaders in state and local government, at philanthropic foundations, in colleges and universities, and in school districts across the country. Led by a corps of self-styled educational entrepreneurs aggressively pursuing reforms that they could take "to scale, " the movement sought to remake the American high school piece by piece. The dissertation examines this reform movement through the nation's three largest districts—New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles—and through three particular change efforts: a physical plant reform (the small schools movement), a personnel reform (Teach For America), and a curricular reform (the Advanced Placement Program). The work aims to establish the ways in which this most recent era of school reform represented a departure from previous reform eras, strives to explain the movement's broad appeal, and ultimately, aims to understand its shortcomings by exploring the assumptions underlying the excellence for all approach and the tradeoffs required by it.

American School Reform, 1983-2008

Excellence for All

Test scores are the go-to metric of policy makers and anxious parents looking to place their children in the best schools. Yet standardized tests are a poor way to measure school performance. Using the diverse urban school district of Somerville MA as a case study, Jack Schneider’s team developed a new framework to assess educational effectiveness.

Jack Schneider

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