The Death of Public School: How Conservatives Won the War over Education in America

Pulitzer winner Fitzpatrick’s informative debut outlines the recent history of public education reform, detailing the intellectual underpinnings and political wrangling behind successive movements for school privatization. Beginning in the 1960s, she notes, school vouchers and similar programs were developed to “sidestep” integration, allowing white students to opt in to segregated private schools in the South, an idea that spread across the country but “remained deeply unpopular”—and rarely implemented—because of how it would have diverted taxpayer dollars to Catholic institutions. (Catholic intellectuals, like political scientist and Jesuit priest Virgil Blum, became strong proponents of voucher systems.) In the 1990s, charter schools and their promise of “school choice” became a far more successful method of diverting resources from public education. Promoted in a 1988 speech by Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers, the concept of a charter—a small, experimental “school within a school”—caught on like “wildfire,” according to Fitzpatrick. Rather than functioning as teaching laboratories, however, most charters were coopted by the forces of privatization and established as “competitors of the traditional public school”; by 1993, Shanker was referring to charters as a “gimmick.” Meticulously drawn from years of archival research, this is a lucid and thorough study of a hot-button issue. (Aug.)