Toward a New Common School Movement

Toward a New Common School Movement is a bold and urgent call to arms. Corporate school reform in the United States represents a failed project riven by profiteering, corruption, and abysmal 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. The book argues that 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 in doing so 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. There is no alternative.