Publics for Public Schools: Legitimacy, Democracy, and Leadership
In this thought provoking book, Kathleen Knight Abowitz aims to offer a renewed conception of the public in public schooling, hoping to breathe new life and commitment into our schools and communities.1 The book's structure is arranged around three elements that support her endeavor to reinvigorate publics and their support for public schools: legitimacy, public life, and public leadership. As she connects each element to defining "public" and public schools, she reconstructs each notion, providing an enhanced version of each that is grounded in today's educational context and ready to be applied there. Knight Abowitz urges us to refocus on the local, not as a romanticized ideal of the past, but rather as a site where we experience messy education related problems that intimately impact us, and where we can work collaboratively to construct solutions, ultimately coming together to form a public will for our schools. This call is timely in light of increasing pressures toward centralized control of schooling and privatization, both of which work against local participatory political engagement in our public schools. She persuasively goads us to envision creative alternatives to these pressures and offers us helpful guidance in how to do so.