Michael Fabricant

The authors argue that the present cascade of reforms to public education is a consequence of a larger intention to shrink government. The result is that more of public education's assets and resources are moving to the private sector and to the prison-industrial complex. Drawing on various forms of evidence-structural, economic, narrative, and youth-generated participatory research—the authors reveal new structures and circuits of dispossession and privilege that amount to a clear failure of present policy. In the final chapter the authors explore democratic principles and offer examples essential to mobilizing, in solidarity with educators, youth, communities, labor, and allied social movements, the kind of power necessary to contest the present direction of public education reform.

This book aims to reset the discourse on charter schooling by systematically exploring the gap between the promise and the performance of charter schools. The authors do not defend the public school system, which for decades has failed primarily poor children of color. Instead, they use empirical evidence to determine whether charter schooling offers an authentic alternative for these children. This essential introduction includes a detailed history of the charter movement, an analysis of the politics and economics driving the movement, documentation of actual student outcomes, and alternative approaches to transforming public education so that it serves all children. 

Organizing for Educational Justice tells the story of Community Collaborative to Improve District 9 (CC9), a consortium of six neighborhood-based groups in the Bronx, from its origins in 1995 as a small group of concerned parents to the citywide application of its reform agenda ten years later. Drawing on in-depth interviews with participants, analysis of qualitative data, and access to meetings and archives, Fabricant evaluates CC9's innovative approach to organizing and collaboration with other stakeholders, including the United Federation of Teachers, the New York City Department of Education, neighborhood nonprofits, and city colleges and universities. As urban parents search for ways to hold public schools accountable for their failures, this book shows how the success of the CC9 experience can be replicated elsewhere around the country. 

Fabricant and Fisher assess the status of the community-based social service institution called the settlement house"—viewed by some as an artifact from the Progressive era and by others as a vital instrument capable of strengthening the social capital of impoverished communities. Cutbacks in government aid during the late 90s along with the trend toward privatization left many nonprofit community organizations in untenable positions. Drawing on over a hundred interviews with house directors and staff members in New York City, the volume offers a holistic, ground-level assessment of the status of social service agencies in a conservative age, and asks frank, important questions about our broader civic life. Robert Fisher is director of urban studies and professor of social work at the University of Connecticut.