Compete or Close: Traditional Neighborhood Schools Under Pressure

by Julia A McWilliams, Maia Cucchiara (Foreword)

In districts from Chicago to New York to Washington, DC, neighborhood public schools are being forced to compete with charter schools for students and resources, often under the threat of school closure. In Compete or Close , Julia A. McWilliams provides a compelling ethnographic study of one such school, a neighborhood high school in Philadelphia—a district where rising privatization and chronic underfunding cast these common tensions into sharp relief. The book poses two What strategies do schools deploy to minimize market risk and signal their value to stakeholders—district administrators, funders, parents, and students? And how do these strategies conflict with the schools’ mission to serve all children?
 
An astute and compassionate observer, McWilliams paints a devastating portrait of a neighborhood public school under siege, in which educators are panicked by the threat of closure and determined to survive at all costs. McWilliams’s book is a powerful indictment of the role of competition in American education today and offers empirical evidence and a theoretical understanding of the mechanisms through which market forces may conflict with the preservation of education as a public good.
 

Genres: Education

272 pages, Paperback

Published May 21, 2019

Reviews

[Edrick Willie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Big ugh the whole time as Dr. McWilliams diagnoses precisely why charterization and the market-based reforms in education work counter to the very aims of public education and collective flourishing.