What do you think?
Rate this book
Free City!: The Fight for San Francisco's City College and Education for All
In 2012, the accreditor sanctioned City College of San Francisco, one of the biggest and best community colleges in the country, and a year later proposed terminating its accreditation, leading to a state takeover. Free City! follows the multipronged strategies of the campaign and the diverse characters that carried them out. Teachers, students, labor unions, community groups, public officials, and concerned individuals saved a treasured public institution as San Francisco’s working-class communities of color battled the gentrification that was forcing them out of the city. And they pushed back against the national “reform” agenda of corporate workforce training that drives students towards debt and sidelines lifelong learning and community service programs. Combining analysis with narrative, Free City! offers a case study in the power of positive vision and solution-oriented organizing and a reflection on what education can and should be.
273 pages, Kindle Edition
Published June 29, 2021
1 person is currently reading
41 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
March 11, 2021
This is a first-hand account, buttressed by extensive research; it is invaluable for anyone involved in the various conflicts surrounding college education in the U.S. today. It covers the efforts from the Gates Foundation to Betsy De Vos to change community colleges from a place for lifelong education to just-in-time job training. More importantly, it offers a deep account of the resistance by students, faculty, unions, community organizations, and the city council in opposition to these changes, with partial but inspiring success. The authors also situate the fight over City College of San Francisco in the broader contexts of gentrification, immigration, real estate land grabs, and the financial crisis of student debt.
Each author brings long experience with their subject. The writing offers a clear narrative, which makes it accessible even with substantial documentation. The book is especially valuable as a thorough case study of on-the-ground organizing among multiple interests.
Although this reviewer has not taught at CCSF, I have taught at several California community colleges and the SF example is crucial for anyone interested in defending the goal of open education. The battle so well reported here has wide application indeed.
Each author brings long experience with their subject. The writing offers a clear narrative, which makes it accessible even with substantial documentation. The book is especially valuable as a thorough case study of on-the-ground organizing among multiple interests.
Although this reviewer has not taught at CCSF, I have taught at several California community colleges and the SF example is crucial for anyone interested in defending the goal of open education. The battle so well reported here has wide application indeed.
September 20, 2021
This book provides a detailed retelling of the 2012-2017 CCSF reaccreditation crisis from the perspective of the teachers unions (ATF and CTF). I found it to be an inspiring story of resistance and community organization against unaccountable government-appointed institutions that are heavily influenced by private interests. It is an exciting narrative of how students and faculty organized their community and got their political representatives to fight for them, from the community college trustees all the way up to Nancy Pelosi.
I greatly appreciated the level of detail in the book, but I found myself at times questioning the larger story the authors were working to shape. There are clear heroes and villains in this story, which is usually a red flag for me in non-fiction. The foremost villain is the accreditation agency, the ACCJC, and its then-leader Barbara Beno. They give many examples of why the ACCJC is a villain in the eyes of CCSF, enough to convince me. To connect it to a bigger picture story, they frame the ACCJC as part of a larger technology-finance-education complex made up of tech billionaires, for-profit colleges, charter schools, and the student loan industry seeking to "reform" education so that it is more standardized, "efficient", and workforce-training oriented. I was left suspicious about whether I could trust this book because it felt one-sided on that bigger issue.
Where the book left me disappointed was its simplistic takes on the housing crisis in and around San Francisco. The authors seem to think all development that is not 100% affordable housing is bad for low income San Franciscans. In the final chapters of the book, they focus on the city's attempts to turn a large city-owned parking lot at CCSF into a 1000+ unit, mixed income housing development. The authors clearly oppose the idea, framing it as part of a larger "for-profit" alliance trying to take down CCSF. They applaud locals who blocked housing that could have been build on the lot in the 80s. Of course, this resistance to development in past decades is one of the reasons we have such an acute housing crisis today. The anti-development logic the authors promote is common in San Francisco, particularly among older homeowners, and that's what got us to where we are today. Fortunately, most younger people I know in the city, who tend to be renters, want more housing built wherever we can get it. This is a hot political issue in the city, and again, I felt that the book was rather one-sided about it.
It's not five stars for me because the authors didn't convince me of their big picture heroes and villains. Nonetheless, I found the story inspiring and learned a lot about my city in the process of reading it.
I greatly appreciated the level of detail in the book, but I found myself at times questioning the larger story the authors were working to shape. There are clear heroes and villains in this story, which is usually a red flag for me in non-fiction. The foremost villain is the accreditation agency, the ACCJC, and its then-leader Barbara Beno. They give many examples of why the ACCJC is a villain in the eyes of CCSF, enough to convince me. To connect it to a bigger picture story, they frame the ACCJC as part of a larger technology-finance-education complex made up of tech billionaires, for-profit colleges, charter schools, and the student loan industry seeking to "reform" education so that it is more standardized, "efficient", and workforce-training oriented. I was left suspicious about whether I could trust this book because it felt one-sided on that bigger issue.
Where the book left me disappointed was its simplistic takes on the housing crisis in and around San Francisco. The authors seem to think all development that is not 100% affordable housing is bad for low income San Franciscans. In the final chapters of the book, they focus on the city's attempts to turn a large city-owned parking lot at CCSF into a 1000+ unit, mixed income housing development. The authors clearly oppose the idea, framing it as part of a larger "for-profit" alliance trying to take down CCSF. They applaud locals who blocked housing that could have been build on the lot in the 80s. Of course, this resistance to development in past decades is one of the reasons we have such an acute housing crisis today. The anti-development logic the authors promote is common in San Francisco, particularly among older homeowners, and that's what got us to where we are today. Fortunately, most younger people I know in the city, who tend to be renters, want more housing built wherever we can get it. This is a hot political issue in the city, and again, I felt that the book was rather one-sided about it.
It's not five stars for me because the authors didn't convince me of their big picture heroes and villains. Nonetheless, I found the story inspiring and learned a lot about my city in the process of reading it.
December 16, 2021
This is an important book. The broader narrative about the neoliberal assault on education matches what I've seen as a parent in K12 and as a staffmember at UC Berkeley. I learned about the ways Student Learning Objectives fit into that puzzle which made sense but I hadn't thought about that before.
The long-form journalistic telling of the process of organization and multi-level conflict is also instructive as we think about how broad, coalition efforts work (when successful) in the real world. The authors did a great job of sharing different contributions and perspectives without coming down as judge and jury about which forces in the pro-public education coalition(s) were correct.
The long-form journalistic telling of the process of organization and multi-level conflict is also instructive as we think about how broad, coalition efforts work (when successful) in the real world. The authors did a great job of sharing different contributions and perspectives without coming down as judge and jury about which forces in the pro-public education coalition(s) were correct.
March 15, 2021
As someone working in the CA community college system, this book was revelatory. I have a much deeper understanding of the political forces shaping my workplace, and how these are connected to larger trends that are steadily undermining public education. Not just at CCSF, but across the state and higher ed landscape. This book is an essential read for anyone seeking to understand how to defend and strengthen public higher education.
May 20, 2021
Yes, there is a lot of information and I did enjoy some of it. I might try reading it again sometime. I worked at City College from 2000. It may be getting better. I retired in 2016.
I found a photo in my Facebook from July 27 2014. A Certificate of Completion signed by Barbara Beno!
about the photo: I got up early to take my online lesson from the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges. An example of post-literate training, with slides, clip art, and some guy slowly speaking the information. I guess this is the 21st century approach to education. Of course I passed the quiz; you could retake it until you scored 100%. Multiple choice questions, some of which you could actually answer correctly just because the other three choices were nonsense. Sigh.
I found a photo in my Facebook from July 27 2014. A Certificate of Completion signed by Barbara Beno!
about the photo: I got up early to take my online lesson from the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges. An example of post-literate training, with slides, clip art, and some guy slowly speaking the information. I guess this is the 21st century approach to education. Of course I passed the quiz; you could retake it until you scored 100%. Multiple choice questions, some of which you could actually answer correctly just because the other three choices were nonsense. Sigh.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews