This Is Our School!

How local educational justice movements wrestle with neoliberal school reformParents, educators, and activists are passionately fighting to improve public schools around the country. In This Is Our School! Hava Rachel Gordon takes us inside these fascinating school reform movements, exploring their origins, aims, and victories as they work to build a better future for our education system.Focusing on a school district in Denver, Colorado, Gordon takes a look at different coalitions within the school reform movement, as well as the surprising competition that arises between them. Drawing on over eighty interviews and ethnographic research, she explores how these groups vie for power, as well as the role that race, class, and gentrification play in shaping their successes and failures, strategies and structures. Gordon shows us what happens when people mobilizefrom the ground up and advocate for educational change. This Is Our School! gives us an inside look at the diverse voices within the school reform movement, each of which plays an important role in the fight to improve public education.

In this important new book, Hava Rachel Gordon shows how grassroots movements have organized to resist efforts by neoliberal reformers to take control of local public schools. Using Denver as a focal point for her analysis, Gordon shows us that not only is resistance occurring, but in some cases, community groups are winning important victories against formidable opponents in their efforts to retain control over public schools. Well documented and written in a clear and compelling style, This is Our School! will serve as a guide to those who seek to retain public schools as the foundation of democracy., Hava Rachel Gordon has provided us with a significant advance in our understanding of the contradictions, limits, and possibilities of activist movements in educational reform. It is consistently insightful and grounded in the real politics of communities on the ground. I strongly recommend it., This Is Our School! offers a powerful, in-depth exploration of educational justice movements as they negotiate neoliberal education policy and disinvestment in urban communities. Hava Rachel Gordon’s careful analysis of alliances between youth activists and community groups in Denver offers new insights into the dynamics of racial politics, coalition-building, and the potential for community inclusion. This book is an important and timely contribution., In the wake of protests against school mask mandates and a supposed critical-race-theory takeover of the curriculum, Hava Rachel Gordon’s new book provides a fresh examination of neoliberal school reforms and the impact of the coalitions opposing them.

Hava Rachel Gordon is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Denver. She is the author of We Fight to Win: Inequality and the Politics of Youth Activism and This Is Our School! Race and Community Resistance to School Reform.