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2023 AERA Outstanding Book Award Winner
How local educational justice movements wrestle with neoliberal school reform
Parents, 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 mobilize from 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.
— Pedro A. Noguera, author of The Trouble With Black Boys: ...And Other Reflections on Race, Equity, and the Future of Public Education
"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."
— Michael W. Apple, author of Can Education Change Society?
"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."
— Nancy Naples, author of Grassroots Warriors: Activist Mothering, Community Work, and the War on Poverty
"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."