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Viteritti begins with his 1978 arrival in the chancellor’s office of the New York City Public Schools. From there, the book tracks how a variety of influences shaped the author’s scholarship and policy work. Ronald Edmonds, famous for the “effective schools movement,” was serving as deputy chancellor at that time and became his “unofficial tutor.” Edmonds helped Viteritti develop a model for understanding school politics that carries throughout this book. It’s built on the difference between clients and constituents. The former are the families and students a system serves; the latter are the powerful individuals and groups to which the system’s leaders are actually accountable. Part of the appeal of school choice, in the author’s view, is that it turns clients into constituents.
Edmonds—and the prospects of choice—had a major influence on Viteritti because of the growing consensus in the 1960s and 1970s, thanks to studies by James Coleman and Christopher Jencks, that schools could only do so much. Outside-of-school factors largely determined kids’ futures. Because of Viteritti’s knowledge of this academic literature, he was drawn to Edmonds’s research on schools that work for the disadvantaged. The book’s funniest passage recounts Edmonds’s grudging inclusion of texts he detested on a reading list he distributed to staff in the chancellor’s office. Viteritti wanted the list to be balanced, and Edmonds obliged while insulting the works via annotations. The reader will understand when the author writes, “Ron could come off as opinionated because he was. He was articulate and erudite and wanted you to know it.”
I learned the most from the chapter on Jack Coons, a law professor at UC Berkeley, whom Viteritti credits with convincing him of the progressive approach to choice. Though Coons is mostly known for his work on school finance, he organized a group of academics and advocates on the left to fight for choice. The chapter includes enlightening discussions of how Coons’s work intersected with Coleman’s, his role in Serrano v. Priest (the landmark 1971 California school-funding case), and his ongoing debate with Milton Friedman about why school choice is valuable and how it should be brought to life. Though I prefer Friedman’s take to Coons’s, I agree wholeheartedly with Viteritti’s view that “a parent’s lack of discretion over the education of a child, in a larger systemic context where others can exercise it, reinforces a sense of powerlessness among the unrich.”
If anything in the book will convince today’s progressives to embrace school choice, it’s probably the two chapters dedicated to Howard Fuller. They are full of gripping stories from Fuller’s remarkable career dedicated to empowering the underserved. That section begins by declaring, “Howard Fuller shares Derrick Bell’s conviction that American society is incurably racist” and “Fuller’s career is a living exhibit of critical theory.” The reader will learn of Fuller’s upbringing in the Deep South and upper Midwest, his early civil rights work, his role in creating Malcolm X Liberation University, his superintendency of Milwaukee’s schools, his founding of the Black Alliance for Educational Options, and more.
Though some on the left still caricature school choice as a nefarious effort by the rich and connected to destroy public education, Fuller’s career—consistent with Viteritti’s view—demonstrates that support for choice can grow from a sense that those without means gain power and influence when they can control education decisions. This agency includes starting schools, running schools, directing school dollars, choosing schools, and holding schools accountable, and it leads to a new, dynamic, pluralist system that better serves the marginalized. As Viteritti describes Fuller’s view, “His approach was a complete rejection of the ‘One Best System’ common school model we inherited from the 19th-century Taylorists, those same reformers who had deemed the factory to be an optimal workplace.”
