This Is Our School!: Race and Community Resistance to School Reform

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.


About the Author
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.