A Review of Ashley Berger’s Educational Pluralism and Democracy: How to Handle Indoctrination, Promote Exposure, and Rebuild America’s Schools

225 pages, $35.00 CAD

Declining outcomes. Civil discord. Cultural illiteracy. Functional illiteracy. The list goes on. K-12 education is struggling to deliver on the promise of not only universal education but also civic formation. It is time for an “entirely new way to approach public education.” This is the case Prof. Ashley Rogers Berner (D.Phil., Oxford), director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy, makes in Educational Pluralism and Democracy (p. 107).

Anything by Berner is worth reading. Consistent with her previous scholarship, this work is thoroughly researched and well written, with clear, compelling, and challenging insights. The core arguments build off Berner’s first book, Pluralism and American Public Education: No One Way to School (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), where she laid the original foundation for three big ideas.

First: Why do we tax our neighbor to pay for the education of the other neighbor’s child? Because that kid’s education, or lack thereof, affects the whole community. It follows, then, that education is not merely a private interest but also a public one. . . .

Continue reading at the Journal of School Choice, here.