These two books can be read together as companion volumes. Both make a case for the “democratic promise of public education” (A Match on Dry Grass, p. 12), seeing schools and their reform as a strategic domain in which democratic citizenship is exercised and enhanced.

A Match on Dry Grass develops a series of interlinked case studies of the ways in which community organizing—in its various guises—enables low-income groups to address inequalities in educational provision at a local and state level. The constructive thesis developed overall is that the cases it narrates are indicative of a new movement committed to the transformation of public education (p. 4). In contrast, Public Engagement for Public Education focuses on a broader repertoire of strategies for contending with inequalities of educational provision. So in addition to community organizing, the strategies discussed include coalition building, coproduction and cogovernance of education, and the creation of alternative forms of provision such as charter schools.

What links all these forms of “public engagement” is that they are instigated neither by those with direct administrative or professional responsibility for schools nor by holders of public office. Instead, they are undertaken by groups of parents, students, or broader coalitions within civil society. This may seem an uncontentious proposition, but what comes across time and again in the essays is the hostility provoked by such “outsiders” and “nonexperts.” Drawing on Harry Boyte's notion of “public work,” Marion Orr and John Rogers point to public engagement with education and how it challenges and demands a move beyond technocratic, top down, one-size-fits-all, centralized, and procedural reform initiatives to draw on a wider variety of experience, knowledge. and a diversity of solutions in order to solve common problems (Public Engagement, p. 10). In defining what they mean by “public engagement,” they state that it “emerges as parents, community members, and youth identify common educational problems and work together to address them. It is the kind of work that people engage in because they believe that their efforts might make a difference to their collective future” (p. 10). Perhaps, then, the hostility that such public engagement provokes should not be surprising; what is demanded is that those with a vested interest in the status quo—whether teachers' unions, public officials, or politicians—not only admit that they might be wrong but also relinquish control and collaborate with others they previously viewed as part of the problem. Or to parse Frederick Douglas: Power concedes nothing without a fight.

A Match opens with an introduction that charts the growing attention paid to educational reform among community-organizing initiatives from the 1990s on. It distinguishes between parental involvement, in which parents are co-opted to passively accept and maintain the existing procedures and processes of a school, and parental engagement, which sees parents as cocreators of education with the agency to challenge and change how education is done (p. 7). The hard work it takes to generate such a shift in approach is what the case studies examine in different contexts with different challenges. These contexts range from the urban, notably Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, to the rural and small-town context of the Mississippi Delta.

The opening essay of this volume locates community organizing for school reform within the framework of social capital and makes a claim that such initiatives draw on a wide range of influences, notably the Alinsky organizing tradition, the Civil Rights movement, the social movements of the 1960s, in particular the Chicano movement and the women's movement, and the new immigrant and labor movements of the 1980s and 1990s (pp. 16–19). Whether the qualitative data actually warrants this claim is another matter. There is clear evidence given for the influence of Alinsky, the Civil Rights, and Chicano movements, but none of the case studies explicitly notes the influence of the other social movements cited in the introductory essay. Moreover, one important influence not given its due weight but which appears repeatedly in both volumes as a key resource is Christianity and the role of churches.

The concluding essay of A Match synthesizes and maps the features common to all of its case studies. These include the need to build relational power in order to challenge existing power structures; the importance of drawing on people's common history, identity, and traditions to generate a transformative sense of being part of a shared community; the identification and development of local leaders; the reform of institutions through collaborative work by a variety of actors, ranging from students to superintendents; and, finally, the need to organize at a variety of levels to achieve lasting change. I would add that another common feature of the studies is the importance of political education, or “conscientization,” and the ways in which organizing efforts generate an alternative community of interpretation that can reframe or provide an alternative perspective to existing orthodoxies and plausibility structures that are used to justify an unjust educational status quo.

A notable feature of this volume is the collaborative way in which it was generated. Mark Warren and Karen Mapp are to be commended for facilitating a process that allowed 15 younger scholars to both develop their own work and experience a genuinely collegial research project, one that resulted in a coherent and mutually illuminating sets of essays. Likewise, Public Engagement emerged from a collaboration initiated by the Public Education Network and the Ford Foundation. This is reflected in the cross-referencing among the different essays, which contributes to the coherence of the volume as a whole.

A consistent theme of the six case studies in A Match is how school reform involves the challenging of entrenched and institutional racism. The cases in which issues of racism are particularly stark are found in Chapter 4, which details how Latino/a students in Denver agitated for change in their school, and Chapter 5, which details efforts by Southern Echo to enhance the educational provision for marginalized and low-income African American populations in Mississippi. The importance of such work not just for those groups directly affected but also for educational policy and practice as a whole is brought home when the authors point out that “students of color are expected to become the majority of students in public schools across the country within the next ten years” (p. 249).

The broader context and issues raised by the effects of racism on educational provision and outcomes are examined in the three opening essays of Public Engagement. These essays detail the inequality of political voice that racially marginalized groups endure when it comes to public decisions about the distribution of resources in education (Chapter 1); the history of the struggle to gain voice, from the coconstruction of public education by ex-slaves after the Civil War to the community-organizing efforts from the 1990s onward (Chapter 2); and the structural challenges that school reform efforts face from factors such as the “grey peril” to privatization, globalization, and legal obstacles to change (Chapter 3).

Part II charts the different forms of public engagement observed in school reform efforts. Of these, Warren's essay on community organizing overlaps with the introductory essay in the other volume under review. There is also a degree of overlap between the two volumes with the forms of engagement outlined in chapter 7 of Part II. This chapter is billed as focusing on “Alliances and Social Movements,” but nearly all of the concrete examples at a local and regional level are instances of community organizing. However, a key point of distinction between the two volumes is how Public Engagement assesses the potential of foundations and philanthropists and market-based reform efforts. This focus comes through in the case studies that constitute Part III, in particular the case study in Chapter 11, which analyzes market-orientated reforms in Philadelphia. The final essay helpfully summarizes the key practices and factors that enable robust engagement in public education, pointing to the need for policies that create a context for greater depth and breadth of public engagement (Orr and Rogers, p. 311).

While both volumes are highly admirable in scope and content, there are a number of tensions and questions that are suggested by reading them in relation to each other. The first is the choice of social capital as an overarching framework of analysis in A Match. Warren criticizes the public-engagement framework in his essay in the Orr and Rogers volume for potentially masking differences of race and class (Public Engagement, p. 141). Yet I would argue that the public-engagement framework proves a far more robust and analytically helpful one than social capital, which, as Orr and Rogers rightly contend, does not attend to the deliberate, constructive and political nature of such public work (pp. 9–10). Moreover, not only does the social-capital framework mask the importance of institutions in many of the organizing efforts discussed in A Match, but it is also not at all clear what, if any, conceptual work the notion of social capital does in any of the actual case studies.

Lurking in the shadows behind the issues addressed in each volume is the specter of Mr. Gradgrind demanding that education serve wholly utilitarian and economic goals. Such a Gradgrindian spirit haunts justifications for school reform to be couched in terms of the need for a city, a state, or America to be economically competitive (e.g., Public Engagement, p. 309). Neither volume directly explores the tension between schools as a locus and focus of democratic citizenship and schools as a preparation for and a site of economic activity, but this tension surfaces repeatedly—not only in the justifications given for school reform but also in the motivations of students and parents to be involved in changing their schools. It is important to name this tension, as it is a backdrop against which the concerns and questions of each volume can be understood. School-reform efforts must attend to both goals while recognizing that they may pull in different directions at certain points.

In summary, these are consistently well-written, passionate, and highly illuminating volumes that contribute not only to debates about educational reform but also to wider debates about grassroots and participatory democracy, welfare reform, and the coproduction and cogovernance of public services, the role of experts and the need for a democratic professionalism, and, finally, the contemporary analysis of racism.