In this thought-provoking book, Kathleen Knight Abowitz aims to offer a renewed conception of the public in public schooling, hoping to breathe new life and commitment into our schools and communities.1 The book’s structure is arranged around three elements that support her endeavor to reinvigorate publics and their support for public schools: legitimacy, public life, and public leadership. As she connects each element to defining “public” and public schools, she reconstructs each notion, providing an enhanced version of each that is grounded in today’s educational context and ready to be applied there. Knight Abowitz urges us to refocus on the local, not as a romanticized ideal of the past, but rather as a site where we experience messy education-related problems that intimately impact us, and where we can work collaboratively to construct solutions, ultimately coming together to form a public will for our schools. This call is timely in light of increasing pressures toward centralized control of schooling and privatization, both of which work against local participatory political engagement in our public schools. She persuasively goads us to envision creative alternatives to these pressures and offers us helpful guidance in how to do so.

中文翻译：

---

公立学校的公众：合法性，民主和领导

在这本发人深省的书中，凯瑟琳·奈特·阿波维兹（Kathleen Knight Abowitz）的目的是在公立学校中提供公众的新观念，希望为我们的学校和社区带来新的生活和承诺。1该书的结构围绕着三个要素来安排，以支持她的努力。重振公众及其对公立学校的支持：合法性，公共生活和公共领导。当她将每个元素与定义“公立”和公立学校联系在一起时，她重构了每个概念，提供了每个概念的增强版本，这些版本基于当今的教育背景并准备在那里应用。Knight Abowitz敦促我们重新关注当地，而不是过去的浪漫理想，而是要让我们体验与教育有关的混乱问题，从而直接影响我们，以及我们可以在哪里共同努力以构建解决方案，最终聚集在一起形成我们学校的公众意愿。鉴于越来越多的压力要求对学校和私有化进行集中控制，因此这是及时的，这两种做法都不利于我们公立学校的地方参与性政治参与。她有说服力地劝说我们构想出解决这些压力的替代方法，并为我们提供有效的指导。