A Call to the Village: Retooling Public Schools is a personal invitation to every citizen to discover and identify how she or he can contribute to improving public schools in their local neighborhoods and communities. This book is a practical guide that shows us all how to integrate some of the unique attributes and defining characteristics of the nonprofit, private, public, and religious sectors into daily classroom activities and school operations. The author, Wana Duhart, provides an overview of how cross-sectoral collaboration can be an effective format for attracting diverse persons and organizations to come together around the issue of school reform. Her references to existing school reform experiments and global realities substantiate how critical it is to have a broad representation of people and enterprises from many professions and industries in the overall movement to transform schools.

Ms. Duhart appropriately uses the early chapters of her book to provide her readers with the social, political, cultural, and economic contexts within which school transformation must occur. There are even some discussions about public education trends and realities that will surely impact longstanding mandates and focuses of American public education. The effects of school choice, school desegregation, higher standards, and improved accountability are some of the factors which are described as integral to any experiment involving school change and innovation. Her emphasis on the elevation of school facilities and infrastructure as well as the restructuring of how teaching professionals are recruited and rewarded will certainly resonate with many reform advocates. She masterfully uses all of these realities to make an undeniable and convincing case for the urgency of a paradigmatic shift in elementary and secondary public education.

While strongly advocating for collaboration and partnerships as prerequisites for large scale school transformation, the author rightfully acknowledges the persistent challenges and opportunities that historically accompany efforts to partner across sectoral and professional boundaries. In the spirit of optimism, she concludes this part of her text with these words - “The crisis state of local schools all over the country calls for unusual levels of commitment and persistence……the hope is that the huge need to transform elementary and secondary schools nationwide will motivate participants from all sectors to work desperately toward workable solutions.”

A large portion of the text provides a look at how each sector’s relevant expertise and resources might be incorporated into everyday school operations. The nonprofit sector is viewed as important because of its proximity to families and constituency groups and its knowledge of local needs while the private sector’s results orientation and management proficiency are seen as vital for elevating how students and schools are evaluated. The public sector, which is largely the traditional education establishment, is recognized for its indispensable knowledge about public school intricacies and components. And the religious sector is seen as perhaps the most influential segment because so many diverse groups of people rely on this sector’s leaders for guidance in every area of human life.

In the end, Ms. Duhart is careful not to appear as prescribing solutions for schools and communities. Instead, she leaves this task to the sector participants as they dialogue and strategize in their communities. A Call to the Village is the urgent “call to action” that many may discover they have been waiting for, to help them define and articulate what their individual and collective roles can be in raising the academic standards and performance for students and schools. For some, it is as simple as making a visit to a local school to observe firsthand the daily challenges confronting classroom teachers and school administrators. As a village, maybe we can rescue public education and restore the hopes and dreams for academic success and fulfillment for every child.