Public Schools That Work addresses the efforts of teachers, administrators and parents to develop alternative educational models capable of overcoming the alienation and intellectual disengagement that have become so common in American schools. Educators working in some of the best alternative elementary and secondary schools across the country recount their attempts to create systems which will educate diverse populations in their customs and heritages, involve parents and community leaders in decisions related to the life of their schools and involve students in their communities by encouraging participation in a variety of civic projects. By being rooted in their local social environment, these schools demonstrate the transformative potential of education to return power and authority to those individuals attempting to reconstruct and humanize the institutions within which they must learn and teach.

Gregory A. Smith is Assistant Professor at Lewis and Clark College, Portland, Oregon. He is the author of Education and Environment: Learning to Live with Limits and coauthor of Reducing the Risk: Schools as Communities of Support.

Introduction: Schools and the Maintenance of Community, Gregory A. Smith; Chapter 1 Community: An Alternative School Accomplishment, Mary Anne Raywid; Chapter 2 Creating a School That Honors the Traditions of a Culturally Diverse Student Body: La Escuela Fratney, Robert Peterson; Chapter 3 The Denali Project, David Hagstrom; Chapter 4 Building Community in an Alternative Secondary School, Dave Lehman; Chapter 5 Building a Community by Involving Students in the Governance of the School, Tom Gregory, Mary Ellen Sweeney; Chapter 6 Empowering Students to Shape Their Own Learning, Arnold Langberg; Chapter 7 Linking Classrooms and Communities: The Health and Media Academies in Oakland, Larry F. Guthrie, Grace Pung Guthrie; Chapter 8 International High School: How Work Works, Terrill Bush; Chapter 9 Turning In: Community Schools as Enclaves, Robert B. Everhart; Chapter 10 Schools in Communities: New Ways to Work Together, Toni Hass;