Part I: Why is Public Education Public?
“…it’s hard to think of an education-related policy that has effectively and sustainably worked, beyond the granddaddy of all ed policy: a free, high-quality, fully public education for every American child, no matter what they bring to the table.” -Nancy Flanagan, Teacher in a Strange Land
We return to our overview of what COVID-19 has revealed about systemic weaknesses in the various areas DeedSpeakOut covers, starting from public education.
Let’s start this group of posts with a question: What is the purpose of public schools? Sounds simple, right? But the answer has become more controversial over the past 30 years as the U.S. has been inundated by “school choice” (charter schools, expanded voucher/quasi-voucher programs for private schools, home schooling, virtual [online] schools), national curricular and assessment programs (Common Core, No Child Left Behind [2001], Race to the Top [2009], Every Student Succeeds Act [2015]), anti-union and anti-teacher agitation, and aging school facilities. The financial crisis of 2008-2009 with its drastic budget cuts have not been made up for in many states/districts by a return to pre-2009 funding levels. And then the pandemic arrived.
The almost-overnight shift to online learning did not proceed smoothly in many schools/districts. It particularly affected those already resource-strained before the pandemic, i.e. high-poverty inner-city and rural schools (a significant percentage of which lacked adequate [or any] broadband coverage).
By 2021, parents in better-resourced districts were lobbying for school re-openings. Working parents (particularly mothers, who still bear the burden of most child-rearing) were obliged to return to their offices but could not leave children at home all day without an adult presence; mothers of preschool-age children struggled to find day care facilities because so many such centers had closed. Lobbying sometimes turned into hostile confrontations with school administrations and boards; parents, goaded by frustration at lengthy school closures, continuing mask mandates, curtailed extracurricular programs and “learning loss”, accused boards/district leaders of infringing on their own and their children’s “freedoms” (to attend in-person class, to ignore mask mandates at will). For these parents, COVID-19 has devolved into a minor inconvenience to be treated as “endemic.” “We’re done with COVID,” parents and like-minded community members claim. How many ever pause to ask whether COVID is done with us?
To return to our initial question: Why is public education public?
The U.S. public school system is not a federal one, although federal funds are disbursed to support schools, for example through Title I, which provides additional support to poor schools in the amount of $16.7 billion (2020). But we have no “national” prescribed curriculum (the closest thing being the “Common Core”), and the various states are largely free to determine, in collaboration with school districts, the curricula, textbooks, and requirements for graduation from primary and secondary schools.
This, as we shall see in this group of posts, has proved a double-edged sword.
Individual states have enshrined their commitment to educate all residents within their constitutions. The fourth Illinois Constitution (1970) is typical:
Article X.
Goal – Free Schools
A fundamental goal of the People of the State is the educational development of all persons to the limits of their capacities.
The State shall provide for an efficient system of high quality public educational institutions and services. Education in public schools through the secondary level shall be free. There may be such other free education as the General Assembly provides by law.
The State has the primary responsibility for financing the system of public education.
Thus: “the educational development of all persons to the limits of their capacities” is defined as a goal, further elaborated as an “efficient system of high quality… institutions and services” It “shall be free.” And the State “has the primary responsibility for financing ….”
To restate for the purposes of discussion:
– the public education system is for all persons, i.e. it is universal
– the public education system shall be efficient and of high quality
– the State shall provide primary financing
Defined in these terms – universal, high-quality, state-financed, free – public education is a public good. In this it resembles our interstate highway system, our bridges and dams, our public parks (national, state, local), our public libraries, our law enforcement personnel (local, county, state police), our fire departments, and emergency services. All of these are public goods for everyone who uses/needs them.
The guiding principle behind public goods is that they are financed by everyone (through taxes) and are equally-accessible to everyone. They thus differ from private – consumer – goods in that the latter are paid for by individuals, at their individual discretion, and consumption should not materially affect the availability or quality of public goods. Private consumption is a matter of individual preference in concert with financial means, and is sometimes referred to as discretionary consumption.
Applying the terminology and adopting the criteria associated with private, discretionary consumption to refer to public goods is intellectually disingenuous and deliberately misleading. Over the past 20-30 years, school reformists have insisted on using the term “consumers” to refer to public school parents. This is strange, because while parents (along with all other taxpayers, parents or not) are indeed funding public schools, if anyone is a “consumer” it is their children, not themselves. The appropriate term should be “beneficiaries” – you won’t see that term being bandied about – or simply “users.” (Think of “library users” or “highway users” – we’d hardly call people who check out books from the local library, or drive their autos on public interstates “consumers,” would we?)
Public goods are public because they demand massive investment, planning, coordination, oversight, long-term maintenance, and regular renovation/replacement, all of which are too costly for any private individual to fund. Not even billionaires could have built the Hoover Dam, or the New York Public Library; to take a recent example, not even Elon Musk could have funded the James Webb Space Telescope.
In the case of public education, both private individuals – students – and the public itself – “society” – are beneficiaries. Each student benefits to the “limits of their capacities,” and when those limits are attained, society as a whole reaps long-term benefits.
What sort of “freedom” is involved for parents here? Well, there is the freedom to opt out of the system entirely, for one; wealthy parents may choose to send their offspring to private schools whose tuition ($60,000 per year is not uncommon for an elite private school today) their fellow citizens could never afford. This doesn’t, however, mean that wealthy parents’ obligation to the universal good ensured by public schools can be abnegated; they can opt out of sending their children but they cannot opt out of the more general obligation to the common good. Thus, the rich continue to pay local property taxes and state and federal taxes, some portion of which return to states/districts in the form of public school funding.
Against this background of public schools as public goods supported by public funds as enshrined in our various state constitutions, we will examine a number of issues exacerbated by the pandemic but not caused by the pandemic.
First, we’ll consider personnel shortages. It’s estimated that 90% of public schools are currently short of staff, including administrators, teachers, teachers’ aides, substitute teachers, bus drivers, cafeteria workers, and custodians. What happens when 20% of a school’s bus drivers are out on any given day? Some students won’t get to school, or they’ll get to school two periods late. When 10% of your teaching staff is out, and there are no substitutes to call on? Administrators, secretaries, custodians are asked to fill in, or classes are combined and placed in a gym – in which case, gym classes are curtailed. Many districts depend on retired teachers for substituting, but because this population tends to be over 65, many were reluctant to serve during the pandemic.
Second, we’ll look at school infrastructure. The U.S. has 50,000,000 school-age children enrolled in 13,000 districts and around 100,000 separate school facilities. Many schools couldn’t manage to make their facilities COVID-safe because the buildings themselves were too old to renovate quickly or indeed at all. The great period of public school construction was the first third of the 20th century; many of these structures are still in use, but they have not been maintained or renovated to 21st-century standards. This is particularly true for our older industrial and commercial cities both large and small; when COVID struck NYC, for example, where more than 50% of all schools operate out of facilities more than a century old, many had non-functioning windows, or ancient ventilation systems that would have required gut renovations to upgrade to COVID ventilation standards. This had consequences for the virus’s dissemination.
Following infrastructure, we’ll take up privatization, which along with governance and policy form two of the most fractious aspects of public education today. Privatization of the public schools has been presented as a matter of “choice” and (personal, individual) “freedom.” Beginning in the 1990s, school “reformists,” funded by various private groups and individuals devoted their efforts to dismantling U.S. public schools and replacing them with charter schools (tax-funded private schools) and vouchers (for private, largely religious schools). Two states (Alabama and Oklahoma) currently have pending legislation that would essentially abolish public schools entirely – parents would be awarded a sum of money each year and left on their own. This isn’t easy (and that’s another reason we call public schools a public service): charter schools are often loathe (or refuse outright) to admit special needs students and English Language Learners (ELL), and in order to keep their test scores/rankings high, are prone to expel students each school year, leaving them to scramble to find a school that will accept them. Nor do charter schools offer any guarantee that they’ll remain open indefinitely; in fact, they sometimes close without notice over a weekend. Vouchers/quasi-vouchers (such as Education Savings Accounts and Tax Credit Scholarships) supposedly enable parents to enroll their children in private schools, but the amount doled out never covers tuition and fees at the private schools of parents’ dreams.
Governance has become increasingly difficult for many school boards during the pandemic, partly due to controversial virus-related measures such as mask mandates and, during the first year of the pandemic, cancellation of athletics – not everywhere, but in many states/districts. Many school boards moved their meetings online and it proved a lot easier for parents to participate vocally via Zoom than in person. And then in the summer-fall of 2020, CRT hit the public schools like a spiritual-ethical pandemic. Some boards jumped on the pro-CRT bandwagon, others on the anti-, but few had any clear understanding of what CRT even was. Iowa’s governor now wants a camera in every public school classroom in the state to ensure that teachers aren’t teaching “CRT,” but what she means by that is that teachers will be forced to ignore key events in U.S. history and social life from the 16th – 21st century.
The fifth and final topic of this series of posts will be the more general crisis of public education towards which most states have been heading the last 30 years. But the crisis of public education is in fact only part of the crisis of American society itself – schools are microcosms of society at large, and their problems are mirrored in other public sectors. The U.S. never fully transitioned to the form of social democracy enjoyed by many European countries during the post-WW II era extending from the late forties to the late seventies. Its social welfare system remained anemic, universal healthcare was never implemented, daycare / preschool programs were never federally mandated or funded, university-level education was never free. And since the eighties, there has been a concerted assault on the working classes combined with a powerful anti-tax movement which has intentionally starved the public sector of funding to maintain public services at their 1970s level. Poverty has become more prevalent at both the individual and the public sector level. Many reformists and like-minded opponents of public schools – of public anything, really, except perhaps freeways and law enforcement – have for a generation now been engaged in a misdirected assault on public schools as responsible for a plethora of ills.
But social inequality, systemic racism, and a deliberately-underfunded public sector are not the fault of our public schools, and they cannot provide a full redress for larger social failings.
Above all, schools cannot be made to compensate for mass poverty. Nearly 17% of all U.S. children were living below the poverty line in 2020. One in 10 of NYC’s 1,000,000 school children is homeless at some point throughout the school year. No teacher and no school can compensate for such social tragedies.
In the remaining posts in our “Public Education & COVID-19” series, this stark and shameful reality will serve as backdrop.