What Is a Public School?

Our definition of a public school is changing. And so, how we support our public school system financially is also changing.

Mark Lieberman, an EducationWeek online reporter specializing in school finance, recently wrote,

“Over the years of covering school finance, I keep running up against one nagging question: Does the way we pay for public schools inherently contradict what we understand the goal of public education to be?”

“For that matter, what do we want it to be? ‘Open and welcoming to all, committed to providing a quality education to everyone,’ wrote one educator in a recent EdWeek Research Center survey. ‘Something that is supported by everyone and helps or benefits everyone,’ wrote another. ‘The foundation of our modern society,’ according to a third.”

“With more frequency in recent years, however, state lawmakers have directed significant sums of money not exclusively to the greatest education needs of the public school system we’ve established – fixing crumbling school buildings, closing massive academic-achievement gaps along racial and socioeconomic lines, providing services to vulnerable students with disabilities and English-learners – but also to private schools or to parents for private decisionmaking on the educational options they choose for their children.”

“These funding developments – both recent and long-standing – test the very premise of what our public education system is. And the longer they persist, the further away we move from resolving the contradictions of a publicly funded system that falls short of being fully public.”

…

“With the debate over the parameters of public schooling raging in state legislatures, at school board meetings, on social media, and in classrooms themselves, there’s rarely been a more crucial time to define what a truly public school system should look like – and what it would take to get there.”

“That work might be painful, and it certainly won’t be done by the end of this essay. It’s also intertwined with complex political realities and the inevitably slow pace of altering a massive bureaucracy. The willingness of the American public to pay higher taxes for more robust public goods is often limited. And the sprawling bureaucracy of America’s public schools – 13,000 independent districts, 100,000 school buildings, 80,000 local school board members, 50 state systems for funding and administration – won’t transform overnight.”

“It’s difficult to interrogate a beleaguered institution that’s so omnipresent, said David Backer, an associate professor of education at West Chester University who’s writing a book about fighting privatization in public schools: ‘It’s the ground that everyone’s standing on.’”

“This, of course, makes change all the more complex: If you can’t see the full picture of the American education system, how can you address the cracks in its foundation?”

It seems one must agree with Mark Lieberman when he writes “…there’s rarely been a more crucial time to define what a truly public school system should look like – and what it would take to get there.” The problem is that we might be using a 20^th century, maybe even a 19^th century, definition of what a truly public school system should look like, all the while making assumptions of what it would take to get there through the lenses of school, teacher, curriculum, and tests.

In 2023, no one should assume public dollars must be directed to schools for those dollars to be considered public.

No one should assume learning happens because teaching is happening inside a classroom.

No one should think that what a young learner works on in terms of reading, writing, problem solving, and character development should be determined by a state legislature, state board of education, or local school board.

No one should assume a pen to paper high-stakes standardized test tells anyone very much about whether a young learner has become smarter and stronger.

Lieberman is right when he writes that the current system won’t transform overnight, but it must be said that the current system hasn’t transformed over the past 50 years. So when is it long enough when it comes to replacing, in Lieberman’s words not mine, a “beleaguered Institution”?

It really comes down to the answer to this question, when you want to define who is “the public” in our public school system:

Would you rather have state legislators and school board members controlling funding while making decisions for young learners, or would you rather have parents, with the support of professionally-trained learning coaches, control public money while making decisions for their own children?

Til tomorrow. SVB