Public Schooling Over Public Schools

I’m a big Willie Nelson fan. So when I saw this group in Des Moines was going to celebrate Willie’s 90^th birthday, I was there.

The group was the Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement (Iowa CCI). They earned national media attention back in the 1980’s, when they, along with Willie Nelson, focused on the number of Midwest farms that were being foreclosed on in favor of corporate takeover. Today Iowa CCI works in many areas of community organizing. The story they told at Willie’s birthday party centered on how one Iowa farm wife got a corporate pig farm to change their plans to build a huge operation right across the road. When asked what the motivation was to stop the building, the Iowa farm wife, Barb, said, “Well, I guess I didn’t want to smell pig shit the rest of my life.”

I became interested in joining the fight when I found out Iowa CCI was forming a group to improve the state’s public schools. Iowa has long found themselves as one of the top performers when it comes to public school performance, but recently, due to state legislative funding cuts and the introduction of education savings accounts, Iowa public schools have started to struggle.

In their fall newsletter, Iowa CCI asked their supporters to deliver signatures to their local school boards asking them to publicly stand with Iowa CCI by passing a resolution calling on the Governor and legislature to fully fund our public schools at a 5% annual increase and to phase out private school vouchers. Iowa CCI is in the process of getting school boards across the state to sign on to these two requests.

Back in August, I participated in a Zoom call Iowa CCI sponsored titled “Why Public Schools?” The 90-minute meeting was again focused on increasing public school budgets and ending education savings accounts. When I brought up the idea to start using money in different ways to support alternative learning models, the moderator was quick to return to the two topics of the night – improving public school financing and putting a stop to the public school to private school money drain currently occurring in the state. At one point in the meeting, the moderator called me out for “exhausting him” with all of my new ideas.

I don’t think they liked my ideas much. I think they wanted me to “leave” the meeting. But I wasn’t going to give up that easy.

Earlier this month, Iowa CCI hosted an in-person meeting when Jay Travis, Executive Director of the Needmor Fund for Social Justice and Jitu Brown, National Director of the Journey for Justice Alliance, were guests. Both Travis and Brown served as board chair of the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization in Chicago. They were in Iowa to speak about the success they experienced recouping Chicago Public Schools’ money to launch a “community school” in their Chicago neighborhood. A “community school” is a campus where students receive wrap-around services, meaning nutrition, workforce, housing, and other supports are addressed within the school walls. Travis and Brown were proud of the fact that today Chicago Public Schools have 70 community schools within the district.

There are 643 schools within the Chicago Public Schools system.

The in-person organizers emailed out a questionnaire the day after the meeting, asking two questions of the participants: How did last night’s presentation inspire you to take action? And, how do we make fully funding public schools and phasing out private school vouchers a winning and key issue in the 2026 elections?

I probably should have answered the questionnaire, but I didn’t. I suppose my experience with the August Zoom moderator caused me to pause.

So let me take stab at the questions now:

How did last night’s presentation inspire you to take action?

There are a lot of parents unhappy with their child’s experience inside their assigned traditional public school campus. Instead of focusing on the state legislature (which, in Iowa, is dominated by Republican Trumpers), Iowa CCI should focus on parent education and what moms and dads (or significant caregivers) can do to leave the current traditional system and invest in a new type of learning system. That’s what Iowa CCI should be working on.

And, how do we make fully funding public schools and phasing out private school vouchers a winning and key issue in the 2026 elections?

Actually, you don’t. If the money is used appropriately and is focused on the individual learner in personalized ways, there is more than enough money budgeted in most states to make all kids smarter and stronger in their reading, writing, and problem-solving skills. The problem is that our current K-12 system is bleeding money, and their solution to that is more money. No thank you.

Phasing out private school vouchers is a microdot compared to the work we have to do to offer our young learners better opportunities to become lifelong learners. Instead of phasing out private school vouchers, we need to continue the push to use public finances to support alternative forms of schooling – like learning pods, microschools, homeschooling, and, yes, privates. This is especially important in communities that don’t have good public schools to send their children, and most of those children are black, brown, and poor.

I’ll probably hang around Iowa CCI a bit longer to see if they “see the light,” (besides, they did invite me to Willie’s birthday party) but if they don’t, my search continues for a community-based organization that understands that just giving more money to a broken system gets you nowhere.

Friday News Roundup tomorrow. SVB