Putting the Public Back in Public Education

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The goal of the conservative Heritage Foundation’s study was to shame privileged legislators into granting less well-off families the same “school choice” via vouchers. A different sort of shame is in order, though. If the country’s representatives were invested in the system for the sake of their own children, not just for votes, our schools wouldn’t be morphing into mindless test-prep centers. Teachers wouldn’t be crafting heartbreaking appeals for donations for school supplies on sites like DonorsChoose.org.

Right-wing icon Grover Norquist was on to something when he helped to realign the ’90s political landscape by bullying conservative candidates into pledging never to raise taxes. Citizens should exert the same pressure on their representatives to sign a new pledge that personally commits them to public schools.

For most parents, the situation is far trickier. Countless mothers and fathers do yeoman’s duty propping up their public schools not only with fund-raising initiatives that put the bake sales of yore to shame, but also clocking so many volunteer hours that they more or less serve as unpaid employees.

A sinister meme has begun to infect middle-class communities, and it goes like this: If you really loved your children, you’d scrape together the money to protect them from the horrors of public schools and send them to private school.

The constant refrain of what private schools do better can be deafening: Smaller classes give students more teacher attention, kids are free from the tyranny of standardized testing, and collegial campuses offer functioning facilities. Perhaps most importantly, private schools haven’t drained their curricula of arts and humanities classes. These laboratories of creative thinking have been steadily stripped from a cash-strapped public system ruled by a single-minded fixation on math and science scores.

There is, however, a strong case to be made for the advantages of public schools. They offer more advanced placement and college-credit classes, vocational courses, and work-based learning programs than private schools do. A 2007 study by the Center on Education Policy found that, after controlling for background factors like student achievement before high school, a family’s socioeconomic status, and parental involvement, public school students performed just as well on achievement tests as private school students did, and made it into college at similar rates.

Then there are the intangibles to consider. For instance, too many private schools have become holding pens for mostly white, wealthy youngsters who head off to college without any inkling of the world beyond their gated communities. Worse, they carry with them the unchecked inclination to recreate this world elsewhere.

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