Can Public Education Make a Deal?

At Hechinger Report, Johnathan Gyurko surfaces with a curious proposition. Donald Trump is supposed to be a dealmaker, he says, so maybe instead of getting alarmed, The Left should try cutting some deals about public education. But first, he needs to redefine a few terms.

Gyurko spins off the Network for Public Education's call to arms for heading into an administration likely to herald “a new era of federal hostility toward public schools.” (Full disclosure-- I am a member of NPE). 

NPE warns of deep cuts to federal programs that support low-income students and those with disabilities, more funding for charter schools, advocacy for religious education and a nationwide voucher program. The group also fears new curriculum mandates and a rollback of student protections.

A threat to public education, indeed, as NPE defines it. But that’s the problem.

The italics are his, because he wants to debate the definition. He says "the political left" has a single definition for public schools-- "district schools governed by local school boards, along with special purpose schools like magnet, vocational and agricultural tech schools run regionally or by state governments."

I don't know if I'm an example of the political left, but that's not quite how I would define public schools, but it doesn't matter for our purposes, because Gyurko is in the weeds in the very next sentence:

This blinkered view excludes 7,800 tax-funded and government-authorized charter schools that enroll 3.7 million children across 44 states and Washington, D.C.

It also excludes another 4.7 million children in private schools, many of whom receive tax-funded services for purposes important to the public.

He writes as if charter and private schools were somehow cast out into the darkness by public school advocates. But they cast themselves out there. School choice have consistently made the fact that they are NOT public schools central to their pitch. 

It's true that charters have, at times, claimed to be public schools, making arguments like "They get public funding so they are public schools." You will note that advocates (like Betsy DeVos) have never attempted to extend that argument to voucher-accepting private schools. But charter schools have only claimed to be public when it suits them. Just this week we got yet another example of charter schools refusing to open their records to the state and arguing that they aren't subject to the kinds of transparency laws that govern public schools. The privatizing crowd has tried multiple times to get the Supreme Court to rule that charter schools don't have to follow the same rules as other "state actors," either because they aren't public schools or because, well, they just don't have to.

Voucher-fed private schools have never pretended to be anything other than non-public schools, and voucher supporters have been all in on declaring that they are separate from and superior to public schools, those woke-infested dens of gender ideology and commie teachers. Voucher laws come with carefully-crafted "hands off" clauses, guaranteeing that private schools accepting taxpayer-funded vouchers are still free to discriminate as they wish.

So let's not pretend that charter and voucher schools are not considered public schools for any reason other than they don't want to be.

Okay, so let's move on to his point. This is probably the time to note that Gyurko teaches education and politics at Teachers College, Columbia University, founded and runs the Association of College and University Educators, and has a book-- Publicization: How Public and Private Interests Can Reinvent Education for the Common Good. He's been on the Have You Heard podcast with Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider, and he's had a chat with Rick Hess. His Hechinger piece is re-presenting some of his favorite ideas.

So how does he want revise the definition of public school?

Instead of focusing on types of schools, we should consider a school “public” when it (1) enrolls and educates any student who wants to go there, and (2) prepares them to be engaged citizens, productive workers, good neighbors and stewards of the planet.

I note quibbles and limits. His definition does not include any sort of accountability, but if you're going to spend public taxpayer dollars, there has to be some form of accountability to the public, and to this day, the choice sector resists that. 

It's hard not to notice that #1 disqualifies every voucher program in the country. Gyurko wants to note that attendance zones and real-estate-linked school funding are exclusionary practices, plus elected officials who only pay lip service to parents and community members, and learning standards imposed by experts without input from stakeholders. 

It's also hard not to notice that #2 leaves lots of room for interpretation, enough to accommodate the ideas of any christianist white nationalist academy in the country. 

But Gyurko wants to offer families a new way forward, and this is where he gets to his cutest ideas-- the negotiating part. 

The left should play some offense and propose a transformative increase in federal funding for all schools — district, charter, charitable and proprietary — with a catch.

Dollars would need to be used to end exclusionary practices and to prepare future citizens, workers, neighbors and stewards of the planet.

I don't even know where to start, so let's begin with some of the specific "deals" that Gyurko imagines.

For example, could “hardening” schools against mass shootings also get us high-tech, 21st-century facilities? Would we trade vouchers to publicly purposed private schools for a national minimum teacher salary? Can we include patriotism in curricula that also respects everyone, equally? Might we eliminate caps on new charter schools if appointed charter authorizers were replaced with elected officials, thereby democratizing the charter sector?

Hardening for 21st century schools? Do you mean every single school building in America? I have no idea exactly what that might cost, but I'm guessing somewhere between a shit-ton of money and all the money in the world. "Publicly purposed private schools"?? That's not a thing, and our experience with vouchers so far is that no private school is going to take that deal since states already have made them a vouchers-with-no-strings-attached deal. Maybe you could get some pop-up crappy voucher schools that set up shop to cash in, but we already know that produces non-educating junk schools.

Patriotism and equity? Which part of the Donald "I Will Defund Any School With DEI or CRT" Trump administration do you think will sign on for that? Elected charter boards? I think that's a great idea, and I also think that the many folks profiting in the charter business have no interest in making such a deal.

And is there a reason for public education to offer to accept further privatization in hopes of some of these possible returns?

The central flaw in Gyurko's idea is that he is proposing to make a deal with privatizers in which they give up fundamental parts of their business model in return for stuff that they already get from their state government anyway. Or maybe the thought is to force states that have resisted voucher incursions to give up by offering some crumbs in return, but I have my doubts that privatizers would accept his conditions. 

The modern choice movement is based on competition with the public system. I appreciate Gyurko's notion that we could have one big public system that embraces many forms of schooling. I've played with that thought experiment myself. But the premises required for such a system are unacceptable to the folks in the modern choice biz. 

Public good, true non-profit and not free market? Public ownership, operation and accountability? No religious education? Honest discussion and support for the real total cost? Serving all students? All of those necessities for a public school system with robust choice--every one of them--has been pointedly and systematically rejected by choicers over the past few decades. They reject them either because they truly believe that a market-based competitive system is the path to educational quality for all, or because they don't actually care about educational quality for all as much as they care about profit, about a multi-tier system that keeps lessers in their place, or about pushing their own favored ideology. 

My impression is that Gyurko's heart is in the right place, but his head is deep in the sand if he imagines that Dear Leader or any of his underlings are interested in any of these deals. This may be a better pitch than the privatizers longing for the days that Democrats joined a coalition in order to roll over for right-tilted reformsters but not by much. This administration will, in fact, be plenty hostile to public education, and trying to get them to make deals when they imagine they can just take what they want is a pointless exercise.