What Is Public Education, Really?

One of the repeated tricks and techniques of reformsterism is to propose policies or procedures as beneficial for public education when in fact, intentionally or not, they are far more likely to damage public education. This argument usually takes the form of trying to redefine public education itself-- kind of like handing someone a screwdriver and saying, "This will be a great hammer; just hold it like this." Much of what is presented as an attempt to reform the public schools are actually attempts to turn them into Not Public Schools.

So let me see if I can lay out what features the real US education system actually has, the better to understand when we've moved outside that boundary. I'll stipulate right up front that our current public education system does not always nail each of these perfectly, but these traits still define what our public education system is (and is not).

The public education system takes all students.

We've divided up territory geographically so that we can be sure not to miss a single child. If a child lives within the boundaries of that school system, that school system must take that child. There are some limits in the public education system (for instance, a child who presents a clear and present danger to other students), but beyond those limits no child can be rejected, pushed out, or required to seek education elsewhere. And certainly the public education system does not require you to apply to be in the system, or go find a school to take you when your original school no longer will.

The public education system is publicly funded.

All taxpayers contribute. It may be necessary for state or federal government to shuffle some of that money around to even things out; after all, we do not provide roads decent roads only in rich neighborhoods. If there's a requirement that parents must contribute money, time, or both in order for their child to be allowed to attend, that is not a public school.

Conversely, any attempt to cut funding or failure to properly provide for a school is nothing less than an attempt to turn it into Not A Public School. While student "outcomes" are certainly a consideration for a public school, it is does not establish equity to simply demand that all schools produce the same outcomes regardless of what resources and facilities they have.

The public education system is run by local taxpayers.

A public school system is one of the last bastions of participatory democracy. The school is run by a group of taxpayers who are elected by other taxpayers. The school board must (in fact, can only) have public meetings at which members of the public can have their say about the decisions of the school board. Taxpayers get to have their final say about school board decisions by voting.

If a school is run by people who don't have to meet in front of the taxpayers and do not have to listen to the taxpayers, it is not a public school. If the people who run the school cannot be removed from office by the people who live in that local school district, it is not a public school. If school policy is set by a people who do not have to answer to local taxpayers, that is not a public school.

The public school system is run transparently.

The complete financial records of a public school are always available, in full, to any taxpayer and/or voter in the local school district. Any school that says, "We don't have to show our financial records to you," is not a public school.

The public school system is not run for profit.

The public school system is a public service. If you like, you can think of it as a managed public good, like a park or the municipal water supply. As such, it never produces a profit for anybody. This includes directly (as in an explicitly for-profit charter) or indirectly (as in a not-for-profit charter that pays profit-creating fees to a building owner or school management company).

The public school is stably staffed with the best professionals the available money can buy.

A public school hires certified professionals, and it pays with a competitive salary and it structures its system to encourage the staff members to stay in the school for the length of their career. Teachers are evaluated with a system that considers the full range of skills and qualities that the school district values, and those who do poorly receive support or, eventually, fired if they cannot get their act together. A public school tries to be a source of stability in its community.

Schools that use any of the pay systems that are designed to cut total operating cost by paying the total teaching staff bottom dollar are not public schools. Using an evaluation system that does not really evaluate the full range of teacher qualities, or which injects an invalid random element, is an attempt to turn the school into Not a Public School. None of these "merit" systems, VAMvaluations, "career ladders," or short-term hiring practices designed to run a school on the cheap contribute to the quality or stability of the school.

The public school is a long term commitment.

Public schools represent a promise by the community made to every child, present and future, that they will be given the best education we can get them, no matter what, as long as there are children who need it. Public schools do not close for business reasons.

You can break these rules.

There are plenty of perfectly good schools that don't meet these standards, and their existence is not a pimple on the face of the universe. But they aren't public schools.

Another way of understanding the reformster position is that they have tried to convince us that entities that are not public schools actually are. If they want to have a conversation about how to change our traditional public education system into something else, that's a perfectly legitimate conversation to have.

But to have that conversation, we need honesty. Reformsters need to just say, "We want to replace the traditional American public education system with a different kind of system," and then we can have that conversation. But insisting that we are trying to bolster or improve public education by stripping its defining qualities is both destructive and dishonest.

My Public School Sales Pitch

In an America stuffed with charter schools, how would I make a pitch for a public school?

I don't mean how would I argue the ins and outs and dollars and cents of policy decisions. I don't mean how would I, for instance, try to talk the GOP out of turning ESEA into the Charter and Privatization Act of 2015. I'm not talking the big idea macro-scale argument about the place of modern charters in education.

How would I look a parent in the eye and make my pitch for them to choose public school over a charter? Well, I haven't polished this up into a slick video or fileted it down to billboard-ready copy yet, but here's the basic outline of what I would say.

Here's why you should send your child to your public school.

Stability.

I will promise you that at the end of this year, at the end of next year, at the end of your child's educational career, even if that's thirteen years from now, this school system will still be here. You will never arrive at our doors and find them suddenly locked. You will never spend a single part of your year scrambling to find a new school to take your child in. As long as your child is school age, we will be here for her. You will never have to discover that we have decided to stop teaching your child because we can't make enough money doing it.

Shared expertise.

Our teaching staff has over a thousand years of collective teaching experience. You may think that those thousand years don't matter if your child is in a classroom with a second-year teacher, but they do, because that second-year teacher will be able to share in the other 998 years' worth of experience any time she needs to.

Our staff will also share the experience of teaching your child. Your child's classroom teacher will be able to consult with every other teacher who works with, or has ever worked with, your child. We do not routinely turn over large portions of our staff, nor do we depend on a stable of green young teachers.

Commitment.

We are committed to educating your child. Only in the most extraordinary circumstances will we expel him, and we will never "counsel him out." We will never require a minimum performance from him just to stay in our school.

Ownership.

Our public school is owned and operated by the voters and taxpayers of this community, your friends, neighbors, and co-workers. The charter school is not. This public school is overseen by an elected board of individuals who live here and who must answer to voters. The charter school is not. When you have a complaint, a concern, an issue that you want to direct attention to, the people who run this school must have regular public meetings at which you must be able to air your concerns. The charter is a business, run by people who don't ever have to let you into their board room.


How we spend your money.

We have no expenses that are not related to educating your child. We will never spend less on your child so that we can pay our CEO more. We will never cut programs for your child so that we can buy a nicer summer home or a bigger boat. And we buy in bulk, so we can buy more resources, more programs, more variety, more choices under one roof. Nobody here is trying to make money from your child's education; we are simply trying to provide the best education we can, as directed by the elected representatives of the voters and taxpayers of this district.

And if you don't believe us, you are free to examine our financial records any time you wish. We will never hide them from you.

The public school difference.

I know that you must consider the best interests of your child. I also know that not every public school system does a perfect job of delivering on each of these promises. But as you are considering that charter school alternative, ask the charter school folks these questions:

Will you promise me that this school will still be here the day my child graduates?
Will you promise me that my child will be taught by the same group of highly experienced teachers throughout my child's school career?
Will you allow me to see your financial statements any time I wish?
Will you commit to holding all meetings of your leaders and operators in public, with ample opportunity for members of the public to speak out?
Will you promise me that no matter what, you will never turn my child away from this school?

My suggestion to you? Find a place that will say yes to all of those, because without a foundation of stability, transparency, and commitment to your child, any other promises mean nothing. They are like getting a marriage proposal from a man who says, "I will be the greatest husband ever, but I do reserve the right to skip town any time that I feel like it." The charter school promise is not really a promise at all. If our pubic school promises seem smaller and less grand, it's because we know that whatever we promise, we'll have to stick around to deliver.



That would be my pitch. I know there are public schools that would have to step up their game to live up to that pitch, and they should start stepping today. I know that state and federal government have put obstacles in the way of living up to those promises, and that in some urban areas, much has been done to take the "public" out of public education. I know that the sales pitch would have to be tweaked by locality.

Most of all, I know that this sales pitch doesn't address the actual quality of education. But we have to start with the foundation, and the foundation (which we have previously taken for granted) is an institution dedicated to being a permanent provider, operated by and responsive to the community, and committed to meeting the needs of every student within its community. That foundation must be in place in order for a structure of quality education must be built.

Choice and Disenfranchising the Public

School choice is one of those policy ideas that just never goes away, and it probably never will. For some people, it is an irresistible way to unlock all those public tax dollars and turn them into private profits. For some people, it's a way to make sure their children don't have to go to school with Those People. And some people have a sincere belief that competition really does create greatness.

I'll save my disagreements with those folks for another day. Because there is a huge fault with school choice that we discuss way too rarely.

School choice disenfranchises the public.

Our public school system is set up to serve the public. All the public. It is not set up to serve just parents or just students. Everybody benefits from a system of roadways in this country-- even people who don't drive cars-- because it allows a hundred other systems of service and commerce to function well.

School choice treats parents as if they are the only stakeholders in education. They are not. We all depend on a society in which people are reasonably well-educated. We all depend on a society in which people have a reasonably good understanding of how things work. We all depends on a society in which people have the basic abilities needed to take care of themselves and the people around them. We all depend on dealing with doctors and plumbers and lawyers and clerks and neighbors who can read and write and figure. We hope for fellow voters who will not elect a politician because he promises to convert straw to gold by using cold fusion. We all depend on a society that can move forward because it is composed of people who Know Things.

This is why everybody votes for school board members-- not just the people who have kids in school. Everybody has a stake in the students who come out of schools, and every taxpayer has a stake in the money spent on schools.

A choice system says no-- you only get a say in how education works if you have a kid.

Reformsters like to make the argument that schools need to be more responsive to what employers and businesses are looking for in graduates, but in a choice system, these folks have even less say. Charter operators and other choice beneficiaries don't have to listen to anybody except the people who affect market share.

This has the potential of serious long-term harm for the choice schools themselves. Most notably, disenfranchising the public literally moves them from the list of stakeholders. It will vastly increase the list of people saying, "Well, I don't have a kid in school. Why do I have to pay taxes, anyway?" The day those people make a large enough group is the day that choice school operators suddenly find the pie shrinking as voters decide they're tired of paying for a system they've been cut out of.

But the biggest damage will come to communities themselves, because choice and charter systems are based on business principles, not education or community principles. And the most basic business principle is, when you aren't making money, close up shop.

There has been a lot of shock and surprise around the country as charter schools just close their doors. People tend to assume that part of being a school means staying open in your community, and they keep being surprised to discover that a charter school is not a school-- it's a business. Charter and choice systems don't just disenfranchise the public in saying how schools in the community should work-- charter and choice systems also take away any choice about whether there are schools in the community or not.

A public school system cannot suddenly just close its doors, even just a few of its doors, without answering to the taxpaying and voting public. But when it comes to decisions about whether to stay open or not, even the parents themselves are disenfranchised. A choice system in your community doesn't only mean that the public has lost the ability to decide what kind of schools they'll have today. A choice system also means they've lost control over how much longer they'll have any schools at all.

That's the trade. A few people get to have a choice about schools today, and in return, nobody gets a choice about what schools, if any, to have in the community tomorrow.

John Green on Public Education

If you teach high school, you are probably familiar with John Green, Author of Various Novellic Weepfests That Your Students Carry Around. He's the author of the highly popular Looking for Alaska and the even more popular The Fault in Our Stars. But John Green is also a high school teacher, and he and his brother are highly popular vloggers. Their Crash Course series on youtube presents just about everything (though mostly science and history-- their subject areas) in rapid-fire and engaging style.

In the midst of those videos, one finds John Green's "Open Letter to Students Returning to School," and it is worth four minutes of your life.

Green gives some simple perspective on public education's place in history, and he delivers a fine response to the eternal students complaint- "My teachers are stupid."

Yes, your teachers may be stupid. So are you. So am I. So is everyone, except Neil Degrasse Tyson. The whole pleasure of being a human being is in being stupid but learning to be less stupid together.

And then he goes on to make the big point-- school is not about you. Green addresses a point I believe is critical-- schools are for all of society. They are not, as modern charter operator marketing departments would have us believe, a service provided for parents and parents alone, but an important service provided for the entire nation, for all of society.

This video makes as good a case for public education as anyone could make in under four minutes. Perfect thing to watch before you head back to school in the new year.

Correction: I incorrectly called Green a high school teacher. That's what I get for writing before I eat my morning bagel. For my money, he's still a teacher, albeit through unconventional means. But not a public school teacher.

Why For Profit = Anti Student

Let me offer a simple explanation for why for-profit charters (like the one slated to take over the York PA public school system) are bad news for education.

You are leaving your child with a babysitter. You hand the babysitter ten dollars and say, "Use this to get lunch for my child. Everything you don't spend on her lunch, you get to keep."

Do you think your child is going to eat steak or baloney sandwiches?

Granted, schools are more complicated. Let's add a layer to our analogy.

You are part of a neighborhood co-op. You all put in money together to pay for babysitting for everybody's kids. Your neighbor Swell McGotrocks is in charge of the system, and Swell makes that same deal with the sitter-- only Swell stops by every day and picks up his own kid and takes her to Red Lobster for lunch.

You ask for accountability, so Swell says, "Fine. I will require the sitter to weigh the food and make sure that your child is getting at least eight ounces of food a day."

Do you think your child is getting eight ounces of steak, or eight ounces of baloney?

You would feel better if the deal were, "Here are ten dollars. Spend all of them on my child's lunch. I'll see that you're well paid, but spend all ten dollars on my child's lunch."

The anti-public school crowd is going to say, "That gives me no guarantee that the sitter won't buy ten dollars' worth of baloney and skittles." And they are correct. We will still need to keep an eye on the sitter. But with the spend-it-all-on-lunch system, we have the possibility of a good steak for my child. At the very least, we have not created a system with the strong perverse incentive to screw over my child's meal in order for the sitter to stay in business. In a for-profit charter, the students are the enemy, the obstacle to making money. The main management problem remains, "How do we keep these kids from sucking up too much of our money."

Note: It's not really any different for most modern charter non--profits, if the operators pay themselves outsize salaries, like Eva Moskowitz at $500,000+ or Deborah Kenny at Harlem Village Academy at $475,000).

Forever Schools

You may well have seen some variation on this poster:

I've seen plenty of them (and we have a forever dog of our own).

This morning I came across this piece on Buzzfeed, of all places, talking about the beginning of the end for charter profiteers in general, and K12 in particular. And it reminded me of one more quality that distinguishes between modern profiteering charter schools and true public schools.

Public schools are forever schools, not until schools.

Public schools do not serve students until the financial returns get too low.

Public schools do not serve students until those students turn out to be too challenging.

Public schools do not serve students until they can't get away with lying about staff qualifications.

Public schools do not serve students until the students reveal learning disabilities.

Public schools do not serve students until the market presents a better investment opportunity.

Public schools do not serve students until the sponsoring corporation dissolves itself and disappears.

Public schools do not serve students until they can't get sweetheart deals from politicians any more.

Public schools do not serve students until they decide to just close up overnight with no notice.

Public schools do not serve students until the people running them feel like doing something else instead.

Public schools do not serve students until those students have to be pushed out for scoring too low on The Test.


A public school is a commitment. It's a community promising, "We will build this place to help our children learn and grow, and we will never, ever, close it for capricious or self-serving reasons. Families may come and go. Businesses may rise and fall. But when you come back here in a generation or two or three, you will find this school still standing."

It is true that forever schools don't really last forever (and our dog is not immortal, either). But the commitment is a forever commitment, a commitment that goes beyond individual staff, leaders, community members. The commitment is the community, past, present and future saying to their children and their children's children, "We will be right here, just as long as children need a safe place to learn and grow."

The modern profiteering charters make no such commitment. "We'll be right here," they say, "just as long as it serves our purposes."

There are cities, increasing in number, where leaders have trampled on the promise of public schools. Shame on those leaders, and shame on our national leaders who have encouraged the destruction of the public school promise. Wouldn't it be interesting if charter school companies had to sign contracts that, say, bound them to keeping a school open for ten, fifteen, twenty years whether they were making money or not. Wouldn't it be interesting if, in places like New Orleans, politicians had said, "You can open a charter school to replace the public school that used to be here, but you can't ever close it until we say you can. You must guarantee to provide educational services to the children of New Orleans as long as there are children in New Orleans." Public schools should be as permanent as any public institution can be. It is a huge ripoff to replace them with temporary schools having no more aspiration to permanence than the pop-up tent store selling Fourth of July fireworks.

In the meantime, the modern profiteering charters are just the educational version of the people who bring home puppies and a year later have taken them to the pound or abandoned them in the country or simply neglected them to death.

All pets should be forever pets. And all schools should be forever schools.

Super Quote Re: Public Vs. Private

Bruce Dixon at Black Agenda Report way back in February of 2013  a must-read article about privatization under the current administration.  Diane Ravitch quoted it earlier today, but I need to set it down, too, because this quote deserves to be handily located in everyone's mental file of Responses To The Same Old Reformster Arguments. So the next time somebody tries to tell you that the new wave of charter school chains are public schools, just tell them this:

On every level, the advocates of educational privatization strive to avoid using the p-word. They deliberately mislabel charter schools, just as unaccountable as every other private business in the land as “public charter schools,” because after all, they use public money. So do Boeing, Lockheed, General Dynamics, Bank of America and Goldman Sachs, but nobody calls these “public aerospace companies,” “public military contractors,” or “public banks.”

You get to call yourself a public institution when you are answerable to the public (say, by having your governing board members stand for election). You get to call yourself a public institution when any taxpayer who's paying for your shop to stay open can have full and transparent access to your financial information.Some charters, particularly the traditional ones, do this, and they deserve the "public" label.

But if your attitude is "Once that money is in our hands, it's our money and we don't have to explain anything to anybody," you are not a public institution. When it comes to "public," charter chains keep using that word, but I do not think it means what they think it means.

Why American public education is worth the fight

There's a danger in doing this kind of blog that one can get all wrapped up in anger and frustration and general irkedness, and I won't pretend for a minute that there aren't some real threats to the stability and future of American public education. But it's worth reminding myself from time to time why I care.

The US is a big gloriously polyglot mess of a country, stitched together out of pieces-parts from every other people on the planet. As such, we can only claim a handful of native art forms. Jazz, comics, maybe baseball. And true public education.

Only in America do we dump people from any and all backgrounds into the same building. Only in America do we let you pursue whatever dream of a future you can conjure up. Only in America have we put it down in law that one of your obligations as a citizen is to get an education.

We don't even make you vote, but we put the full force of law into making you learn to read and write.

We guarantee that every child, regardless of background and home life, will have at least one unrelated adult in his/her life who can provide good direction and model a healthy adult life. We guarantee that every child will have access to a place where every person is put in place to honor the needs of that child first and foremost-- not profits, productivity, or the good of the institution. As I tell my students every year, "You need to take advantage of this place. You will never again be surrounded by people whose only job is to look out for your best interests."

They say that home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in. But in America, there's one other place like that-- a public school.

American public schools collect everything there is to love and hate about our culture. American public schools display everything that is beautiful and everything that is broken about us as a people. American public schools are everything that we have to say about hopes and fears and aspirations for our future.

Given all that, of course American public schools capture all that is random and chaotic about life (as well as the very American fear and distrust of random chaos). As teachers, we know that we will leave a mark on the future, but we rarely know how. The moment that you built and planned and put all your effort behind vanishes into your students' pasts like a brief breath of wind, even as you discover that a few simple words you spoke decades ago have become a treasured guidepost in someone's journey.

American public schools are Democracy in action-- messy, tumultuous, contentious, inefficient, joyous, sprawling, striving, triumphant, rising, advancing, spirited, exhausting, reborn again and again and again. Do we contradict ourselves? Very well, we contradict ourselves. We are large. We contain multitudes.

I do not share warm-hearted stories. If you asked my students if I am warm and nurturing, they would laugh. But I believe in public education. I believe in it as an expression of our national character, and I believe there is nothing so awesome as varied young persons side by side finding their way to a greater understanding of themselves and each other, finding ways to be in the world, to be human, to be themselves.

Nothing else compares. Nothing.  American public school will never be a neatly manicured hyper-orderly efficiently unified system because America will never be that kind of country. That's okay. It's not a bug; it's a feature. The fight will never be over, but American public education will always be worth fighting for.