Common schools create the public good

David Labaree has spent his career examining why and how private interests corrupt public institutions. As he argues in his book, Someone Has to Fail (2010), even as Americans expanded access to public schools, they sorted themselves. For K-12 schools, this sorting included internal tracking and, of course, residential segregation by class and race. Voters reinforced these inequalities by ensuring that school district boundaries separated the haves from the have-nots. For colleges, sorting depended on developing a pyramid with elite schools at the top. Not all diplomas and degrees would be created equal. Children who attended the “right” schools would receive an education with greater market value. The result, as Labaree argues in the above essay, is that Americans seek credentials for their market value, rather than an education for its personal or civic value.

In his response, Eric Hanushek argues that it is possible that schooling also develops students’ actual skills. It may not all be signaling. Yet, in making this claim, Hanushek ignores Labaree’s larger point: if education is a public good, we have to consider its value more broadly, as accruing not just to the student but to society. Despite Hanushek’s concerns as “the economist,” Labaree’s argument is grounded in economics. Economists argue that individuals will underinvest in public goods absent government intervention. If education is a public good, it is because its benefits—civic and economic—are widely shared. Moreover, because public education prepares citizens, it requires a curriculum designed for more than developing human capital. It demands a broader liberal education so that all Americans have the skills, the knowledge, and what our nation’s founders called the “virtue” to be capable voters.

If Labaree has devoted his career to thinking about how private interests can corrupt public institutions, he spends less attention on how public institutions might overcome private interests. However, in the history of public education, I argue in my recent book Democracy’s Schools, we see both processes at work simultaneously. Americans learned to consider education as a public good not just because of abstract ideas but because of actual institutions.