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.
For most Americans, support for public schools did not depend on the rhetoric of elite leaders such as Thomas Jefferson or Horace Mann. Instead, Americans supported public schools because they were involved with them. The institutions preceded the commitment. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, in towns across America, legislators spurred citizens to come together in local districts to raise taxes, hire schoolteachers, and build schoolhouses. By working together as neighbors, Americans learned that they had common interests. As more parents sent their children to common schools, even more Americans wanted in. It became an expectation. This feedback loop reinforced Americans’ commitment to public schooling.
In other words, common institutions transformed parents’ private interests in their children into a shared interest in the education of others. Mann, secretary to the Massachusetts Board of Education in the 1830s, knew it. He believed that the best way to expand public schooling was to make every family a stakeholder in the schools. Wealthier families would invest in other people’s children only if their own children attended the same schools and benefited from them. If some families decided to “turn away from the Common Schools” and send their children to a “private school or the academy,” poorer children would end up with a second-class education, he wrote in 1837. To ensure that students and their parents came together as a public, “there should be a free school, sufficiently safe, and sufficiently good, for all the children” in every district. The constituency for the public schools would be forged through the schools themselves.
Today, advocates of private school vouchers, for-profit schools, or privately-run charter schools argue that they are empowering families without wealth to make the same kinds of choices for their children as do wealthier parents. And to an extent, they are right. As Labaree shows, wealthier families have long used their resources to get their children into the “right” schools in the “right” school districts. In other words, the private interests of families have produced a system rife with inequality. We must right these wrongs. To do so requires a shared commitment to education as a public good. If, historically, it took common institutions to cultivate this commitment, we must ask ourselves what might happen to that commitment if Americans no longer go to school together.
This is an invited response to “Public schools for private gain: The declining American commitment to serving the public good” by David Labaree.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Johann Neem
JOHANN N. NEEM is a professor of history at Western Washington University, in Bellingham. He is the author of Democracy’s Schools: The Rise of Public Education in America and What’s the Point of College? Seeking Purpose in an Age of Reform .
