Public education has become a structure in which students become career-ready, as opposed to world-ready.

In 1848, Horace Mann, considered by many the “father” of public education in the U.S., argued that a public education system would be “a great equalizer of the conditions of men.” In 2011, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan echoed this sentiment, proclaiming, “In America, education is still the great equalizer” (Rhode, Cooke, & Himanshu-Ojha, 2012). Yet, all evidence seems to suggest the opposite.

According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, students’ achievement in literacy and math has improved very little over the past 50 years (Rothwell, 2016). Moreover, any gains made are tremendously inequitable. For instance, in my home state of New Jersey, politicians gloat that New Jersey has the best public education rankings in the country (Murphy, 2020), yet the data demonstrate a 28-41 point difference between white and Black students’ performance (National Center for Education Statistics, 2020). Long-standing national outcome gaps also exist for students of different demographics in SAT scores (Smith & Reeves, 2020) and Advanced Placement exam scores (Jaschik, 2019). While the method of gathering these data is far from ideal, one thing is clear: Public education has not been equalizing.

Considering our purpose

The inequities within U.S. public education should not be surprising. Public education in the U.S. exists to serve the economic structure by preparing students for the market economy.

While early advocates, including Horace Mann (1848) himself, advocated for a public education system that reflected and promoted civic participation, they also noted the economic benefits. In his 1841 Fifth Annual Report, Mann argued for public education by estimating the economic value that a public education could produce (Vinovskis, 1970). This tie between the economy and the purpose of education has persisted into the present, where President Joe Biden’s educational platform is almost entirely based on helping students “succeed in tomorrow’s economy” (Biden Harris Democrats, n.d.). Given how our economic structures create inequalities, is it at all surprising that a public education system built to support these structures will continue to perpetuate these inequalities?

When politicians claim that we need to educate our young people so we can better compete against China or other powers for economic power, not only are they wielding public education to heighten tensions between countries, but they are suggesting that the primary purpose of public education is to create young employees, rather than to produce healthy, empathetic, and civically active humans. This emphasis shifts the conversation around public education toward strategies to improve test scores and ranked lists. In framing public education in this manner, those in power perpetuate the inequalities and ineffectiveness that have plagued public education for decades.

As a high school educator operating within this system of public education, where the pressures to mold students into “career-ready” individuals surpasses all else, these messages become difficult to reconcile. If the purpose of public education is to ensure students become effective participants in our wider economy, is my job as a teacher, then, to make students into great employees? Are the grades given to students less a reflection of their development and more an indicator for future employers about the degree to which they will obediently work on an unappealing task? Despite becoming a teacher to foster progressive change, am I — and so many others — ensuring the perpetuation of inequality in perpetuity? When the vast majority of educators come into the profession to make a difference (Ni & Rorrer, 2018) and to contribute to the greater societal good, is it any surprise that so many become disillusioned and jaded when facing the fact that they can’t?

As the purpose of education becomes more tied to how well students can serve the economy, the outcomes are more standardization, testing, accountability, and ranking. In effect, this translates into teachers doing less actual teaching, which encourages students to question their realities and interact with societal issues, and more test-coaching, which encourages students to be passive regurgitators. In essence, the very purpose of teachers in this system has become explicitly to continue the system in place. Educators are no longer teachers, but mere career coaches functioning to ensure that students become “successful” employees, grateful for the extraction of their value, or “successful” employers, effective in their extraction.

Missing the point of education

So often, debates about and within education are about the how and the what of education. The debates around the value of charter schools, merit pay for teachers, high-stakes testing, teacher accountability, classroom pedagogy, class sizes, discipline practices, and more miss the point: What do we want the function of public education to be?

Because those in power have legislated that the purpose of education is economic utility, we have passively accepted a reality where a teacher will enter students’ grades into a for-profit grading software for an assignment where students read a textbook created by a for-profit company that attempts to prepare students for a for-profit standardized test. It seems we are closer than we may think to Christopher Wittle’s dystopian attempt at providing schools with media equipment so long as they played two minutes of commercials daily (Miller, 1992). Is it just a matter of time before our educators perform a lesson for students after saying, “this lesson was sponsored by Samsung”? The intrusion of the market economy into public education is intentional and serves to perpetuate the tie between competition, education, and economic utility.

Instead of becoming distracted by the divisions of what and how, we need to center the why of education; the proper what and how will become much clearer if we know the why.

Educators need to push back against the assumption that the purpose of public education is to maintain a successful economy. Instead of becoming distracted by the divisions of what and how, we need to center the why of education; the proper what and how will become much clearer if we know the why. A school’s policies regarding testing, class size, homework assignments, start time, disciplinary practices, and grading systems will look vastly different if developing empathy, rather than career readiness, is its central purpose.

The student experience

As  we consider how to reframe our purpose, we mustn’t forget how the messages we send about the purpose of education affect students. Students internalize the implicit messages that our educational system provides. For instance, at the end of long chat with a student in my homeroom — where attendance is taken but grades aren’t assigned — the student said to me, “You know that I actually want to talk to you because I don’t have you as a teacher for a class, so it’s not for a grade. That’s how you know I actually care to chat!” This student recognizes that the public education system values grades above all else and that the field is competitive.

If students view their relationships with teachers as transactional, a polite talk with the teacher may benefit or damage their grade, which may then affect their chances when applying to colleges. What a lesson this student has learned! And when this student is eventually employed, perhaps they will pretend to be friends with their manager in hopes that they will get a good evaluation and will be promoted or get a raise. The student has become the perfect employee in our market economy, willing to be agreeable to their employer at whatever the cost so long as it may benefit them in some material way. There were no lessons for the student in being authentic, standing up for what they believe in, or sacrificing personal benefit for the sake of the larger community. They learned nothing about the inherent power imbalances between student and teacher or employee and employer, the examination of self, the importance of aiding those in need, or the importance of empathy. Rather, they were taught the exact opposite: View everything as transactional, please those who may enrich you, the world is competitive, and you must fight for your share.

My hope is that we can pivot the conversation about public education away from the what or how, and more toward the why. I hope that we can see that the marriage between public education and economic utility perpetuates inequalities, continues oppression, and stifles our role as progressive change agents and turns us into pawns in the larger economic structure. I hope that we advocate for policy and education standards that focus less on getting students to be “career-ready” and more on helping them become empathetic, conscientious, and global humans. Let’s see the current trend of legislators and parents attempting to defund school initiatives, demonize teachers, and legislate what can and cannot be taught for what it is: an attempt to further shift public education into a privatized entity to perpetuate economic structures.   

References

Biden Harris Democrats. (n.d.). The Biden plan for educators, students, and our future.

Jaschik, S. (2019, February 11). More AP success; racial gaps remain. Inside Higher Ed.

Mann, H. (1848). Twelfth annual report to the secretary of the Massachusetts State Board of Education.

Miller, M.C. (1992, September 9). A dose of propaganda with no education value . . . Channel One comes to the city. The Baltimore Sun.

Murphy, P. [@GovMurphy]. (2020, April 9). New Jersey has the best public schools in the nation because we have the best educators in the nation. [Tweet]. Twitter. https://twitter.com/govmurphy/status/1248360905328517124

National Center for Education Statistics. (2020). The Nation’s Report Card: New Jersey student groups and gaps. U.S. Department of Education.

Ni, Y. & Rorrer, A.K. (2018) Why do teachers choose teaching and remain teaching: Initial results from the Educator Career and Pathway Survey (ECAPS) for teachers. Utah Education Policy Center.

Rhode, D., Cooke, K., & Ojha, H. (2012, December 19). The decline of the “great equalizer.” The Atlantic.

Rothwell, J. (2017, December 23). The declining productivity of education. Brookings Institution.

Smith, E. & Reeves, R.V. (2020, December 1.) SAT math scores mirror and maintain racial inequity. Brookings Institution.

Vinovskis, M. (1970). Horace Mann on the economic productivity of education. The New England Quarterly, 43 (4), 550-571.

This article appears in the April 2023 issue of Kappan, Vol. 104, No. 7, pp. 54-57.