Were common schools truly common?

David Labaree convincingly argues that between the 19th century and the present, our nation’s educational ideals have shifted from an emphasis on creating citizens, which was central to the founding of the Common School movement, to a narrow focus on private educational gain, mainly benefiting the wealthy and well connected. In describing the phenomenon, he says,

“At a deeper level, as we have privatized our vision of public schooling, we have shown a willingness to back away from the social commitment to the public good that motivated the formation of the American republic and the common school system. We have grown all too comfortable in allowing the fate of other people’s children to be determined by the unequal competition among consumers for social advantage through schooling.”

I admire Labaree’s passion for a shared and expansive vision of educational access. However, I also wonder why he neglects to point out that his narrative about the origins of the common schools applies primarily to White male citizens of means. Women, Latinos, Native Americans, and Black people, for example, tend to have a very complicated relationship to the very concept of citizenship upon which the Common School movement was based. To turn our attention to their histories is to raise the possibility that the nation’s educational ideals haven’t shifted quite as seismically as Labaree would suggest. Education has always been about winners and losers, the advantaged and the less so. Opportunity hoarding and the pursuit of private gain were very much part of the early chapters of American education.

In my recent work, Cutting School: Privatization, Segregation, and the end of Public Education (The New Press, 2017), I tell a somewhat different story about the use, meaning, and possibilities of public education. I begin not with the Common School movement but with the Post-Reconstruction period following the Civil War, when compulsory and state supported education became widespread. Starting there, what I found is that since the earliest days in which tax-supported public education was conceived and implemented, there have been intractable tensions within the ways in which economics or race — or both — determine the funding, form, and purpose of education in America. These differences based on gender, color, and class have remained in effect throughout the history of our public schools, and they remain so today. Viewed from this perspective, the nature of education has remained more constant than Labaree suggests.

Rather than educating all children in the same way as we educate the wealthy, we have always, in every period, provided some children with lesser educational content (e.g., consider the recurring focus, beginning in the 19th century, on vocational education for the poor) and unproven models of educational funding and delivery (e.g., the recent rise of virtual charter schools). In short, we have always acted upon differing visions of the role of education in relation to citizenship. Our school systems have always steered the greatest educational resources and opportunities to the wealthy and well connected, and significantly less to poor communities and those of color.

It is worth noting also that separate, segregated, and unequal education has provided the opportunity for businesses to make a profit selling idiosyncratic forms of schooling (cyber education, for instance) to communities who believe deeply in education’s promise and potential to confer on them citizenship. In recent years, what I call “segrenomics” — the business of profiting from high levels of racial and economic segregation in our schools — has been on the rise, but it has long been with us. From the 19th century to the present, our schools have always been separate and unequal. And separate and unequal schooling has always been profitable, too.

This is an invited response to “Public schools for private gain: The declining American commitment to serving the public good” by David Labaree.