The Coming Demise of Public Education
How the War on Public Education Will Steal Our Children’s Future, Part 1
This is the first essay in Civic Way’s series on primary and secondary education. In this essay, we tackle one of the most ominous—and least understood—threats to America’s future, the stealth war on public education. The author, Bob Melville, is the founder of Civic Way, a nonprofit dedicated to good government, and a management consultant with over 45 years of experience improving public agencies.
Highlights:
America has long benefitted from a bipartisan commitment to public education, building an educational system that became the cornerstone of our nation’s rise to global prominence
As the radical right has turned its focus onto dismantling public education, our bipartisan political consensus for reforming public education has shattered
School choice, once a battle cry for fostering competition and improving public schools, has become a fig leaf for universal voucher programs, defunding public schools and evading accountability
For many evangelical leaders, universal voucher programs offer the best mechanism yet for transforming K-12 schools from an instrument of job preparation into one of moral molding
To defeat the extreme right’s plan to dismantle public education, we must first understand it
The Shattered Political Consensus
My goal is to cut government in half in 25 years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub. – Grover Norquist
There was a time when America’s leaders grasped that public education was critical to our economic competitiveness, our shared prosperity and our democracy. In recent years, however, anti-government zealots, in their rabid lust to “drown government in the bathtub,” have lost sight of what made America great.
Through much of its history, America enjoyed a bipartisan commitment to public education, building a system that became the cornerstone of our nation’s rise to global prominence. After the 1983 Nation at Risk report, that bipartisan consensus shifted to improving our public education system.
By the turn of the 21st century, leaders from both parties coalesced around a comprehensive educational reform agenda. Public charter schools. Competitive teacher compensation. Rigorous instructional standards (e.g., common core curriculum). Accountability, student testing and school ratings. Hopes were high across the political spectrum that such reforms would improve overall performance and reduce racial achievement gaps.
Today, while public school enrollment remains high[i], the bipartisan political consensus for reforming public education has shattered. The radical right, perhaps emboldened by other victories, has become obsessed with dismantling public education. School choice, once sold as a strategy for fostering competition, protecting religious freedom and improving public schools, has become little more than an empty slogan.
The radical right’s aim now, as evidenced by its promotion of universal voucher programs, is the defunding of public schools and evasion of oversight for private schools. For many evangelical leaders, the ultimate goal is to transform K-12 schools from an instrument of job preparation into one of moral molding.
The Rise and Reform of Public Education
Initially, America’s education sector was dominated by private academies. During the mid-19th Century, public education began with small community-sponsored, single-teacher public schools with multi-grade classrooms. Before the Civil War, northern states began building common (public) school networks with grade-separated classrooms, trained teachers and compulsory attendance laws. During Reconstruction, public schools began emerging in the South[ii]. The US Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson “separate but equal” enabled many states to establish racially-separate schools and underfund black schools.
During the 20th Century, the nation’s state-local public education system, expanded and prospered. Most public-school districts operated as autonomous local entities (sometimes with county oversight) under state guidelines. The federal government provided limited fiscal support and relatively few mandates (Title 1 is one important exception). In 1954, the US Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education ruling banned discrimination against students based on race or gender, but many communities resisted school desegregation and public-school districts remain largely segregated due to zoning and housing factors.
In 1989, President George H.W. Bush convened a national governor’s summit on education. Led by then Governor Bill Clinton, the governors adopted a national school reform agenda including charter schools and testing. In 1994, President Clinton launched a $6 million federal program to spur new charter schools[iii].
In 2002, President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law threatened failing schools with closure. At the state-level, under Governor Jeb Bush’s leadership, a bipartisan education movement promoted reforms like charter schools, standardized tests and school performance ratings. In 2009, Obama launched the Race to the Topprogram, a $4.4 billion competitive grant for states committed to national (Common Core) standards, test-based assessments and low-performing school changes.
The Tragic Politicization of Public Education
After 41 states initially adopted Common Core, reform began to stall. Some early state adopters opted out. The GOP made it a partisan issue, calling Common Core a threat to local control. While Congress reauthorized the No Child Left Behind as Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) in 2015, it prohibited the Education Department from influencing, incentivizing or coercing state adoption of Common Core.
As the GOP saw potential political gains in politicizing public education, it became more intentional about defunding it. Anti-government extremists, once a small minority within the party, convinced others to shift from reforming public education to ending it. Christian fundamentalists mounted a crusade to demonize public schools as “godless and immoral” and promote religious schools as the antidote.
GOP talking points, once limited to inane pledges to eliminate the Department of Education, spread to include amorphous terms like parental control. Partisan fissures began to subject the long-standing bipartisan reform coalition to enormous strain.
The pandemic widened the partisan gap on public education. It motivated partisan extremists to exploit public anxiety concerning school closure and mask mandates. It fueled inflammatory rhetoric on cultural issues like wokeness, racial history and LGBT+ tolerance. It spurred deep-pocketed campaigns to censor library books and vilify local school boards. It provided cover for enacting vouchers and tax-credit scholarship programs, one of the most brazen attempts to seize public moneys for private interests in our nation’s history.
The pandemic also effectively ended the bipartisan public education reform era—perhaps irrevocably—and paved the way for a callous ideological campaign to end public education as we know it.
The Campaign to Strangle Public Education
We may be slow or even reluctant to accept it, but there is a well-orchestrated, phased campaign to destroy, or at least destabilize, public education in America, and that movement is gathering force in several states. It has come a long way since 1955 when Milton Friedman argued that government schools were intrinsically inefficient and that parents should be given public funds to buy education in the marketplace.
The anti-public education movement is undoubtably more politically powerful today than in the mid-20th Century. However, the crusade’s leaders have failed to develop the kind of competitive market that Friedman contemplated. It has even failed to validate the concept as a prudent expenditure of public funds. It is difficult to conceive of a process more slapdash and less transparent than the rash enactment of state voucher programs in GOP-controlled states like Florida.
As much as he detested government, even Friedman would be appalled by the waste and fraud that these bills will likely produce—and the utter lack of the most rudimentary checks and balances.
From a purely political perspective, however, the war on public education has been astonishing. Not just for its secrecy and rashness, but its cunning. Extremists may have always wanted to turn public schools into religious indoctrination camps, but they knew they couldn’t sell that idea until the time was right. In the states where such extreme views now prevail, the time is now right—there is no need to hide the end game.
Perhaps their plan was apparent all along. Perhaps those of us who care about public education and democracy simply failed to connect the dots. Perhaps the phased rollout of their strategy lulled us into believing that the extremists really wanted to improve public education. Perhaps we were too gullible in our good faith efforts to secure a bipartisan consensus to recognize their true intentions.
Regardless, we must see the extremist strategy clearly before we mount the requisite campaign to defeat or overturn it. As dishonest and diabolical as it is brilliant, the movement to strangle public education has involved five overall phases over many years, as follows:
Phase 1 – Fund, organize and mobilize the campaign
Phase 2 – Exploit public education reform demands to sell charter schools
Phase 3 – Exploit pandemic fears to delegitimize public education and spur homeschooling interest.
Phase 4 – Force private school voucher programs on an unsuspecting public
Phase 5 – Give public funds to private religious schools
In our next essay, we will describe these phases in more detail and assess the potential benefits, costs and ramifications of the radical ideas underlying the anti-public education movement.