Is public education worth saving? 

That’s the question in the air these days.  

In the last century, the US academic system helped us reach the moon, defeat Communism and become the world’s largest super power.    

However, today our public schools are more damaged than ever before.  

An increasing number of families are leaving them for charter and voucher schools.  

Teachers are quitting their jobs in droves with few people willing to fill the vacancies they leave behind.

And above all, many people seem to think the schools, themselves, are failing. 

Isn’t it time to move on to something else? 

I’m here to tell you – no, it is not. 

In fact, we need to guard and cherish our public schools more than ever before. Because we face the real possibility of losing them for good.  

The Covid-19 pandemic on top of years of corporate sabotage and propaganda have obscured what public education really means and why it is absolutely necessary to the functioning of our society and any possibility of social, racial or economic justice. 

Let’s begin by looking at how the current disaster exacerbated an already difficult situation and then consider why we should care enough to fix the mess. 

The Pandemic Effect 

Public schools got a bloody nose from the Coronavirus crisis.

After decades of segregation, inequitable funding, incentives to privatize, and federally mandated standardized testing, it took a deadly virus to finally hobble the system.  

Being forced to contend with the uncertainties of Covid-19 damaged people’s faith in public education more than anything that had come before it. 

Issues of masking, contact tracing, safety of immunocompromised students and staff, and when to open or close buildings (among other issues) lead to inevitable dissatisfaction from all fronts.  

However, none of these issues should have been decided at the local level in the first place.  

These were issues of national significance. We needed a unified strategy to fight a global pandemic as it washed over our shores – not scattershot policies by part-time officials unequipped to deal with them. 

These problems should have been tackled by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and enforced by the federal government without deference to big business.  

Instead, the CDC made conflicting decisions based more on the needs of the economy than public health (many of which were roundly ignored anyway). Then federal and state governments either refused to decide safety protocols leaving it up to individuals or municipalities, or when they did decide matters, they were embroiled in partisan battles over any kind of restrictions.  

In fact, it was the failure of federal, state and even local municipal governments that often made public schools the de facto legislators of last resort. And this is something they were never meant to be. 

Public health should be decided by scientists not school directors. 

The result was widespread dissatisfaction no matter what school boards decided and an exodus of students and faculty. 

Many families, upset at local school board decisions, enrolled their children in charter, cyber or voucher schools.  

Overall, charters saw a 7% increase in enrollment – an influx of roughly 240,000 students -during the 2020-21 school year, according to a new report from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. This is the largest increase in five years. By comparison, public school enrollment dropped by 3.3% – or 1.4 million students – in the same period. 

The biggest increases were in cyber charter schools. For example, in Pennsylvania 99.7 percent of the charter enrollment growth occurred in virtual charter schools. Enrollment at the Commonwealth’s 14 cyber charter schools swelled from about 38,000 students in October 2019 to more than 60,000 students in October 2020, according to the Pennsylvania Department of Education. 

But it wasn’t just students leaving our public schools. It was staff, too. 

Teachers and other school employees who felt unsafe or were crushed by the incredible pressure thrust on their shoulders either quit or retired in droves.  

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are 567,000 fewer educators in our public schools today than there were before the pandemic. And finding replacements has been difficult. Nationwide, an average of one educator is hired for every two jobs available. 

This has left us with a weakened system suffering from more problems than before the pandemic hit.

Why Are Public Schools Important? 

Because of what they are and what they represent.  

We hear about public education so often – usually in deprecating terms – that we forget exactly what the term signifies.  

A public school is a school meant for everybody and anybody.  

It is a school where any child can go to get an education.  

You don’t have to pay tuition. You don’t have to have a special ability or qualification. You don’t have to be neurotypical, a certain race, ethnicity, belong to a certain faith or socioeconomic status. If you’re living in the US – even if you’re here illegally – you get to go there.  

That may seem simple, but it is vitally important and really quite special.  

Not all nations have robust systems of public education like we do in the US. 

This country has a commitment to every single child regardless of what their parents can afford to pay, regardless of their access to transportation, regardless of whether they can afford uniforms, lunch or even if they have a home.  

We simply define education differently. We look at it as a right, not a privilege. And for a full 13 years (counting kindergarten) it’s a right for every child, not just some. 

Perhaps even more significant is our commitment to children with special needs. 

We have developed a special education system to help children at the edges that many other countries just can’t touch. In some nations these students are simply excluded. In others they are institutionalized. In some countries it’s up to parents to find ways to pay for special services. The United States is one of the only countries where these children are not only included and offered full and free access, but the schools go above and beyond to teach these children well beyond their 12th academic year. 

In every authentic public school in the United States these students are included. In math, reading, science and social studies, they benefit from instruction with the rest of the class. And this, in turn, benefits even our neurotypical students who gain lessons in empathy and experience the full range of human abilities. 

That isn’t to say the system has ever been perfect. Far from it. 

There are plenty of ways we could improve. Even before the pandemic, we were incredibly segregated by race and class. Our funding formulas were often regressive and inadequate. Schools serving mostly poor students didn’t have nearly the resources of those serving rich students.

But at least at the very outset what we were trying to do was better than what most of the world takes on. You can’t achieve equity if it isn’t even on the menu. 

Without public schools, equity is definitely not on offer. 

Public is Better Than Private 

That’s really the point.  

Charter, cyber and voucher schools are not set up around this ideal.  

They are not instruments of inclusion. They are instruments of exclusion.  

They are about who is sent away, not about letting everyone in.  

The United States is a big country – the third most populous in the world. We have 332,630,000 people and growing. That’s about 50 million students in public schools. 

No private system in the world has ever been able to work at that scale. If we lose our public schools, many kids will be left wanting.  

The market-driven approach does not guarantee an education. It guarantees competition for an education. 

It forces students to compete to get into schools and schools to compete for their very existence. Think of how that affects instruction. Schools have to spend a considerable amount of time and money attracting students to enroll. That’s time and money that doesn’t go to education. It goes to advertising. 

Moreover, any school that attracts a surplus of students can choose which ones its wants to enroll. The choice becomes the school’s – not the parents’ or students’. In fact, administrators can turn away students for any reason – race, religion, behavior, special needs, how difficult it would be to teach him or her. This is much different from authentic public schools. There, any student who lives in the district may attend regardless of factors such as how easy or difficult he or she is to educate. 

Another major change with this approach is how privatized schools are run. Many are operated behind closed doors without the input of a duly-elected school board, without transparency for how they spend tax dollars, without even the guide rails of most regulations. 

Like in the charter school sector, these schools get almost free reign to do whatever they want.  

This means corporate interests get to run charter schools while cutting services and increasing profits. In fact, administrative costs at charter schools are much higher than at traditional public schools. Students lose, the market wins. 

Moreover, many charter schools provide a sub-par education. To put it more bluntly, they do things that would be impossible for public schools to do. One in Philadelphia literally transformed into a nightclub after dark. Another funneled profits into the CEO’s personal bank account to be used as a slush fund to buy gifts and pay for rent at an apartment for his girlfriend. Another CEO used tax dollars to buy a yacht cheekily called “Fishin’ 4 Schools.”  

And virtual charter schools are even worse. A study found that cyber-charters provide almost less education than not going to school at all. Even brick and mortar charter schools can close on a moments notice leaving students in the lurch. 

It’s a Darwinian model made to benefit the predators, not the prey. It’s a boon for any unselfconscious businessman who doesn’t mind getting rich stealing an education from children. 

We Must Fight 

That’s why we must fight to keep our public schools.  

As flawed and bruised as they are, the public school model is far superior to the alternative.  

But many will look only at their own individual situation and stop there.  

They will say, “At MY charter school we do this…” Or “That’s not the way things are at MY voucher academy…” 

First of all, a well-functioning privatized school is like a castle built precariously on a cliff. Things may work well now, but they could change at any moment and there’s nothing you could do but vote with your feet. When authentic public schools go bad, you have a democratic process to fix the problem.

But you may luck out. Every privatized school isn’t a scam. Just most of them. So if you have found a charter, cyber or voucher school that is working for your child and doesn’t self-destruct in the time your child is enrolled, you may wonder why you should worry about the rest of us – the kids caught up in a web of privatized predation and neglect?  

Because it’s not all about you and your child. Selfishness cannot be the foundation of a just society.

Even a well-functioning charter or voucher school is publicly funded. It splits the funding that would normally go to one school and divides it among two or more. So students at both have to make do with less. 

You have to live in this society. Do you really want to live in a country with a large population of undereducated citizens who cannot figure out how to vote in their own interests? Do you really want to live in a society where crime is a better career choice for those who were not properly educated.

That’s why we can’t let public education disappear.  

It is a necessary condition for democracy, shared economic prosperity and a just society.  

I know it may sound like an insurmountable task, but saving our public schools can be done.  

It will require collective action. 

We will need to actively participate in our school board elections, go to school board meetings and possibly even run to serve on the board, ourselves. 

Many people are upset with what local boards did during the pandemic, but the way to solve this isn’t to flee to schools without democratic principles. It is to seize those principles and make them work for you and your community. 

We will need to change the way our system treats teachers. If we want to encourage educators to stay on the job and even entice young people to enter the field, we need to make the profession more rewarding. That means higher salaries, more autonomy, more respect, smaller classes, less paperwork, and actually listening to educators on the subject of education.  

We also need to discontinue countless policies and programs that have been dragging our public schools down for decades. We need to eliminate high stakes standardized testing. We need to ensure every school is adequately, equitably and sustainably funded. We need to actively integrate our schools and classrooms. We need to stop supporting privatization through charter and voucher schools and instead support authentic public schools.  

And to do that, we need real political change at every level of government – local, municipal, state and federal.  

None of this is easy. All of it takes work.  

But it is the fight we must wage if we are ever to keep our democracy.  

It is the fight we must win to create the better world our children deserve.  

Public schools are worth saving, but it is up to you and me to do it.