There has been an exodus of families from public schools, we are told. Total enrollment this year is down 1.2 million students from 2020, with projected declines into 2030. Though declining birthrates appear to be the likeliest culprit, media reporting can’t help speculate about other possible reasons: mask mandates, prolonged remote instruction, they/them/their, and a right-wing campaign to delegitimize public schools.
The anxiety coursing through the coverage is palpable, and it can feel like if you’re reading another story about the ever-shrinking Siberian tundra.
No essay evinces this anxiety more than Anya Kamenetz’s “Public School is For Everyone,” part of the Times’ “What is School For?” series they published at the beginning of the month.
Kamenetz’s argument is straightforward and familiar to anyone who’s gone through a teacher’s ed program: public schools unite Americans and are literally where democracy starts. As “hubs of togetherness,” public schools are “where students grapple together with our messy history and learn to negotiate differences of race, class, gender and sexual orientation.” But their existence is under threat, Kamenetz warns. The pandemic reminded Americans how vital public schools were but also weakened their trust in them. This has only “emboldened a movement on the right that has for more than half a century sought to dismantle public education and the idea that Americans from diverse backgrounds should learn alongside one another.” Irate parents are yanking their kids out of local schools all over the country and, according to Kamenetz, this puts our democracy on life support: “If we lose public education, flawed as it is, the foundations of our democracy will slip. Not only the shared knowledge base but also the skills of citizenship itself: communication, empathy and compromise across differences.”
But how true is this? What is it specifically about public schools that make them more vital to democracy than, say, parochial schools? Is it the very fact that they just are public schools? Or is it their curriculum? Is it the demographics of their student body? Just how meaningfully different are public schools from non-public schools? What percentage of kids need to attend public schools in order to ensure our democracy persists?
I’m not sure I know the answers to these questions, but I do think they’re worth asking, however blasphemous they may first appear.
And full disclosure before I attempt to answer at least a few: I do not live on Park Avenue and send my child to Dalton. I am also not a Libertarian, or a school choice hawk, or a father pissed off that his kid’s school kept the mask mandate for too long or started teaching the Tulsa Race Massacre. Rather, I attended public schools, proudly draw my paycheck from one and always will, and am of the admittedly cynical opinion that many private or religious schools basically exist to satisfy parents’ status anxieties or provide cover for their race and class prejudices.
And yet.
There was something about Kamenetz’s essay that didn’t feel true, and it left me wondering whether the claim that public schools are the “crucible of democracy” is actually little more than a bromide — at least in 2022 — and if all the handwringing about the general fitness of American public schools post-pandemic is yet another example of adults projecting their own anxieties about the condition of our country onto our schools (see also: every single book ban or curriculum fight ever, sex education, Sputnik, transgender bathrooms) and, in doing so, choosing to wield schools as tools to achieve their own desired political and social ends. And, at least in this case, the anxiety about public schools’ rosters distracts us from what actually matters, which is not where our students learn but that they learn, and in a manner that allows them to actually flourish and not just satisfy our own outdated notions of what a student should be.
To begin with, let’s take the premise that our public schools, with their spectacular diversity, prepare students to “learn to negotiate differences of race, class, gender and sexual orientation.” I very much wish this were true, but, sadly, most American public schools are by no accounting diverse.
A recent analysis by the Government Accountability Office found that one third of students attended schools in which 75% of the students were one race or ethnicity, and 15% attended schools where 90% of students were one race or ethnicity. A recent report from Stanford and the University of California found that, in spite of the growing overall diversity of our K-12 student population, school segregation has increased in the last 30 years, most especially in the largest 100 districts, which educate 40% of all public school students. And not by a little, either: economic segregation grew by 50% since 1991, and white-black segregation grew by 35%.
There is no place where this is more true than New York City, which despite its exceptional diversity, has the most segregated school district in the country. My own personal experience bears this out: in my ten years here, I’ve had two white students and zero wealthy or even upper-middle class students in spite of the fact that my school is blocks from multi-million dollar brownstones and grand mansions.
I have little doubt that public schools, on average, are probably more racially and socio-economically diverse than private or religious schools, but to claim they are “hubs of togetherness” in the racial and socio-economic sense is false, and to imply that parents who pull their kids from public schools are putting our democracy at risk by contributing to the atomization of our country fails to acknowledge that the homogenization of public schools isn’t just happening across districts — which suggests residential patterns heavily influenced by regional economic forces — it’s happening within districts, i.e. at the neighborhood level, which suggests that public school parents, even proudly progressive ones, quite skillfully deviously play the game of school choice in order to secure the “best” school for their kids.
So while we should very much worry about the composition of our public schools, it’s not because the marvelous diversity of Roosevelt Elementary supposedly prepares students for the marvelous diversity of American society. That’s a platitude, and platitudes exist to affirm the virtuous beliefs we have about ourselves.
Rather, we should be foremost concerned with the more immediate consequences of segregated schools, which is that they widen the achievement gap for poor students and students of color, who are often left to languish in schools of concentrated poverty.
Running beneath the surface of Kamenetz’s essay is a critique of conservative parents. I am not wont to defend a group of people who are more frightened of books than guns, but those in glass houses.
Second, with the exception of orthodox religious schools and off-the-wall progressive schools, what and how students learn in non-public schools is not terribly different than what and how they learn in public schools.
School is school is school is school.
With regards to curriculum, even though laws governing private schools differ from state to state, granting private schools significant leeway in what they teach, most are required to provide an education that is comparable to that of public schools. Even still, there is broad agreement that for K-12 education, a liberal arts education is ideal. Math, science, English, history, the arts, etc.
It’s so commonplace we don’t even question it, but if there are any schools you know of that eschew the 3 R’s for training young boys in the Spartan art of war, please email me here.
And though there might be disagreement from time to time about which aspects of American history we should teach or what books students should read in their English classes, the hysterical coverage of those disputes dramatically overestimates how much of an impact the inclusion or exclusion of a book or historical event or perspective has on an overall curriculum and on students’ learning. Some of this has to do with the staggering amount of content teachers are expected to cover (ask a U.S. history teacher how many class periods they spend on the Depression), but some of it also has to with the fact that as students grow older school becomes so stultifyingly dull that they barely know what’s happening in their classes. (More on that in a sec.)
Which is all to say that there are not competing doctrines of history or math or science (Creationism notwithstanding) we indoctrinate our students into the way there are competing doctrines of religion. A student who graduates from Concordia Preparatory School will not graduate with a significantly different understanding of U.S. history than a student who has graduated from Jemez Valley High School.
And in terms of how students are taught, studies large and larger have confirmed not just the sameness of American classrooms from one to the next, but also from one era to the next, which, unfortunately, means lots of “teacher talk,” as educators refer to it, and lots of students sitting a lot at desks, passively receiving information, bored to tears. Though most of those studies focused on public school, there’s no reason to suspect private or religious schools are exceptions to the rule since they tend to be more traditional in their curriculum and pedagogy.
To parents, a school’s philosophy or facilities or whether the kids wear uniforms or not may meaningfully differentiate it (to them) from the next school, but the broad contours of what school is as we’ve conceived it — age-graded classrooms, discrete subjects taught as such, credit accumulation based on seat time, teacher-centered instruction — determine what happens in classrooms more than any other factor and, in fact, have created a model of education so durable that no innovation (computers, e.g.) or reform (pick one) has really changed it all that much. Your grandma’s classroom probably wouldn’t look different from your kid’s and, what’s more, neither do the ones in private schools.
Ultimately, there’s but so much you can do when you’re responsible for teaching algebra to 27 students four days a week for 48 minutes at time for ten months out of the year, and every teacher comes to realize just how tight the restraints are when they experiment with various classroom set ups (stations, group work, project-based learning, etc.) or change schools or revamp their curriculum because they went to a workshop over the summer about trauma-informed teaching. Further constraints include non-teaching duties, instructional mandates from on high, teacher evaluations, and pressures for students to excel on external assessments (state tests, AP exams, etc.). These constraints exist for most teachers everywhere, and if not these exactly, then others, like pushy parents or a broken copier, which equally limit what you can and can’t do in a classroom.
School, basically, is Taco Bell: the same 5 ingredients, combined in almost infinite ways, yet still producing basically the same thing.
To take the wide socio-historical view, if there is another way to teach large groups of children year after year so that they can eventually function as adults and contribute to society, non-public schools aren’t doing it, and as far I know, another way doesn’t exist. Even classrooms in North Korea look like ours. They may learn their Great Leader was a god, but they also learn how to build bridges, too.
Essays panicking about the robustness of our public schools make the same mistake that endorsements of school choice do: both believe that the health and direction of our country will be largely determined by where our students sit. To some extent this is true, but not for the reasons Kamenetz fears, for the breach between public schools and non-public schools is not so wide as to create students who lack a “common reality,” and can’t speak to each other, or understand each other’s differences, and anyone who doesn’t believe in vaccination, or that Trump actually won in 2020, didn’t learn that in any school, and nor was their idiocy encouraged at one. Quite the contrary.
What’s of greater concern is the antiquated, academic-centric, one-size-fits-all education model that almost all our schools, public or not, still adhere to and which largely demands that our students sit hour after hour filling out worksheets or passively listen to adults talk. Course loads are mostly the same from Maine to California, though no one has ever convincingly explained to me why every single student needs to take algebra, or even why taking algebra supposedly makes you a better citizen than taking an HVAC class does. Other questions worthy of our concern and of greater consequence than whether students are in public school or not are why we still have a credit system based on seat time, or why so much learning has to happen at school (as opposed to at a hospital, or a factory, or an aquarium), or even between the hours of 8 and 3, or why every student needs the 12th grade, or why, knowing what we know about how critical early-childhood education is, we don’t just start schooling at 3. Or 2. Or 1.
The fate of our democracy depends less on the politics of where kids sit than on the how and what of what they learn, no matter where it is they learn.
Above image: “Afternoon Break, St. Elizabeth’s School.” Linda Rich. 1975. Smithsonian American Art Museum,
Lots to think about, and I mostly agree. Having taught at international schools around the world, I can say that a lot of what you wrote applies there too. The biggest difference is that with just one high stakes test (a leaving exam), and no GPA to worry about, students and teachers are willing to take a lot more risks in the name of learning and not grades. I'm trying to move my students in that direction just by slowly decreasing their dependence on grades as signs of mastery. Oh, and btw, you have a typo at the end of the penultimate paragraph. I'd want someone to tell me😉
“Credit accumulation based on seat time.” I’ve never heard it framed that way but for older students especially it makes sense to give credit for achievement, not presence, and it’s related to the Problematic way so many math teachers grade/discourage their students. We’re going to take the entire semester or year into account when we give you a grade, and penalize you even if you get an A+ on the final. Nonsense! https://www.quora.com/What-makes-kids-give-up-on-math/answer/Thomas-Donahue-5?ch=17&oid=21766828&share=1a831efe&srid=SZ3H&target_type=answer