Rethinking American Education

Why public schools became political — and why they still matter

Public education is one of the most contested institutions in American life because it is one of the few places where the country is forced to make a collective decision about the future.

Every school system answers a basic question: What do we owe children?

That question sounds simple, but it opens into nearly every major conflict in American politics. Race. Class. Religion. Labor. Democracy. Local control. Property. Public goods. The role of the state. The rights of parents. The rights of children. The power of markets. The meaning of citizenship.

Public schools are not politicized because people care too much about them. They are politicized because education is where a society reproduces itself. Whoever shapes schools helps shape the future.

That is why the fight over American education is not really about test scores alone. It is about whether children will be educated as members of a democratic society or sorted into an unequal economy. It is about whether schools will serve as public institutions or marketplaces. It is about whether education belongs to all of us, or only to those who can afford to escape the consequences of disinvestment.

A socialist interpretation of American education begins here: public schools are one of the clearest examples of a public good under attack by private power.

Why did Americans build public schools?

The United States did not begin with a fully developed public school system. Education was uneven, local, religious, private, and deeply unequal. Enslaved Black people were often legally prohibited from learning to read. Indigenous children were later subjected to violent assimilation through boarding schools. Girls, poor children, disabled children, immigrant children, and children of color were often excluded or segregated.

So we should not romanticize the origins of American education.

But the idea behind public education still mattered. The common school movement of the nineteenth century argued that a republic needed an educated public. If ordinary people were expected to govern themselves, they needed access to knowledge, literacy, civic formation, and shared institutions. Public education was tied to the promise — often betrayed — that democracy required more than elections. It required people capable of participating in public life.

That was always an incomplete promise. Public schools were built inside a country structured by slavery, settler colonialism, patriarchy, capitalism, and racial hierarchy. But the democratic idea still had power: education should not be reserved for elites. It should be publicly supported, broadly accessible, and connected to the common good.

The contradiction is that America built public schools while refusing to build an equal society around them.

That contradiction has never disappeared.

The schoolhouse as a battlefield

Because public education is supposed to serve everyone, it has always been a site of struggle.

Black communities fought for access to schooling during and after slavery. Reconstruction governments expanded public education across the South. Immigrant communities used schools to pursue opportunity while also resisting forced assimilation. Labor movements fought for children to be in classrooms rather than factories. Disability rights activists fought for access and legal protection. Civil rights organizers fought segregation. Teachers fought to be treated as professionals and workers, not as disposable caretakers.

Public education has always been shaped by conflict because democracy is shaped by conflict. The question is not whether politics belongs in education. Politics is already there. The question is whose politics will govern the school.

Will schools be governed by democratic public purpose, or by private wealth?

Will they be organized around the needs of children, or the demands of markets?

Will they reproduce racial and class inequality, or help challenge it?

That is the real fight.

Segregation never ended; it changed form

One of the central myths of American education is that school segregation is mostly a problem of the past. In reality, segregation was never simply defeated. It was challenged, partially dismantled, resisted, legally reworked, and then reproduced through housing policy, district boundaries, white flight, property wealth, school closures, tracking, discipline, private schools, charter expansion, and school choice.

Brown v. Board of Education declared legally mandated school segregation unconstitutional, but it did not create an equal school system. Many white communities resisted integration for decades. Some created private segregation academies. Others used suburbanization, zoning, district lines, and local property wealth to protect advantage. Courts eventually weakened desegregation enforcement. The result is that many children still attend schools that are racially and economically isolated.

This matters because segregation is not only about who sits next to whom. It is about access to resources, experienced teachers, advanced coursework, safe facilities, political power, social networks, and institutional stability.

Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities remains powerful because it shows the moral scandal of a country that claims to believe in equal opportunity while sending children to radically unequal schools. Eve Ewing’s Ghosts in the Schoolyard shows how school closures in Black communities are not just administrative decisions. They are losses of memory, trust, community, and public life. Noliwe Rooks’s work on “segrenomics” helps name how segregation itself has been turned into a market opportunity.

This is one of the most important points: inequality in education is not only a failure of policy. It is also a business model.

How public education was opened to the market

Over the last forty years, American education policy has been shaped by a bipartisan reform consensus that treated public schools as failing institutions in need of competition, accountability, and market discipline.

The language changed over time, but the direction was consistent: more testing, more rankings, more closures, more charters, more data dashboards, more private management, more suspicion of teachers unions, and more emphasis on parental choice as an alternative to public investment.

Some of this emerged from real frustration. Many families, especially Black and Latino families trapped in underfunded and segregated schools, had good reason to distrust school districts. Many schools were failing children. Many bureaucracies were unresponsive. Many reformers claimed they were offering poor families options that wealthier families already had.

But the market solution never addressed the deeper problem: why were the public schools serving poor children allowed to become under-resourced in the first place?

Instead of building excellent public schools for every child, reformers often created escape routes for some children while leaving the larger system intact or weakened. Charter schools expanded. Voucher proposals grew. Philanthropies and private operators gained influence. School closures were justified as efficiency. Teachers were blamed for structural inequality. Public education was increasingly treated as a portfolio of options rather than a universal public commitment.

The core problem with this approach is not that every charter school is bad or that every family choosing one is wrong. Families make decisions under real conditions. If a neighborhood school has been neglected, parents will look for alternatives. That is understandable.

The problem is turning that desperation into an ideology.

Choice is not the same as justice. A marketplace of unequal options is not the same as a democratic system of excellent public schools. When education is organized around competition, schools compete for students, funding, reputation, and political survival. Some children become desirable. Others become expensive. Some families have the time, language, transportation, and social capital to navigate the system. Others do not.

A socialist approach asks a different question: Why should any child need to shop for a decent education?

Title I and the limits of compensatory policy

Title I is one of the federal government’s major attempts to address educational inequality by sending additional funding to schools serving low-income students. Its existence reflects an important truth: poverty shapes educational opportunity, and the federal government has some responsibility to respond.

But Title I also reveals the limits of trying to compensate for inequality after the fact.

If school funding remains tied to state and local systems that reflect neighborhood wealth, if housing remains segregated, if families lack healthcare and stable income, if teachers are underpaid, if school buildings are neglected, and if poverty is allowed to concentrate across generations, then supplemental funding can help but cannot fully repair the damage.

This is the trap of American social policy. We tolerate deep inequality, then create targeted programs to soften its worst effects. We ask schools to close gaps that the larger economy keeps producing.

That does not mean Title I is unimportant. It means Title I should be understood as a floor, not a substitute for justice.

A serious public education system would not depend on charity logic, emergency grants, or competitive applications. It would guarantee the conditions every child needs: strong neighborhood schools, small class sizes, well-paid teachers, counselors, nurses, libraries, arts, special education services, after-school programs, safe buildings, transportation, nutritious meals, and meaningful family support.

That is not unrealistic. It is a political choice.

Teachers as workers, not martyrs

One of the clearest signs of the attack on public education has been the attack on teachers.

Teachers are often praised symbolically and punished materially. They are called heroes while being underpaid, overworked, surveilled, blamed for test scores, and expected to absorb every social crisis that enters the classroom. The public is encouraged to see teaching as a calling, which is often true, but that language is then used to deny teachers power as workers.

Teachers unions became targets because they stood in the way of privatization, austerity, and managerial control. Weakening unions made it easier to expand charters, impose testing regimes, close schools, and restructure districts without meaningful resistance from educators or communities.

But teachers have also shown what resistance can look like.

The Chicago Teachers Union helped shift the national conversation by linking teacher working conditions to student learning conditions. Their fight was not only about wages. It was about class size, school resources, counselors, nurses, libraries, racial justice, and the future of public education in a city shaped by segregation and austerity.

The Red State teacher rebellions made a similar point in a different political context. Teachers in states like West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona, and Kentucky rose up not only for themselves, but for public schools that had been starved by tax cuts and anti-union politics. These movements mattered because they challenged the idea that public education is a narrow partisan concern. Teachers in conservative states showed that the defense of public schools can become a working-class movement.

This is essential for any socialist education politics: teachers are not just service providers. They are workers, public intellectuals, caregivers, organizers, and democratic actors. A society that disrespects teachers cannot claim to value children.

The parental rights movement and the politics of distrust

In recent years, the language of “parental rights” has become one of the main tools for attacking public education. At its best, parent involvement is vital. Families should have a voice in their children’s education. Schools should be transparent, responsive, and respectful.

But the current parental rights movement often goes beyond family engagement. It frames public schools as enemies of the family, teachers as ideological threats, and curriculum as something to be policed. It has been used to attack LGBTQ students, restrict discussions of racism, ban books, intimidate school boards, and weaken trust in public institutions.

The irony is that the movement claims to defend parents while often ignoring the material needs of families: affordable childcare, paid leave, housing, healthcare, safe schools, mental health support, and well-funded classrooms.

A democratic approach to education should reject both bureaucratic arrogance and reactionary privatization. Parents matter. Teachers matter. Students matter. Communities matter. The answer is not to hand public education over to markets or culture-war entrepreneurs. The answer is deeper democracy: more public participation, more trust, more transparency, and more shared responsibility.

Public schools should not belong to the state alone. They should belong to the public.

What can we learn from other countries?

International comparisons are useful, but they should be handled carefully. Finland, Japan, and Germany are not perfect models, and none can simply be copied into the United States. Each has its own history, culture, labor market, welfare state, and political institutions.

Still, they help reveal that American common sense is not inevitable.

Finland is often discussed because of its emphasis on equity, teacher professionalism, low school selectivity, and relatively limited private schooling. The lesson is not that Finland has solved every problem. The lesson is that a country can choose trust, public investment, and equity as organizing principles.

Japan shows that strong public systems, high expectations, and cultural respect for education can produce impressive academic outcomes. But Japan also warns us that achievement without attention to student well-being can become its own problem. A humane education system cannot measure success only by performance.

Germany offers another lesson through its vocational education and apprenticeship traditions. It recognizes that not every meaningful life follows the same academic path. But Germany also raises concerns about tracking and inequality. The lesson is not that early sorting is good. The lesson is that education should connect to meaningful work without reducing children to future labor-market slots.

The broader point is this: other countries make different choices. They fund differently. They train teachers differently. They structure school-to-work transitions differently. They treat public systems differently.

The United States often acts as if our education debates are trapped between bureaucracy and privatization. International examples show a wider range of possibilities: stronger public investment, more respect for teachers, less reliance on market competition, more robust vocational pathways, more attention to equity, and more willingness to see education as part of a broader social contract.

What would a socialist vision of public education require?

A socialist vision of education begins with a simple claim: every child deserves an excellent education because every child has equal human worth.

Not because they might become productive workers.
Not because they might raise GDP.
Not because they might compete globally.
Not because they might escape poverty individually.

Those things may matter, but they are not the foundation. The foundation is human dignity and democratic equality.

A democratic socialist education system would treat schools as public goods and civic institutions. It would reject the idea that education should be governed by markets. It would fight segregation directly. It would fully fund schools based on student need, not local property wealth. It would make early childhood education universal and public. It would pay teachers well and protect their collective bargaining rights. It would provide wraparound services without turning schools into surveillance agencies. It would give students access to arts, music, libraries, sports, nature, civics, history, languages, and career pathways.

It would also democratize school governance. Families, students, educators, and communities should have real voice in shaping schools. But democracy is not the same as letting the loudest or wealthiest factions dominate. Real democracy requires structures that include working-class families, marginalized communities, students, and educators — not just organized backlash campaigns.

This vision would also connect schools to the broader welfare state. Education cannot be separated from housing, healthcare, labor policy, transportation, food, and environmental justice. A child cannot learn freely if they are hungry, sick, evicted, unsafe, or constantly stressed. A teacher cannot teach freely if they are exhausted, underpaid, and politically attacked.

The future of public education depends on whether we are willing to build a society that supports children before they enter the classroom and after they leave it.

Why do we care?

The deepest reason to care about public education is not national competitiveness. It is not test scores. It is not college admissions. It is not workforce development.

We care because children are people, and because democracy depends on the formation of free people.

A child deserves to read literature that expands their imagination. A child deserves to learn history honestly. A child deserves to ask hard questions. A child deserves teachers who have time and support. A child deserves a safe building, a library, a counselor, art, music, science, recess, friendship, and joy. A child deserves to know that the world is not fixed, and that they have a role in shaping it.

Public education is one of the last places where Americans still argue, however imperfectly, about the common good. That is why it is always under attack. If public schools can be weakened, privatized, and divided, then one of the most important democratic institutions in the country can be converted into another market.

But if public schools can be defended and transformed, they can become something else: centers of learning, care, democracy, and community life.

The task is not to return to a mythical past. The old public school system was never equal enough, never democratic enough, never free enough. The task is to build what public education has always promised but never fully delivered: amazing public schools for every child.

That means no more separate and unequal systems. No more austerity disguised as reform. No more treating teachers as enemies. No more using parents as political weapons. No more school choice as a substitute for justice. No more childhood organized around scarcity.

A better education system is possible, but it will not be built by technocrats or billionaires. It will be built by teachers, parents, students, workers, organizers, and communities who understand that public education belongs to all of us.

The fight for public schools is a fight over the kind of society we want to become.

If we want a democratic future, we have to educate children for democracy.

And if we want a socialist future, we have to begin by defending the public institutions where solidarity can be learned, practiced, and made real.