The School as a Commons

American education debates usually begin in the wrong place.

We ask whether schools are producing high enough test scores. We ask whether parents have enough choices. We ask whether districts are efficient. We ask whether students are ready for college, careers, or competition in the global economy. These questions are not irrelevant, but they are incomplete. They treat schools mainly as delivery systems: places that provide academic services to individual students.

But public schools have always been more than that.

A public school is one of the few institutions where a community is forced to confront a basic democratic question: what do we owe every child, regardless of who their parents are, where they live, what they can afford, or how much power they have?

That question cannot be answered by the market. It cannot be answered by test scores alone. It cannot be answered by consumer choice. It has to be answered publicly, collectively, and politically.

This is why we should think of the school as a commons.

A commons is not simply a resource. It is something shared, protected, maintained, and governed for the good of a community. It carries obligations. It asks people to think beyond private consumption and toward shared life. A park can be a commons. A library can be a commons. A public square can be a commons. So can a school.

When a school functions as a commons, it is not only a building where children receive instruction. It is a place where families meet one another, where children learn how to live with people different from themselves, where teachers become trusted public workers, where communities organize around shared needs, and where public life becomes visible.

This is very different from the way education is often framed today.

Over the past several decades, public education has increasingly been described through the language of markets. Parents are treated as consumers. Schools are treated as competitors. Students are treated as data points. Teachers are treated as service providers. Districts are judged through performance metrics. Reform is often measured by whether families have more options, not whether every neighborhood has a fully funded, democratically governed, excellent public school.

This market language changes how we understand the purpose of education.

If schools are products, then the goal is choice.
If schools are businesses, then the goal is efficiency.
If schools are investments, then the goal is return.
If schools are test-score machines, then the goal is measurable output.

But if schools are commons, then the goal is different. The goal is shared flourishing.

That means the success of a school cannot be measured only by individual achievement. It also has to be measured by the relationships it builds, the trust it earns, the stability it provides, the democratic habits it forms, and the ways it strengthens the community around it.

This does not mean academic learning is unimportant. Children deserve excellent instruction. They deserve to read deeply, write clearly, reason mathematically, study history honestly, understand science, create art, learn languages, and develop the skills they need to live freely. But academic learning becomes thinner when it is separated from the broader purpose of education.

Children are not only future workers. They are members of communities. They are future neighbors, caregivers, voters, organizers, parents, artists, builders, thinkers, and public actors. They need schools that prepare them not only to compete, but to participate.

A school organized as a commons would take that seriously.

It would see teachers as democratic workers whose knowledge matters. It would see parents and families as partners, not customers. It would see students as whole people, not performance indicators. It would see the surrounding neighborhood as part of the educational environment. It would understand that libraries, parks, clinics, churches, unions, recreation centers, and local organizations all shape a child’s ability to learn.

This is especially important in communities that have experienced disinvestment. In many neighborhoods, the public school is one of the last remaining civic institutions. It may be the place where families vote, pick up food, attend meetings, access social services, watch performances, organize around safety, or build relationships with other parents. When that school is closed, privatized, neglected, or destabilized, the loss is not only educational. It is civic.

Eve Ewing’s work on school closures in Chicago captures this well. A school is not just a neutral facility. It carries memory. It holds relationships. It represents a community’s history, labor, grief, and aspiration. When officials close a school in the name of efficiency or performance, they often ignore the social and democratic value that cannot be captured on a spreadsheet.

That is one reason the language of the commons matters. It helps us name what market logic cannot see.

Market logic asks: is this school performing?
The commons asks: what role does this school play in the life of the community?

Market logic asks: can families choose something better?
The commons asks: why does every family not already have something excellent?

Market logic asks: which schools deserve to survive?
The commons asks: what would it take for every school to become worthy of its children?

This shift matters because American education policy has often used failure as a justification for abandonment. Schools serving poor children are underfunded, segregated, overburdened, and denied the resources they need. Then, when they struggle, reformers declare them broken and introduce competition, closure, privatization, or takeover as the solution.

But a socialist politics of education begins from a different place. It does not ask how to help some children escape a weakened public system. It asks how to build a public system that no child needs to escape.

That requires more than defending the status quo. The existing public school system has never been equal enough, democratic enough, or just enough. Schools have reproduced segregation, punished Black and brown children, marginalized disabled students, underpaid care work, and tracked children into unequal futures. To defend public education honestly, we also have to transform it.

A school as commons cannot simply mean protecting every existing institution exactly as it is. It means expanding democracy inside and around schools.

That would include real voice for educators, students, families, and communities. It would include strong teachers unions. It would include public funding based on need rather than property wealth. It would include culturally honest curriculum, smaller class sizes, nurses, counselors, librarians, art, music, recess, special education support, and safe buildings. It would include schools open beyond the school day as centers for public life. It would include partnerships with libraries, parks, clinics, universities, unions, churches, and neighborhood organizations.

It would also require rejecting the idea that public schools alone can solve inequality. A child’s education is shaped by housing, healthcare, food, transportation, environmental conditions, family income, neighborhood safety, and parental work schedules. If society produces instability around children, schools will be forced to manage that instability inside the classroom.

So the school as commons points beyond the school itself. It asks us to build the social conditions that allow education to succeed.

This is where public education connects to a broader democratic socialist vision. The goal is not merely better schools as isolated institutions. The goal is a society where the core conditions of a dignified life are treated as public goods: education, housing, healthcare, childcare, transportation, clean air, libraries, parks, and meaningful work.

Schools matter because they are one of the places where people first encounter the idea of the public. A child learns, long before they can explain it politically, whether society has made room for them. They learn whether their classroom is safe. They learn whether their teacher has time. They learn whether books are available. They learn whether adults listen. They learn whether their neighborhood is valued. They learn whether public institutions can be trusted.

That is civic education.

Not just a civics class. Not just a lesson on voting. The school itself teaches children what democracy means.

If a school is neglected, children learn one lesson.
If a school is over-policed, they learn another.
If a school is rich in art, care, trust, and public investment, they learn something else entirely.

This is why the fight over schools is so intense. Public education is one of the last major institutions where the idea of the common good still has real force. It is also one of the institutions capital has tried hardest to reshape. If schools can be turned into markets, then one of the central democratic claims of modern life is weakened: that every child deserves not merely access, but abundance.

A politics of scarcity tells us that some schools will be excellent and others will fail. Some children will get music, libraries, small classes, safe playgrounds, and experienced teachers; others will get test prep, surveillance, overcrowding, and staff turnover. Some families will choose; others will be chosen for.

A politics of the commons refuses that arrangement.

It says the measure of a society is not whether a few children can escape inequality, but whether every child can grow up inside institutions built for their flourishing.

This does not mean every school should look the same. Communities differ. Children differ. Local culture matters. Schools should be responsive to the places they serve. But difference is not the same as inequality. A democratic system can honor local identity while still guaranteeing every child the full material conditions of a good education.

That is the future worth fighting for: not a marketplace of options, but a public landscape of excellent schools.

Schools where teachers have power and respect.
Schools where children are known.
Schools where parents are welcomed without being turned into consumers.
Schools where libraries are open, art is funded, recess is protected, and history is taught honestly.
Schools where the building belongs to the neighborhood.
Schools where education is understood as a shared project of democratic life.

To call the school a commons is to insist that education belongs to all of us.

It belongs to the child learning to read.
It belongs to the teacher planning late at night.
It belongs to the parent trying to trust the institution that holds their child all day.
It belongs to the neighborhood that gathers in the cafeteria.
It belongs to the public that depends on each generation being educated not only for work, but for freedom.

The future of public education will not be saved by nostalgia. The old system was never good enough. It will not be saved by markets. Markets do not build equality. It will not be saved by moral panic. Fear is not a curriculum.

It will be saved, if it is saved, by people willing to treat schools as one of the central democratic institutions of public life.

A school is not just where children prepare for the future.

A school is one of the places where the future is made.