As public as possible
I've been thinking about what the overall argument or statement of this newsletter might be. What's holding it all together?
One idea I'm working with is about the word "public" in public school. What makes the public school public? There's a long tradition of thinking about this question, starting with Horace Mann and the founders of what we now call our public education system, but I don't want to do a history of that tradition. What I want to point out is that the socialist answer to this question has to be different than other other perspectives. And if there's a unifying theme or thesis to what I've been writing for the last two years, it's that our public schools in the United States must be more public than they are.
Public schools should be as public as possible.
But what does it mean to say schools should be more public? A socialist will tend to look at the material conditions of existence and go from there. Rather than pay lip service to highfalutin ideals of opportunity, citizenship, or morality a socialist will first follow the money. Who benefits and how? Who owns the stuff that makes life possible? Don't pee on my leg and tell me it's raining, the materialist says, what are the concrete and down-to-earth features of the situation that we can use, eat, and build with to make sure everyone has what they need and want? Like Marx wrote: philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is to change it.
So what's the socialist take on public schools? One thing we know for sure is that the right wing has been trying to dismantle public schools for decades. They've had various reasons to do this. Chief among them are lowering or getting rid of property taxes, destroying teacher unions, and increasing market competition (and theocracy), like with voucher programs or charter schools. The rallying cry from the left during this period, which arguably started in its most recent form in 1983 with the A Nation at Risk report and continued on through the No Child Left Behind Act, has been "protect public schools!" The position has been to defend our public schools from the right's privatization onslaught.
But this makes us ironically into a kind of conservative. Protecting public schools as they are can also mean not critiquing them. Do we have to protect what exists at all costs? Beyond that, is the best way to protect public schools to keep them largely as they are and just react to whatever the right wing does next? I say no.
Public means for all, for the people, for everyone. In capitalist societies, this tends to mean non-private and subject to voters' approval and financed through taxation schemes. But socialists want a different kind of society, one where public also means public ownership and control. Rather than voting every once in awhile, and thus having a nominal say in the policies that govern one's life, democratic socialism means extending that democratic principle into the economy and material life: owning and controlling the ways we make our livings. Society isn't just us voting about it. It's about us owning it.
So, are public schools public? For those content with a capitalist society, then the answer is yes, more or less. By law, public schools must except all students. These schools are "funded through" taxes on property at the local level, sales taxes at the state level, and a tiny bit through federal income tax. Public schools are accountable to elected officials in the form of school boards, departments of education, and state governments. While certainly there are issues to work out, this system of public schools (which 90% of students attend by the way!) is indeed for the public they might say.
But for those of us who think we can do better than capitalism, the answer is not so simple. The socialist looks at the material conditions of these public schools and calls bullshit. How can this system of public education be for the people, just look at how it's supposedly funded! The local property tax works like private school tuition, except the cost gets rolled into the cost of housing. Who can afford to live in areas with 'good' schools? Usually people with more money! And rather than taxes being levied on the production side, like a value-added tax, state revenues come from excise taxes that hit the working class in the pocket. Given the reliance on local property taxes and state-by-state funding formulas--which tend to benefit smaller, wealthier, whiter areas--the school system is chronically under-resourced, segregated, and unable to serve whole communities of people.
These property-rich areas wall themselves off like fortresses, taxing themselves at lower rates to get more revenue for their 'public' schools. To add insult to injury, when these areas are suburban and rely on the proximity to cities for their appeal, they literally steal resources from their property poor and diverse working class neighbors in the urban area. Why do you think that property is worth so much? Because it's close to a city. But do the city dwellers' school benefit from this? No. The good school districts expropriate collective value in the metro region under the guise of local control.
Very few dig into how all this school finance stuff works. When you do, the pretense of public schools being public starts to crack. Take how school buildings are financed. In many states across the country, school districts sell themselves as fixed-income investment opportunities on Wall Street. That's right: schools sell bonds on the municipal bond market, and thus get credit ratings, go into debt, and pay big banks big money for the service.
Deeper still: what if our understanding of how public schools are financed is flawed, like modern monetary theorists tell us? Maybe taxes don't pay for programs if the federal government issues the currency from its own treasury and reserves--what would that mean for the system as we know it? Could we upend the municipal bond market with more radical monetary policies? What if it could all be different? And shouldn't we be extra motivated to change our thinking about these policies as climate change wreaks havoc on every community, as we flee to our school buildings to protect ourselves from floods and temperatures rise?
When public schools get bought and sold on Wall Street and private property taxes serve as a veiled form of tuition, the socialist raises an eyebrow. Public schools, we say, should be really public. They should be as public as possible. When you get down into the material conditions of schools--following the money--what would it mean to have truly public schools, for the people? That's what this newsletter is all about.
Which leads me to a second overall theme. I've talked about what makes public schools public from a socialist perspective. But what makes those schools public? In other words, which policies do we need to craft, pass, and fight to implement to ensure public schools are as public as possible? Typically, the nitty-gritty policy particulars that make huge differences in schooling make our eyes glaze over with boredom, or intimidate us with fancy numbers and graphs. Again, a socialist will call bullshit. These boring and technocratic discourses lull us into a kind of apathetic stupor despite the fact that they are a key bulwark in how the ruling class keeps things the way they are.
Socialists have to dig into these details and make them comprehensible for people organizing to make schools more public. Teachers should understand how the bond deals go down. Staff should understand the nuances of organizational charts and who's in charge of what. Students should study the particulars of the taxation protocols that pay for their desks and the floors they walk on. These groups shouldn't do this for it's own sake, but to be able to fight for better policies. And people have in the past, which is another thing socialists should focus on: organizing and struggle. How have communities fought for better education policies in the past and how can we learn from them right now?
The stuff I write about in this newsletter is a detailed, policy-oriented and movement-based approach to schooling in capitalist America. The goal is to see what schooling in a socialist America would, could, and should look like. I hope you've been enjoying it!