Michael Tomasky, the editor of The New Republic, summarizes the war against public education and why it is so crucial to our society. Yes, everyone must support public schools, whether or not they have children. Everyone must pay to educate all children. Because doing so is for the good of society!
Tomasky is a public school parent. He read the article about the effort by Free Staters to defund the public schools in Croydon, New Hampshire, and he was appalled. Supporting the public schools for all children is
so obviously essential to civilized life that it’s shocking we even have to defend it. But alas, because the American right wing is so bananas these days, defend it we must.
The Free Staters in New Hampshire want to live without any government. They want to live without a state. They already fired the town’s line police officer. Then they went for the town’s public school budget, proposing to cut its budget in half.
I’ve actually been wondering for many years when the right was going to get around to this line of attack. As matters stand in the United States of America, and as far as I know more or less everywhere in the developed world, education is paid for by the state—either mostly by local governments (the United States), or the national government (France). This web page gives a good summary of how public education is funded around the globe. It’s a fairly recent consensus in historical terms—only in the last half of the twentieth century have countries like Brazil, India, and Colombia come to accept that they have to pay the freight for universal education. But accept it they have. As a result, educational inequality around the world has decreased dramatically.
In the U.S., of course, public education is mostly funded by property taxes and financed by local governments. There are problems with this, as there are with any system invented by imperfect human beings, the main one being that rich districts have a lot more money and thus much better schools; but even still, the good part is that we as a society accept the idea that we all have to contribute. It does not matterwhether you have children in the schools. The principle is that even if you are childless, or your children have grown and gone to college, or you send them to private school, or school them yourself at home, you still pay, and you pay because you benefit from a well-educated populace.
I live in Montgomery County, Maryland, home to great schools and high taxes. My daughter happens to go to a public school that is excellent (and happily just up the street). But even if I had no daughter, or sent her to a private school, I would still agree that it was my responsibility to pay for the great public schools my county offers children. It makes for a better county, a better class of citizen, a better nation.
This is a core principle of civilized society: We all contribute to certain activities that have clear universal social benefit. To use Underwood’s sick terminology, that guy pays for that guy’s child to be educated because the first guy benefits when the second guy’s kid is learning math and science and pondering Hamlet’s soliloquy and being prepared for responsible, productive adulthood. Anyone who can’t see that connection is a selfish prick. And if nothing else, even selfish pricks ought to be able to see that good schools increase the value of their homes.The question of political philosophy is this: What is the common good—what must it include, and what is each citizen’s responsibility toward securing it? We decided in the U.S. a little more than a century ago that universal public education, free to every child and paid for by all of us, was central to any definition of a common good. The world, as I noted above, has largely come to agree.
An educated populace serves all of us. Debates about curricula are another issue, and those debates are legitimate, as long as people aren’t lying (my daughter, who just finished sixth grade in a quite liberal school district, reports that yes, she’s learned all about Rosa Parks and so on, but no teacher has ever tried to make her feel guilty about being white).
But even both sides in that debate accept that the public schools are a common good; they just disagree about what should be taught.
More broadly, conservatives have been trying to undermine public education for 70 years now. This goes back to Brown v. Board of Education, in whose wake many Southern school districts set up all-white segregation academies or in some cases stopped collecting the local taxes that supported public schools (it took a Supreme Court decision in 1968, a full 14 years after Brown,to end the most egregious forms of that racist mischief).
Then, starting in earnest in the 1980s, under Reagan-era education secretary and insufferable moral crusader Bill “Snake Eyes”Bennett, the right promoted school vouchers and charter schools, both of which, numerous studies have found, have simply not been the panacea the right advertised them to be. Right-wing rich people and foundations have spent God knows how many millions since then promoting these private educational alternatives. That’s their right, of course. But imagine if they’d spent those millions trying to shore up public schools in poor districts, or financing early reading programs for poor children from Harlem to eastern Kentucky to the reservations of Arizona. The country would be so much better off.
The Free Staters failed in Croydon. The small population mobilized to save their schools.
I expect the coming years will see the mainstreaming of the argument that people who aren’t parents of public-school children shouldn’t have to pay for schools. Liberals must fight back tooth and nail, and not on some statistical point cooked up by some timid pollster, but at the very philosophical root of the argument. We cannot retreat from a century-old consensus that has done the nation enormous good.
Michael Tomasky is the editor of The New Republic.
The Supreme Court’s Holy War Against Public Schools
How Leonard Leo Became the Grey Cardinal of the American Right
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“But even if I had no daughter, or sent her to a private school, I would still agree that it was my responsibility to pay for the great public schools my county offers children. It makes for a better county, a better class of citizen, a better nation.”
Magnificent. Yes,yes,yes.
Great article. The author points out that a core principle of a democratic society is that we all pay for things that benefit us all. I would add that ones own economic success often comes not so much from your own hard work as it does from the intersection of that hard work with the values and natural skills of your society. Success requires that you contribute more than others, even if you believe it was all due to your own brilliance.
the key point: citizens should be encouraged to SEE that public services help the entire society — lately, however, we are seeing so many messages which argue the opposite
Local voters rejected the idea of doing away with the local schools. They realize what nutcases can do to the local community life, property values, and demographics.
https://www.wmur.com/article/croydon-nh-voters-overturn-drastic-school-budget-cuts/39934353
Reducing the quality of education for the children of the masses works for right-wing oligarchs. One can use fundamentalist madrassas to indoctrinate the next generation of lemmings and cannon fodder and docile, compliant worker bees. One can monetize this indoctrination. One can kill the vestiges of unionization by killing the public schools. One can make the rabble bear the costs of education. One can render the working class less capable of kicking up a fuss.
So, the US is headed in precisely the opposite direction from the rest of the world. By mid century, we can be the country that the rest of the world makes fun off (of course, that has long already been the case whenever Donald the Dunce spoke to a world body or issued a new policy.
Would you like that drink by the infinity pool, Mr. Big Bucks, or in the Epstein Memorial Massage Center?
The US is like the Titanic where the band played on and the people still partied until the the very end, when the ship’s stern disappeared beneath the frigid waves.
But unlike the Titanic, the US has hit so many icebergs — and hits more every day — that it’s hard to keep track of them all.
Speaking of icebergs, Georgia’s six week fetal heart beat ban on abortion just went into effect yesterday.
Yet another state to add to my “Don’t travel to or through” list. Of course, why would I want to go through Georgia, anyway? To drive to Florida? Ha ha ha.
Iceberg pinball is the game we are currently playing.
And we are not just a laughing stock because of Trump.
The world considers us scientific ignoramuses for our inaction on and denial of climate change for decades.
And they are correct in that assessment.
Well observed, SomeDAM.
People like the Texas Clown (Ted Cruz) are the face of America on climate change. Obviously one can get into and graduate from Harvard law school without kowing a damned thing about science.
https://www.science.org/content/article/bully-pulpit-ted-cruz-offers-his-take-climate-change
I offer my sincere condolences to clowns everywhere. Cruz is an embarrassment to an otherwise admirable profession.
Bob Shepherd writes “Reducing the quality of education for the children of the masses works for right-wing oligarchs.”
TRUE, TRUE, TRUE.
Until it doesn’t. Careful what you wish for.
When it doesn’t they will just move their factories to China, Mexico and other places and undoubtedly retreat to their heavily fortified pedophiIands to avoid the pitchforks and keep raping little girls with no worries of prosecution.
That’s the beauty of globalism. If you an oligarch, you are not tied to any one country.
Public schools make a tremendous contribution to society. As I mentioned before, public schools helped build this nation. They are social and academic organizations, open to all, and they contribute to mutual understanding and respect for various diverse students. In addition to academics, they promote a civil society.
Funding public schools through property taxes contributes to the inequity that so many poor students face in this country. Most countries fund schools nationally. While we have some federal money in school budgets, the vast majority of funding comes from property taxes. According to charts attached to this post, the US is not spending more on public education than other high economic countries. The whole “war on public education” is promoted by ideological extremists and billionaires that want to reduce their taxes. These are not valid reasons to destroy an institution that is a keystone of democracy. They provide efficient, comprehensive education to so many young people. The public must not allow radical extremists to dismantle public education as it is an essential in a civil society.
I agree with all and would go one step further. The reason I am here is because I believe public education is the elemental keystone to the American Experiment. More so than the Constitution itself, because we see how it can be perverted and discarded when people are not educated to understand and internalize it. Take away public education and the entire American theoretical superstructure will be permanently damaged to make it only a matter of time before it topples over.
Greg-
Your final sentence should be enshrined.
At its founding, the American ship had a rudder. It was men who had vision for a government of the people, by the people and for the people.
Now, the nation has Koch and his evil brethren hacking away at the country so that it’s left with no way to chart a direction except by the ill winds of the oligarchs.
Well said. Public education helps define who we are as a nation.
Libertarians are trying to take down a fence without knowing why it was put up.
The post’s final statement, “How Leo Leonard Became the Grey Cardinal of the American Right.”
Vladislav Surkov is described as Putin’s eminence grisé. The Economist and other media wrote about Surkov, he was the engineer of fake social movements, focused on destruction, was a threat to freedom of the press and journalists, and the man who planned the destabilization for Ukraine, setting the stage for Putin’s invasion.
Before the right wing makes the U.S., a brutal totalitarian state similar to Stalin’s, all Americans should be crystal clear on the point that America’s grey cardinals are driven by conservative religious belief and are enabled by its followers..
Without powerful labor unions offering public school teachers a layer of protection from abuse and threats, teachers, no matter how skilled and competent, would be at the mercy of autocratic, theocratic, narcisistic, psycho mangers/administrators or someone in Congress like a Boebert or Greene.
In affect, those teachers would lose all ability to teach affectively because they’d live in fear of losing their job and/or worse.