“There is No Such Thing as a Public School”

 Public education is often referred to as a “public good.”  Intuitively, this makes sense: public schools are funded with public money and must educate every child without exclusion. But in reality, public schools are conglomerations of legally protected private interests that shape who attends what schools, the curricular options in those schools, and how schools are paid for and maintained. Children cannot participate in school anywhere; they must attend the school that corresponds to where their parents can set up residence. Schools have internal systems that separate children into different curricular “tracks,” in which higher-level learning and pedagogy are reserved for a chosen few, feeding children into the labor market with varying levels of human capital, which students can convert into higher education or jobs. Homeowners go to great lengths to protect the value of their homes by investing in their schools in the community, exercising control over schools, and strictly policing which children are allowed in. In this course, students will explore the multitude of ways the “public school” is anything but “public,” including the laws that facilitate this transmutation. We will look at the so-called differences between “public goods” and “private goods” and discuss how schools do or do not fit neatly into these categories as a jumping-off point for the course. We will next turn to the private interests that capture public education, such as residential choices, curriculum and human capital accumulation, political economy considerations, and community self-definition. Throughout, we will explore the race, class, and gender inequities that accompany these interests. Ultimately, the goal is to understand how public schools are not at all public, highlighting how unstated but ever-present private interests make true education reform so difficult.