While inclusion (the subject of my last post) deals primarily with poor children and families, the second reason I believe public schools are a public good for all people shifts the focus somewhat to include the rich.
The nature of public goods is that rich folks pay a larger share. I’m speaking in raw dollar amounts since changes over the last four decades have ensured that wealthy Americans pay a smaller percentage of their income in taxes than the middle- and lower-class. Regardless, the fact that a man owning a $500,000 house pays more overall in property taxes than his neighbor who rents for $750 per month has allowed for a sort-of hierarchy where “taxpayer” and “homeowner” becomes synonymous with superiority. But even as these two people arrive at the schoolhouse with different perceived investment amounts, they both arrive at the same school and, therefore, are owed the same stake.
Not only do people pay different totals into the system, but the “stake” looks very different depending on the needs of the child. Kids who come to school speaking a language other than English, for example, are given additional services (at no cost to the student’s family) compared to English-speaking children so that they can learn the language. This means smaller class sizes, specialized instruction, etc. The same is true of students with disabilities, students falling behind in class, and gifted children. So how we pay for schools and how schools are directed to spend that money are both specific to the person’s ability. To put it bluntly: different abilities demand different resources. Another word for this is equity.
Now a word on equity. You may find yourself asking, “why?” Why not treat all children the same financially and, therefore, educationally? I can give three arguments: moral, cultural and practical. First, I think it’s morally good, supported by Scripture, that people get more support based on their circumstances. Poor kids and rich kids will never be on a level playing field when you consider the advantages given to that rich kid before she enters school. Equality is great, but in order to achieve it we need to spend more on those who need it more. You wouldn’t refuse to send flowers to a widow because it’s unfair to other people who’s partners are still alive, would you? Speaking of widows: the Bible gives several examples here. All throughout the Old and New Testament we read about the commands to care for orphans and widows. These are two groups of people who lived without any safety net apart from the kindness of others, and the people of God are commanded to go out of their way to support them. Equity in plain sight.
Second, Americans hold a deeply-held belief that all children can excel if given the same opportunities. It is one of the reasons I love education policy in this country. If kids are failing to gain an education, especially based on gender, race, income, geography, or any other noticeable characteristic, then it must be an issue with what opportunities are provided. It is partly for this reason that states fund public schools with an eye towards what the needs of the child are. Instead of measuring equality by what we input into the schools (dollar amounts), we have recognized that we should measure equality of outputs (e.g., test scores, graduation rates). Here we see equity written into our laws.
Finally, it makes financial sense to ensure every child reaches a standard of education, even if it costs much more for child A than child B. We can groan internally at how unfair it is that child A “gets” more resources, but you and I want to live in an educated populace and child A does not just disappear once they leave school. That’s a future neighbor, or dentist, or voter, or convict. The link between high school dropouts and the criminal legal system alone makes increased spending on certain students worth it financially.
Now, back to our two first characters: the renter and the homeowner. The democratic underpinnings of common schools force these two people to enter the same building and decide together how best to run the school. Outside of this institution, our society is set up in a way that allows for me to ignore all but my favorite people groups. The nature of money’s power (or rather, the weakness of the heart) means that often my preferences travel no further than my tax bracket. These are, as pop culture has taught me, the family I have chosen. One problem with this view is the Bible’s concept of community. We hear the church referred to as the “family of God.” A family is famously filled with characters that many people would not choose. When using this metaphor, the reader is forced to reckon with a community that must stick together regardless of personal preferences. A fragmented and on-demand community is no community at all. Is it so difficult to imagine the public schools as a reflection of this ideal? These are one of the last remaining places where we must truly see each other, as 90 percent of all children in this country attend.
One counter-argument I’ve encountered to this line of reasoning is: but what if this plain does not happen? Rich folks uncomfortable with their neighbors and/or schools (often interchangeable) can move to another community where the price of housing is so expensive, they basically create their own private schools. My family knows this to be true, as we moved from Clayton County to neighboring Fayette County when I was in sixth grade. The move brought better-resourced schools and fewer neighbors in poverty. (For those unfamiliar with south suburban Atlanta—as of 2015 Fayette County had the 3rd-highest household income in Georgia at $82,216 per while Clayton County sits at 78th with $43,311 per household). How can I argue that the public school requires people who would never see each other regularly to finally commune under one roof if in practice rich folks will always escape any school that truly mixes?
As much as I’d like for the public school system to solve all of society’s ills the fact that some people can avoid public spaces should not be an argument against their existence and assistance. In practice most people that you and I would consider rich send their children to public schools. Further, while there are certainly public schools gated by high housing costs and bolstered by strong property collection, I’m convinced that this problem calls for more intervention, not less. Not in the force-everyone-to-go-to-public-schools variety and more in the property-values-should-not-determine-quality vein.
Most convincingly, we’ve seen what it looks like for the government to force folks of different backgrounds to go to school together and the results are staggering. The reforms required in the wake of the Brown v. Board of Education decision show the possibilities that deeply uncomfortable actions can have strongly beneficial results. A quick primer: prior to the Brown decision, states had every right to segregate school children based on race. With previous Supreme Court rulings that public spaces could be “separate but equal,” white policymakers ensured the “separate” and conspired effectively against the “equal.” The Brown decision, and the rulings that followed, forced southern states to desegregate public schools—at times using deeply-painful methods like busing or school consolidation. Because of this federal accountability towards integration the south continues to have the most integrated public schools in the nation.
The outcomes of these actions offer two broad lessons. First, student performance can increase significantly if we are committed to educating all kids in the same classroom. Consider that hundreds of years of slavery and Jim Crow laws gave white students advantages over their Black peers that were halved in 30 years of educating these kids in the same schools. Rich folks had the option of “escaping” then (and many did), but public school enrollment has remained surprisingly stable since the Brown decision. Second, racist systems do not go away with one ruling. The cost of Brown was borne almost entirely by Black communities: Black children were forced to bus much further to white schools, when schools were consolidated it was Black schools that policymakers closed, Black teachers and principals became almost extinct in integrated schools because of white parents’ insistence that their child be educated by white teachers, etc. The supreme court essentially ruled for equality only if the location of that equality was a white space. Black folks, to put it broadly, saw the tradeoff of a lesser humiliation (the supreme court treating white schools as superior solely for their whiteness) for a more equal education and acquiesced to the federal intervention. Federal integration paired with compulsory attendance laws situate the public school in a unique spot in our society today.
Our government’s treatment of Black people specifically makes another case for equity moving forward—racial equity. I plan to write on this topic more later on.
The public school is now the last remaining public square. In it we bump into our neighbors and, God willing, find commonalities. From here, the garden is primed for empathy and respect to bloom. I don’t think it’s too much to argue that a detached care for those who are different from us is akin to a detached support beam for a house: if it’s not actually supporting any weight then its strength is purely theoretical. Care for others that costs nothing is no care at all.
When those of us with power and resources have our children sitting next to children whose families lack the same, then the benefits are spread widely. Now the advocacy for my child necessarily becomes advocacy for his classmates, even if their parents who don’t have the time or connections to make such a plea. Similarly for children: sharing a table or group project with others regardless of race or class breeds an empathy that cannot be learned by only hearing calls for loving one’s neighbor. Were that our churches were such places, but as Dr. King so succinctly put it, “It is appalling that the most segregated hour of Christian America is eleven o'clock on Sunday morning.”
At risk of being too on-the-nose, I don’t think that loving people different from you can be taught theoretically—it has to be lived. The irony is that I think one of the best ways to live this ideal is in the classroom.