Research

People to go back to (strikethroughs are people I've already been reading):

Leftist critics of renown include A.S. Neill, John Holt, Paulo Freire, Paul Willis, Herbert Gintis, Ira Shor, Henry Giroux, Peter McLaren, Jacques Rancière and Noam Chomsky, just to name a few.

Phillip Jackson’s arguably tamer Life in Classrooms

John Taylor Gatto, 30-year veteran of public school teaching in New York

French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu: his ‘reproduction’ theory

Cornelius Castoriadis who combined both Marxist and psychoanalytic concepts in his extensive writings on ‘imaginary institutions’.

Quotes from this article:

Liberals and conservatives alike resemble Benjamin’s angel of history, their attention focused on what they perceive to be the present ‘rubble heap’ of education, colored by a nostalgia for a lost Paradise and by the yearning to ‘awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed’. As they back into the future, they often appear willfully blind to the concrete historical circumstances of those whose lives literally depend on schooling, and to the real obstacles to social justice that the least advantaged persistently face in becoming educated.

The inequities associated with highly variable funding schemes, teacher shortages or neighborhood segregation will not be solved by providing every parent with a voucher or ‘chartering’ urban districts. The claim that ‘privatization’ is the answer to the problems of our educational or political systems makes no historical or ethical sense.

In our view, quality schools should be public in the best sense of the word: free and available to all, everywhere, at the point of entrance; challenging and appealing to the intrinsic motivation to learn in all children; and entailing the cultivation of knowledge, dispositions and competences necessary for preparing young people to engage with the wider world. We therefore make no common cause with those seeking to undermine or replace public institutions or with critics who delight in reviling those whose task it is to teach and administer in public schools.

Indeed, narratives suggesting that the ‘sky is falling’ tend to be, in our view, grounded in fantasies about what public schools, or teaching and learning, are or could be, as much as they are grounded in the historical realities of public schools or the realities of so-called privatization. This contention is not unrelated to the observation that the liberal defense of public schools is most often undertaken by those with economic, social and racial privilege ‘on behalf’ of the variously disadvantaged, who may or may not share the same loyalty to these institutions.

The author of the story describes the academy movement as ‘the razing of state provision throughout the world. In the name of freedom, public assets are being forcibly removed from popular control and handed to unelected oligarchs’. In a related Guardian story, another author suggests that it is the teachers, students and parents that make a school what it is, not the authorities running it. Notable in the British context is the emphasis again on local ‘community’ control as an aspect of democracy, undone by the State and its corporate clients. Schools are depicted as public goods, not private commodities.

Is it not the least bit ironic that these people see individuals placed into ministries (without the permission or consultation of the public they claim to serve) as being "democratically selected?" People will decry corporate oligarchs, but they seem fine with those that were "voted in" (despite the fact that the election they were voted in from did not allow them to choose the best and most knowledgeable person for the Ministry of Education).

The liberal defense of real or imagined public schools, and its real or imagined heritage, is not limited to the Anglo-American context. The specific forms of this defense vary according to the particular histories of state-provided education in different localities, including the different purposes that citizens tend to believe are best or necessarily fulfilled by their public schools. Public schools in France and Japan are meant to instill loyalty to a shared French or Japanese culture, so as to produce citizens respectively loyal to France or Japan; American public schools are meant to provide individual opportunity for social and economic advancement, to be the engine of the fulfillment of the ‘American dream’; schools in most countries – from Singapore to South Africa – are believed to promote democratic citizenship, social cohesion, workers for the labor market and so on. But these defenses also usually partake of a familiar set of general propositions about what constitutes the public sphere generally, and why schools in particular ought to embody certain positive aspects of ‘publicness’. So in what does ‘publicness’ consist as this bears upon education?

Knight-Abowitz maintains that fair participation in shared governance is the first requirement for public schools, something we understand to mean that the issues entailed in decision-making should be accessible to the relevant public, whose informed preferences and opinions about how schools operate also should be taken under advisement. But Knight-Abowitz admits that representative and aggregative participation – the model in the United States of voting for the local school board, for instance – has been largely a failure with respect to engaging broad participation. A small percentage of voters turn out for such elections, and those who represent either majoritarian or special interests dominate school boards.

The structure that takes place in school boards also exists within private schools, so it's particularly interesting that people continually insist that these methods function (which rarely work anywhere and are often losing power, even if they manage to elect "progressive" people to them).

Private schools have "parent committees," and these things do very little because parents are not equipped (in terms of socialisation) to fight against schools... Even if that school is engaging in harmful behaviours that are hurting their own child. The entire structure, public or private, isn't as responsive as it claims to be.

These public institutions are also notoriously unresponsive to the ‘interference’ of the public, like parents. With the consolidation of school districts over the past century, leading to districts encompassing multiple communities and neighborhoods, the distance between school boards and their constituents has grown. Knight-Abowitz recommends a cure of deliberative democracy in which teachers, parents, older students and other community members are encouraged to create parallel governing structures. However attractive this remedy might appear, it would seem to depend, in the end, on fantasies about local communities and citizen organizations, and their possible relationships to totalizing bureaucracies like the public school system.

For the sake of legitimacy, public schools also must respect liberty and pluralism. At a minimum, respecting liberty entails accommodating a certain amount of choice with respect to parental and student preference; respecting pluralism, too, would require that schools be sufficiently diverse both in structure and organization in order to accommodate a range of interests and needs. But Knight-Abowitz admits that public schools do not and have not for the most part respected either. Conflicting demands between majority and minority values almost inevitably disadvantage minority students, despite laws that attempt to ensure freedom of expression and nondiscrimination.

Her remedy is a ‘bi-focal’ view of school governance through which competing demands might be negotiated. She suggests that the views of the local majority can sometimes be trumped through consideration of minority values, as well as through consideration of the law. But the ‘rights’ of minorities, in this view, must still be weighed against the preferences of the majority. In any case, the preferences of the majority – buttressed typically by politicians, school boards, school administrators and the national culture itself – always structure the everyday practices of public schooling. Neither ‘integration’ nor ‘value-neutral’ curricula have been sufficient to ensure consistent respect for the nonstandard persons who populate public school buildings: even when schools are almost completely segregated by race/ethnicity/class, the controlling mindset informing educational norms tends to be that of the dominant class, expressed through the structures and administration of schooling, even when the children of that class are permanently absent.

This pairs well, also, with the understanding that even "liberal-minded" or "progressive-minded" educators (or heads of schools) who still retain problematic understandings help perpetuate bigotries within schools.

For example, queermisic beliefs (particularly aimed at trans and non-binary individuals) can still perpetuate in a place that claims to be LGBTQIA+ supportive (because these spaces tend to lean heavily towards liberal understandings of queerness, which focus heavily on the cisgender LG side of things).

Similarly, there are certain bigotries that retain support within spaces that go overlooked by the head of school (or other teachers), especially when students are academically high achieving. This includes students who engage in misogyny, racism, etc but are seen as being "good people" because their grades and supposed effort in a course (two irrelevant factors) support them being "good students."

For Knight-Abowitz, equal opportunity is the third condition for the political legitimacy of public schools. The ideal is perhaps most commonly associated with public education and is meant to denote fair access to a level playing field on which all children, irrespective of ability or social standing, have a fair chance to receive an education sufficient for personal success and social advancement. But if that is the condition of legitimacy, the vast and persistent inequalities of opportunity and outcome in schools across the world might then indicate that public schools are not legitimate public institutions. Knight-Abowitz lays blame for the admittedly pervasive inequality on neoliberal policies that have decreased school funding and redistributive practices generally and on propaganda that maintains that poverty and discrimination are not more powerful than teachers in accounting for achievement. The preferred solution is an increase in tax revenues and higher investments in education, along with a return to active desegregation and anti-poverty government action. But even if one agrees with the critique of neoliberal divestment in public education, and agrees that government might take a more active role in relieving segregation and poverty, there is more than a little wistfulness in forgetting that before there was the ‘new poverty’ of neoliberalism there was an ‘old poverty’ and in most places even deeper, with more overt inequalities.

The fourth pillar of democracy in public schooling would be full attention to political education for democratic life. Knight-Abowitz suggests that this would entail both curricular attention, across disciplines, to the role of citizens in decision-making, and to the creation of ‘democratic schools’ in which students and teachers could actively practice democracy. The active promotion of democratic goals in curricula and pedagogy tends to run up against the problems of respecting liberty and plurality, but from the other direction. Many parents, teachers and students take school to be the place where individual goals of social and economic betterment can be pursued and are not motivated to give their time to ‘political education for democratic life’, which they tend not to see as promoting their own interests. The fantasy here is that ‘citizenship education’ – however valuable we might find it or however much we wish our own children would receive it – is not a central feature of most public schools. In fact, we would maintain that a very different kind of ‘citizenship education’ – one inclining toward materialism and consumerism – is very much part of the everyday life of schools and tends to lead to the very kind of disengagement in public life that those at the top of the field of education routinely lament.

Knight-Abowitz cites the professionalism of teachers as the fifth component for the political legitimacy of public schools, normally involving training and certification necessary for ensuring high quality standards among staff. But professionalism of teachers has an uncertain relationship with those ideal/imaginary aspects of public education that are democracy-promoting. Many teacher educators are ambivalent about promoting professionalism because it conflicts with other beliefs about who teachers are and what they (ought to) do. On the one hand, increased recognition of teachers as professionals seems to legitimate teacher education itself, to constitute an argument for better compensation, to increase the symbolic capital of teachers generally, and probably to increase the learning and development of students. Professionalization of teachers may also compete with the ‘expertise’ of local parents and community values, and potentially erodes the possibilities for democratic community organizing based on shared interests and status. Also, and perhaps more important, it is arguably difficult to sustain the identity between the ‘professional teacher’ (the expert, the technocrat) and the ‘caring teacher’ who acts as a parental surrogate. The demand for professionalism also conflicts with reluctance of citizens of education schools to recognize differences between teachers, to acknowledge the existence of a continuum of ability, motivation and competence among teachers, even among themselves, at the top of the hierarchy of teachers. But if the expertise of teacher educators does not ensure the professionalism of teachers in public schools, then the struggle for status within the Academy, always a losing proposition for the perennially marginalized ‘ed-school’, is further complicated.

I would also point out that there are a significant number of issues that arrived by requiring teacher certification. Some of which include nonsensical requirements within a hierarchy that should already recognise certain skills (e.g., literacy and numeracy tests that are required as part of someone's certification, despite the fact that the requirements to enter the program already infer the claimed "appropriate level" of literacy and numeracy); others include the fact that there is very little legitimate need for most school structures (and that being self-legitimising isn't a good enough reason to keep them), and the overwhelming majority of necessary skills could be handled through mentoring and community-based learning centers that promote and encourage self-directed learning (e.g., libraries in conjunction with print collectives and learning centers).

Everywhere there are enormous challenges in realizing the political legitimacy of public schools, and this is no secret to educational scholars and policy makers. Indeed, these phenomena are documented year after year in dozens of countries and appear in hundreds of publications, popular and academic, and the problems are usually the same that were present at the historical beginnings of public schooling.

This is particularly true if you read a lot of anarchist and socialist literature, as many of the same critiques that existed in the 1920s (for example) still exist today.

The systemic injustices of public schooling are what this professoriate routinely and unapologetically teaches its students about the history and theory of schooling. Nor should it be surprising to said professoriate that increased and more justly distributed funding, better teacher preparation and better teacher pay, progressive curricula and pedagogy, democratic governance, cultural inclusion, free lunch – all of which we would likewise embrace for our own children and those of others – have not generally made state-public schools less unsatisfactory than they are and have always been for a large proportion of the students who attend them.

For the record, better "inclusion" of disabled students has yet to significantly improve outcomes for disabled students. (This is largely because of how difficult the accommodations are to acquire when a student needs them; they also aren't provided for any of the disabled adults who require them.)

It also hasn't made schools safer for a whole host of people, nor has it fully enabled integration of all people into the same spaces (e.g., if the "liberal" or "progressive" people where I live truly cared about all people having equal access to education, Roma and disabled children would not be segregated into different schools... yet, they still are).

Despite what appears to be consensus about the shortcomings of public schools, those who declaim the ‘death of the public school’ appear not to have learned the lessons they themselves have preached and continue to advocate remedies that have been historically ineffective.

First, school systems are notoriously inefficient in distributing financial resources to those most in need of help. Second, extra funding may purchase specialized staff, new buildings, libraries and computer labs but still leave disadvantaged children alienated from learning if other resources are absent. Those resources will include things like strong leadership, positive school climate, appropriate discipline, nurturing teachers, a motivated peer group, involved parents, role modeling, career guidance and consensus on academic goals. Third, unequal resources, usually conceived exclusively as unequal financing, goes to the very fabric of public education, certainly in large countries where local control is paramount. But irrespective of the country or the specific context, it is a truism that local knowledge often is the best kind of knowledge for addressing the needs of local school children. Part and parcel of this favoring local control is to see ‘top-down’ approaches as anathema.

The distribution of funds has been interesting. Again, disability is one of the clearest ways to see how the "increased funding" doesn't necessarily lead to things like increased accessibility or appropriate accommodations. Not all disabled students require the same supports; this money is often provided with caveats explaining how it can be spent, and it often misses the supports that disabled students (and their families) state they need.

It also doesn't provide students who may suspect they have a developmental disability but not have "proof" in the form of a formal diagnosis (which also has a limited scope of recognition, as many children often go undiagnosed).

Inequalities, however, are not necessarily inequities.

The expansion of both the urban charter school movement in the United States and the academy school movement in the United Kingdom has at least in part been motivated by the insight that traditional state-public schools are not effective in leveraging increased resources to the benefit of the disadvantaged students they serve.

This is true. When the charter movement started, there were a number of progressives who saw them as an alternative that would actually function as ways to implement responsive learning environments.

But the whole thing has been co-opted (if not blatantly started by) right-wingers who wish to privatise everything.

Unfortunately, however, good teachers are not in abundance; indeed most countries struggle with a significant teacher shortfall, and even when there are enough teachers to go around, relatively few will be above average. And, typically, it is a truism that schools serving high concentrations of disadvantaged children are more likely to have teachers with less experience and fewer qualifications.

Mostly true, yes. But what exactly is a "good teacher?" And it's worth also recognising that having qualifications does not inherently make you a good teacher.

One way to change this is to offer better teachers strong financial incentives to work in schools with more challenging pupils.

"More challenging pupils" or children whose needs are going unmet within the school they're in?

On the other hand, in many circles to even broach criticisms of public school teachers is tantamount to launching a full-on assault against public education itself. Here, we encounter a myth about who or what the ‘public school teacher’ actually is, namely, an autonomous, student-centered agent. Contrary to this myth, teachers most often serve as agents of the state, and as such are entrusted with carrying out the aims of the state, which include using pre-selected course materials, administering standardized tests, advising for class placement and carrying out disciplinary procedures.

This is a criticism that I wish more people would be willing to broach. Conservatives are willing to engage in it, but they do so as a means to tear down learning institutions (regardless of what they are) that don't sit well with their traditionalist framework.

The left almost unanimously refuses to engage with it (except for anarchists and many socialists), refusing to recognise some of the key truths highlighted here.

Even those, like Darling-Hammond (2006, 2010), who champion teacher education (reform) and enhanced teacher agency, as the main levers to increasing public school success and legitimacy, are acutely aware of the perennial shortcomings of traditional teacher education. But the reforms that Darling-Hammond and others have managed to enact, built on intensive assessment and model of the professional, that is effective teacher tends to perpetuate the notion that teachers are and must be ‘in control’ of their own classes, while simultaneously subjecting teachers subject to the reformers’ hegemonic vision and regulatory schemes. This may signal a return to an underlying message of compliance that has been characteristic of teacher education for the past century, rather than the dawn of new era of ‘agency’.

As someone who often struggles in any school system to work in the ways I see fit (e.g., actually trying to be the socially-constructed "belief" of the teacher -- a caring person who acts as a mentor in student learning), the underlying message of compliance is spot on.

The reason I struggle is not because of how my choices reflect upon the class and classroom management; it's because I am frequently told that my methods are "unorthodox" and "unappreciated."

Even when students tell me all that they've learned through those methods, even when I build good rapport with students (and families).

Doing anything against the traditional model (or the "appropriately adjusted for modern times" traditional model) leads your colleague-peers to question you.

Each succeeding year’s academic scholarship testifies again to the lack of freedom and plurality, equal opportunity, shared participation, democracy and professionalism – to return to Knight-Abowitz’s list of legitimating factors – endemic to public schooling. One might submit that most scholarly careers in education have centered around documenting these daily features of public school life, where those who have documented the failures of public schools are the most keen to circle the wagons against any perceived threat to the institution of public schooling itself.

There are a couple specific education podcast hosts who I feel fit this description almost perfectly.

For instance, it could be the case that we simply have an instance of the insider-outsider dynamic, where it is perfectly acceptable to complain and criticize one’s own system but not for others to do the same.

Except...

There is something to this insider–outsider explanation, but it is questionable whether the analogies work quite so well in the case of public education. As we have argued, many of the criticisms of the public education system come not from outsiders but rather from those who are badly served by it. Indeed, many of the struggles to find alternatives to what ‘the local public school’ has to offer one’s own child have been launched by the marginalized and poor.

It could also be the case that one’s defense of the public school is motivated by the concern to reform rather than to relinquish it to the arbitrary machinations of the free market.

Except...

On the other hand, it is difficult to imagine the actors in any of these scenarios being opposed to alternatives to the services that they provide, let alone profound structural changes that may bring about an entirely different way of more effectively providing those services.

And a lot of teachers, administrators, and public school proponents are strongly against alternatives, claiming that any attempt to engaging in them is tantamount to destroying democracy.

The dominant model, as reformers willing to look inside as well as outside the system point out, is of course one encompassing legislation and massive investment from state governments, but also politicians, academics, teachers, administrators and social workers (to name but a few). And notice that all of these actors, to one degree or another, are dependent upon this leviathan of a system and hence are keenly (if unconsciously) invested in maintaining the status quo.

Again, our aim here is not to repudiate the idea of a public as this concerns important political ideals, or for that matter, essential features of the education system. Instead, we remind the reader that we are taking issue with the circle-the-wagons defense of ‘public education’ against any and all criticisms. Indeed, the knee jerk defense of ‘the public school’, and the concomitant fondness for what never was, engages in a strange kind of disavowal, a psychological rationalization that indefensibly reconciles what educational research has been saying for nearly 50 years with what needs to happen to begin to correct it. Taking always the ‘idealistic’ view (which again incidentally opposes the history and theory commonly taught in university education departments) in each case motivates liberal advocates of the public school to reject all manner of reform as a threat to ‘the public’. These views together represent a fantastical take on the ‘public sphere’ sharply at variance with more critical understandings. Moreover, to the extent that fanciful notions of this public are rhetorically invoked as cures for what ails us now, in our view these defenses merely exhibit bad faith, and as such approximate Baldwin’s (2010, p. 103) more general observation about modes of domination: ‘We have constructed a history which is a total lie, and have persuaded ourselves that it is true’.

Additionally, we surmised the possibility that in this blindness, there also was a kind of denial about how particularistic, non-inclusive, coercive and unequal public schools are. In other words, how is it that this knowledge of the real is so consistently eclipsed by appeals to an ideal, or an imagined essence?

But the fact is that most contemporary defenders of the public school do not seem so much interested in developing a normative theory of public education – where the distance between the ideal and the real can be explained sociologically, philosophically, economically or through some other disciplinary logic – as they do in simply promoting faith in a kind of transcendental, that is imaginary, institution.

This is something that I experience with so many people working in and around schools.

That is, an institutional actor imagines her world according to how the institution presents itself, historically, rather than according to how the institution actually functions, not to mention its effects on society, on its own agents and on its clients, or students or patients. To place this dynamic, as it relates to the individual, within a properly psychoanalytic framework, we might speak of the subject inclined to see herself in the reflection of the institution, so that in order to avoid narcissistic injury the institution must be imagined in such a way that the subject’s worth is preserved.

This definitely provides a better explanation for the kinds of interactions I've had with other teachers, some of whom acknowledge the issues of schools but then almost immediately dismiss them.

And with respect to the institution itself, representations of the public school as democratic, liberty-enhancing, equitable, participatory, democratic and professional – emanating from the broader field of public education itself – are imaginary inasmuch as they project what defenders of the public would like public schools (and their own academic bastions) to be, rather than what public schools in fact are.

These imaginary institutions are also self-representations, and the sense of the integrity of the self for those within the field of the public school depends on the ‘survival’ of this institution in its imagined form. In everyday terms, people tend to see themselves as mirror images of the institutions and organizations in which they have invested not just their time and energy, but their sense of identity.

And this is also a part of why I divested from the 'identity' of teacher (inasmuch as I could, beyond the requirement to have a 'job title').

Denizens of this educational field – professors and teachers, who of course themselves were once school-attending students – find themselves now in a situation Bourdieu called hysteresis, when dispositions are out of line with the field and with the ‘collective expectations’ of its normality. In situations of crisis or sudden change, especially those seen at the time of too-rapid movements in social space, agents often have difficulty holding together the dispositions associated with different states or stages, and some of them, often those who were best adapted to the previous state of the game, have difficulty in adjusting to the new established order.

Again, there are a few education podcasters who I can see this mirroring, but it's much larger than that.

But this also sounds identical to the kind of responses we've been seeing by so many officials, administrators, teachers, and families in response to schools during COVID. There is no attempt to adapt or change; it's all about maintaining the status quo, so this goes far beyond just the private/charter vs. public debate.