The Vicious, Potentially Fatal Anti-Public School Propaganda Cycle

The New York Times discusses the enrollment crisis that’s hitting American public schools. This is driven by declining birth rates and fewer children, but it’s deeply exacerbated by how effective the relentless anti-public school movement has been in demonizing those institutions. And there’s a vicious cycle going on that is simple and sad and very important to understand.

A school’s perceived quality is a function of the pre-entry ability of its students. Schools with a structural tendency to attract the most advantaged students - public schools in rich districts thanks to zoning, private schools thanks to explicit academic screening and implicit screening through high tuition fees, charter schools with their admissions-and-attrition skullduggery - have an inherent and powerful advantage. But pointing out this basic reality runs afoul of the dogged American commitment to academic blank slate thinking; in contemporary times we’re supposed to pretend that we believe that everyone has perfectly equal ability to succeed in school. In political life we insist on an equality of talent that no one really believes in. This inevitably means that the schools with the least ability to prune their rosters of students who are less likely to succeed - public schools that serve the least privileged student populations - are at an immense disadvantage in terms of perceived quality. They can’t trim off the lowest-performing students like other schools do and are expected to make up for talent deficits that they can’t control. And the more negative publicity public schools receive, the worse this disadvantage gets.

This is the cycle.

1. The anti-public school propaganda machine, funded by right-wing forces that want to destroy government intervention in education entirely, makes empirically indefensible claims about the quality of public schools and teachers.

2. Parents, credulous towards this propaganda and often already looking for excuses to separate their children from poor kids and students of color, pull their kids out of public schools.

3. The parents who have the financial and social resources necessary to move to a more affluent district, to place their kids in private schools, or to navigate the intentionally-Byzantine world of charter school admissions are those that have children who are disproportionately likely to be strong students. Therefore, as those students leave, the metrics at public schools get worse, through no failing of the schools and teachers themselves.

4. These declining metrics are then used to fuel more anti-public school propaganda which in turn drives more parents of means to pull their kids from public schools which further drives down performance metrics….

It’s a simple cycle and a predictable one and one that the usual suspects have been contributing to for decades. School “reform” types will often defend the concept of public schools but almost never the reality, and by playing along with at least some large part of the right-wing effort to destroy the entire institution of publicly funded and run schools, they inevitably contribute to the potential ruin of public schooling writ large. And you can easily imagine the endgame for this dynamic, where public schools become the schools of last resort, home to only the most disadvantaged and challenging students and thus seen as entirely unsuitable by parents of means, bringing the self-fulfilling prophecy to its conclusion.

Of course, there’s a certain inevitable reality here: if the anti-public school forces get their way and we tear down the whole edifice of public schooling, but we maintain the commitment to universal and mandatory K-12 education, the hardest-to-educate students will have to go somewhere. And in a system of universally private schools where poor kids attend on vouchers, they’re going to end up in private schools - which will undermine the very reasons that many parents send their kids to private school in the first place. This gets back to a dynamic I’ve written about before: those who work in and around private schools are often profoundly ambivalent about the idea of a voucher-funded, all-private system of the type that libertarians have championed for decades. Of course they’d like access to some government money. But such a system would directly challenge the financial model of private schools. Many parents prefer private schools precisely because they screen out “the bad kids”; private school teachers accept significantly lower average wages based on the same bargain. Many legacy private schools will likely continue to work to exclude undesirable students in order to preserve their advantage, and unless you can prove certain kinds of federally-forbidden discrimination, they have broad latitude to do so. Where do the truly disadvantaged kids end up then? Probably warehoused in private schools of last resort, underfunded and stigmatized, filling the same function that the most criticized public schools do today.

Of course, by then, the damage will have already been done, public schools a thing of the past, with those who advocated for their destruction indifferent to the perpetuation of the same old outcomes in an all-private system - which no doubt is all part of the plan.