The Larger Purpose of Public Schools

Abstract

While there are points on which they can agree, Ms. Nathan questions whether Mr. Hess is truly interested in strengthening education. AT TIMES I want to cheer for Frederick Hess' words in What Is a 'Public School'? Principles for a New Century. How true it is that many reformers regard schooling as a politicized obstacle rather than a shared ideal. How true that of us committed to the promise of education are obliged to see that the idea does not become a tool of vested interests. Yet there is also something chilling about his article that stops the cheer in my throat. His use of innuendo in place of evidence, his sloppy logic, and his attacks on some of the most effective school reformers -- painting them as the enemy -- suggest that his real agenda is not strengthening education but privatizing it through vouchers and for-profit takeover schemes. Hess' labored analysis obscures a simple fact: schools have a larger and democratic purpose than private and parochial schools (although this is not to say that these schools contribute nothing to life). Public school systems are open to everyone regardless of disability, wealth, status, race, or religion. Private and parochial schools are not. While some are open than others, they can have entrance exams and can explicitly exclude students with disabilities or those who otherwise don't fit a profile. And of course they can also exclude those who can't pay. They can expel students who cause trouble, at their sole discretion, without recourse. Hess himself acknowledges this core principle of universal access, conceding that schooling an obligation to ensure that all students are appropriately served. But he seems indifferent to the inequities inherent in his more expansive notion of what makes a school public. Hess makes a false analogy when he equates schools that buy textbooks from for-profit companies with schools that are managed by for-profit firms. Basic educational decisions should be made by of the local school -- not by distant shareholders looking only at a corporate balance sheet. (It's ironic that Hess picks as his exemplar Edison Schools, Inc., which sold off the textbooks, computers, lab supplies, and musical instruments of the Philadelphia schools it had been hired to manage just days before school was to open in 2002 in order to pay down the company's mounting debt.) Hess objects to teaching and affirming diversity because, he says, these words are open to multiple interpretations. Then he states that public schools should children the essential skills and knowledge that make for productive citizens and teach them to respect our constitutional order, as if these were absolute truths not open to interpretation. The example of tolerance he cites, wherein a radical Muslim is calling for jihad, slyly exploits a hot-button issue to imply that the professional community of educators condones terrorism. Similarly, he smears the notion of defending tolerance as uniformly teaching students to accept teen pregnancy as normal and implies that liberals equate these activities with their definition of public schooling. Nonsense. His attack on Deborah Meier, Alfie Kohn, and others is equally baseless. It's the classic straw man fallacy: he attributes a position to them -- that they oppose the teaching of basic academic mastery in favor of promoting preferred social values -- that they have in fact never espoused. Meier's argument, with which Hess is surely familiar, is that such a tradeoff is unnecessary and that strong academic habits and mastery of literacy are essential and are furthered by an intellectually open and challenging spirit of inquiry. The Coalition of Essential Schools, another of Hess' targets, gets similar treatment. …