Do Public Schools Bring Us Together or Tear Us Apart?

Is school choice compatible with a national lesson plan? Johann N. Neem considers a radical new proposal from Ashley Rogers Berner.

By Johann N. NeemJuly 14, 2024

• Education

• Politics

THE PUBLIC school has long been one of the United States’ most prized institutions. It is always surprising to me, therefore, when scholars and activists turn this success story into a failure, as if the United States’ decision to offer democratically controlled public schools reflected a wrong turn.

In a diverse society such as ours, where there are few common institutions, public schools bring Americans together. We argue over their structure and content, yes, but even those arguments reflect democracy in action. Public schools both prepare young people for citizenship and socialize diverse Americans—born here and abroad—into the life of the nation.

In her book-length reform proposal for public schools, Educational Pluralism and Democracy: How to Handle Indoctrination, Promote Exposure, and Rebuild America’s Schools, Ashley Rogers Berner, the director of the Johns Hopkins University Institute for Educational Policy, argues for an alternative that accommodates Americans’ diversity while still hoping that schools will foster national solidarity. She recommends institutional pluralism—really a school choice model—combined with a state-mandated curriculum. She argues that a national lesson plan would improve academic quality and provide a shared framework for all Americans “comprised of shared references and a common body of knowledge,” while school choice would lower the temperature of our culture wars and prevent “indoctrination” by allowing parents to choose schools that reinforce their values.

In other words, citizens or their elected and appointed representatives would decide what students learn, but not how or where. Berner asks whether we can have a public curriculum delivered through private chartered schools. Supporters of public education and school choice alike will need to respond to her thoughtful, balanced, and provocative argument.

But first, some incorrect history in the book needs to be cleared up. Berner endorses the argument that common schools emerged largely in response to the influx of Irish immigrants in the early 19th century, a favorite conservative talking point. While it is true that 19th-century advocates considered socializing new immigrants to be an important function of public schools, the idea of common tax-funded, citizen-run schools predated mass immigration. Our Revolution-era state constitutions committed Americans to public schools. Common schools emerged out of state policies and local activism in the 1780s and ’90s, well before immigration became a pressing concern. When Berner attributes support for public schools to “unprecedented immigration,” she unfairly and incorrectly gives in to narratives that conflate public schooling with nativism.

Even if public schools’ origins were not nativist, immigration made questions of shared culture and values—socialization—more pressing. In today’s diverse United States, Berner urges Americans to embrace pluralism through institutional diversity combined with a common curriculum. It might help to understand Berner’s argument, and its limits, by dividing how we tend to think about public education into the following categories based on whether we emphasize the need for commonness or pluralism. Our institutions come in two forms: the common public system and the private choice-based system. Likewise, our curricular preferences can be described as “Cultivate Commonness, Respect Diversity,” or “Cultivate Diversity, Respect Commonness.”

Many conservative activists are radicals who embrace both institutional and curricular diversity. Ironically, they do so because they want to offer a traditional curriculum—grounded in faith and nation—that has been increasingly marginalized in public schools. They have backed into pluralism to offer what had once been common. Unlike conservatives, many progressives are advocates of common schools, but they are nonetheless pluralists when it comes to the curriculum, arguing that race, ethnicity, and other factors should shape what students learn within common buildings.

Berner rejects both of these partisan approaches. She argues for a third option: a common curriculum without common institutions. There is a fourth option, that we need both a common curriculum and common institutions, to which I’ll turn in a moment.

Educational pluralism is grounded in the fact that a diverse nation such as ours simply cannot agree any longer on basic moral and civic values. Rather than see this as a problem in need of a solution, Berner instead blames public schools, arguing that many democratic western nations have accepted a government-supervised private-delivery system that allows families of different faiths and orientations to attend schools that reflect their values. Why don’t Americans do the same? She does not offer a historical explanation. But there is one.

In the 19th century, Americans came to believe that it mattered who governed institutions. The word public once meant publicly accessible—such as a public house. The American Revolution transformed our ideas of publicity. Public came to mean institutions overseen and governed by citizens or their elected representatives. Our public schools are public because they are ours—as citizens. Private schools are private because they are not.

But institutions, whether common or plural, are only half the story. The other half is what is taught within those institutions. Here, Berner’s critique of public schools is correct and damning. To her credit, Berner refuses to give into partisan narratives; she lays blame equally on bipartisan policies and on progressive educators. In the Progressive Era, Berner argues—drawing on the work of Diane Ravitch and others—educators took a wrong turn when they decided that the academic curriculum was less important than practical goals (such as vocational training) and socialization through psychology and child development (what today might be called social-emotional learning). More recently, educators and policymakers from both parties decided that “critical thinking” that could be measured on standardized tests mattered more than mastering subject matter. Too often, students read to gain skills instead of engaging with books for their ideas. The result, in Berner’s words, is a system of schools that have “left generations of Americans intellectually and civically under-prepared and perpetuated the longstanding achievement gaps between low- and high-income kids.”

Policymakers and educators will have to confront the failure of moving away from subject matter. Berner makes a strong case for the need for schools to focus more on academic content, not because she supports drill-and-kill (indeed, she is a pedagogical pluralist) but because there is a lot of evidence that one cannot think critically without background knowledge. Equality demands that all students have access to a content-rich curriculum. Berner rightly notes that too many American public schools have become intellectually vacuous, spurring many parents to homeschool or seek private alternatives, such as the growing classical school movement.

If one of the main reasons that schools are less content-rich is that federal and state policymakers have focused on skills over knowledge, the other is that progressives have argued that efforts to offer a common curriculum are by definition racist and Eurocentric. This critique has not only fueled conservative criticism of public schools and pushed out many conservatives (making public schools less public) but also led public school teachers to emphasize skills and social-emotional learning because those are less controversial than curricular content. But if progressive educators agree with conservatives that we can’t agree on what to learn and what it means to be an American, then it’s hard to know why they think we need common schools. In short, if progressives are curricular pluralists, why are they not also institutional pluralists?

Berner’s response is that all schools that receive public funding should be considered public. This means that they must be accessible to all fairly and that they must agree to offer a common curriculum. It does not mean that they orient themselves around that curriculum in the same way. An Afrocentric school, an evangelical school, a classical school, and a Montessori school may all teach the same content about the American Revolution, but they can encourage students to draw different meanings from the subject matter.

Berner argues that “exposure is not indoctrination.” Indoctrination happens when students are forced to accept a particular perspective on contested subject matter, such as the legacy and meaning of the American Revolution or evolution or gender identity. The state can mandate exposure, but in a free and diverse society, Berner argues, it should not determine the values that will shape students’ engagement with the material.

Can institutional diversity bring peace to the culture wars, as Berner hopes? First, it is unclear that designing state and national subject area standards will be easy or do anything to lower the temperature. The math/English/history wars of the 1990s are proof enough that it is no easy task for Americans to decide what we should teach. Recent battles over the curriculum remind us that state legislators will be as partisan as anyone else, mandating ethnic studies in blue states and patriotic education in red states. Berner makes it seem as if experts and legislators can somehow agree on what should be taught if we allow schools the autonomy to decide how to teach it. I’m not so sure. In a democracy, we argue over educational content. That’s just one of the costs, and benefits, of living in a democracy.

Second, I am not as confident as Berner that a common academic curriculum is enough for “social cohesion.” I think it is a start, but culture is more than academic content. Culture reflects many implicit as well as explicit factors. In a diverse society, we Americans need to be in contact with each other, and we need to learn to live with each other. We also need to share more than a curriculum. We need to learn common holidays, rituals, books, food, music, movies, games. We need, in other words, to be acculturated into a common life. This is true not just for Americans; acculturation is central to all societies.

Thus, I share with Berner her critique of curricular pluralists, whether they come from right or left, but I remain committed to common schools as well. I take the fourth option: common curriculum and common institutions. While Berner is adamant that a choice model cannot discriminate against people based on race, religion, or other factors, she is also against using public schools as sites of integration and assimilation. To Berner, families should choose schools based on their own values and backgrounds. Americans should embrace separatism as policy, rather than use public policy to overcome our divisions by finding ways to integrate neighborhoods and schools across class and racial lines.

My differences aside, Berner offers the strongest argument for educational pluralism that I’ve read. Neither conservatives nor progressives can dismiss her claims easily. Yet, given the country’s divisions, I can’t help but think that we need to find ways to come together more often in common institutions. Public schools remain at the heart of our democratic experiment, and, despite the strength of Berner’s critiques, I am not yet willing to give up on them.