What history teaches us about the failings of public education, and our path forward

When people talk about how our public education system is broken, I remark, no it’s not. It’s doing exactly what it was designed to do. The question is, do we want a new type of education system?

Since its inception our public education system has served one clear purpose: to sort and track children, often further disenfranchising our most vulnerable communities and widening the opportunity gaps between the haves and the have nots. This is a bold statement. However, our history suggests there’s at least some truth to this assertion.

Consider this timeline:

• In the late 1700s, Thomas Jefferson would advocate for the idea of free public schools, but conspicuously a two track system, one for the laboring and one for the learned.
• In the 1800s after the turn of the century, free public schools in the north for poor children began to organize, largely as a response to business interests to create compliant working classes.
• During reconstruction in the south, freed former slaves organized themselves with the support of progressive coalitions to help fund and create the first southern public schools. In addition, they allied themselves with Republicans to help rewrite state constitutions guaranteeing free public education. It was their intention to learn to read and write so that they could better themselves and participate fully as citizens in American democracy. For a brief period during reconstruction (post the Civil War from 1865–1877) as blacks pursued their own freedom, the tide was turning.
• By the late 1800s, reconstruction has ended, and the landmark Plessy vs. Ferguson case has guaranteed a generation of separate and unequal public services throughout the South, including public schools.
• In the early 1900s, the idea of Eugenics is introduced into public education. As Alan Stoskopf writes in his book The Forgotten History of Eugenics:

Eugenics fed off of the fears of white middle upperclass Americans. In the early 20th century, the United States was experiencing rapid social and economic change. As the nation became more industrial and urban, millions of poor immigrants from southern and eastern Europe flocked to the United States seeking a better life. Simultaneously, thousands of African Americans were beginning a great migration to northern cities from the Jim Crow South. Competition for jobs intensified existing frictions along class and racial lines.
Periodic economic recessions created further social unrest. Labor unions, civil rights groups, and the woman’s suffrage movement pressed for greater equity. At the same time nativist and racist groups like the Ku Klux Klan pulled in the opposite direction. It was out of this cauldron of social upheaval that the American eugenics movement emerged.

Eugenics played a key role in “teach training, curriculum development, and school organization. It also provided the guiding ideology behind the first IQ tests. Those tests were used to track students into separate and unequal education courses, establish the first gifted and talented programs, and promote the idea that educational standards could be measured in single numbered scores. Eugenic ideas about the intellectual worth of students penetrated deeply into the fabric of American education.

• By the time of the landmark Brown vs. Board of education case (1954), we were well on a path of separate but unequal educations throughout our country, not simply segregated by race but also class. Also by this point we had succeeded at creating an assembly line model of education that prepared generations of students for blue collar factory jobs turning our economy into the strongest industrial nation by mid-century.
• Thirty years later, our manufacturing economy was in decline, and we were starting to see the cracks in our education system. In 1983, the report A Nation at Risk is produced, announcing that we were falling behind our global competitors on high stakes tests. This ushered in a new area of accountability which would lead to the high stakes testing movement (including federal initiatives such as No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top).
• By the 2000s, the genie was out of the bottle. Our system, originally designed to sort and track the haves from the have nots, was now increasingly failing many of the “haves” as well.

(Note: This timeline was adapted from numerous sources, but most notably education social justice activist Jamie Jenkins and her Justice Journey work originally introduced me to these sources).

As a nation we’re beginning to learn the lesson that when we view education as a zero sum game of comparison, everyone loses, especially our most vulnerable. When people talk about how our public education system is broken, I remark, no it’s not. It’s doing exactly what it was designed to do. The question is, do we want a new type of education system? I don’t have all of the answers, but I know that the path towards a better public education starts with asking the right questions. The first question we should be constantly examining is, what is the purpose of education? My guess is that at the heart of this question, stands a new path for what education could look like moving forward.

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