Jennifer C. Berkshire and Jack Schneider, coauthors of A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door, have written a new book, The Education Wars: A Citizen’s Guide and Defense Manual (both books are published by the New Press). In it, the two explore the seemingly sudden assault on public schools from Christian conservatives and fiscal conservatives and show that it is, in fact, not so sudden, but rather a sustained line of attack against which public school defenders have been fighting for decades.
Berkshire, a freelance journalist, is a host of the education podcast Have You Heard and teaches in the Boston College Prison Education Program. Schneider is the Dwight W. Allen Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he directs the Center for Education Policy.
Education Wars is, says Heather McGhee, author of The Sum of Us, “Essential reading for anyone who cares about the future of public education in the United States.”
We emailed a few questions about the book to the authors, which they answered jointly.
ITPI: First, can you define, in simple terms, what you mean by “education wars”?
Berkshire & Schneider: The education wars are the conflicts over schools that flare up regularly in this country and that are burning particularly hotly right now. Right now, the conflicts are mainly centered on teaching about race and gender, the place of religion in schools, and the role that schools should play with respect to the larger story of civil rights progress in this country. If you delve beneath the surface of any specific battle that’s raging, you’ll almost always find a larger, unresolved question that we’ve been fighting about since the advent of public schools in this country. For example, a lot of your readers probably think that parents’ rights cause is new, invented by groups like Moms for Liberty. But we’ve had repeated waves of parental rights activism in this country, starting with the effort to ban child labor in the early 20th century. Those original parents’ rights activists opposed a ban on child labor because they saw it as overreach by the federal government, while the conservative industry groups that backed the parents were opposed to public education in principle because they saw inequality as not just natural but desirable. Fast forward to the present and we’re basically having the same argument again. When it comes to questions about education, who gets to call the shots? One of the themes of the book is that today’s education wars make a lot more sense when viewed through an historical lens. You also get to see how previous iterations of the education wars have ended. Hint: This is not the first time we’ve seen broad coalitions form to oppose book banning.
ITPI: There’s an economic attack against the idea of public education—I’m thinking of Milton Friedman, small government types. And then there is a cultural or moralistic attack—public schools are indoctrination centers teaching “critical race theory,” atheism, “the LGBTQ agenda,” and so on. Are we fighting two separate wars with different enemies, or are we fighting two fronts of the same war? Are those arrayed against public education actual allies, or simply allies of convenience?
Berkshire & Schneider: Market ideologues have certainly seized the moment. This is a relatively small group that sees public education as an expensive and quasi-socialist project of big government. For them, the present culture war is an incredible opportunity to pry people’s sympathies away from neighborhood schools. As [Manhattan Institute senior fellow and anti-critical race theory crusader] Christopher Rufo put it, “To get to universal school choice, you really need to operate from a premise of universal public school distrust.” And what better way to undermine trust than to tell people that nefarious things are happening inside the schoolhouse?
The true culture warriors are also a relatively small group. These are folks who are fed up with the secularism of public education, and who believe that progressive politics shape the curriculum, have long complained that they are discriminated against. Why should they have to pay private school tuition or bear the expense of homeschooling their children, while the irreligious left controls the public education system?
Right now, though, the culture war has inflamed the passions of many who would otherwise be perfectly content to send their children to public schools. They aren’t market ideologues who get into bed at night and read Milton Friedman. And most of them aren’t actually culture warriors. Yes, they’re receptive to religiously and culturally conservative ideas about education. But at the end of the day, they want to send their children to taxpayer-supported, open-enrollment, democratically controlled schools. They like public education, or at least thought they did.
Think of the culture war as the siege. That’s where all the fighting is. And meanwhile, the free-market ideologues are the ones doing the most damage. They’re using the moment to enact policy changes that would otherwise be completely unacceptable to most Americans. Our biggest fear is that we’ll come to our senses as a nation in a few years, and that it will be too late—the damage will have been done.
ITPI: Early in the book, you say something that might be surprising to some people: “the conventional wisdom that the country is plagued by failing schools and a declining economy simply isn’t true.” You even hold that it isn’t only a success in high-minded terms, such as serving as a pillar of democracy, you argue it’s an “operational success.” And, finally, you write that it’s its successes, not its failures, that have motivated attacks from those who want to dismantle it. Can you explain what you mean by success and how that success has led to attacks against it?
Berkshire & Schneider: It’s very common to hear that our public schools are failing. And it’s very useful rhetoric if you’re running for office, or if you’re a policy elite intent on convincing people that they need you. But it simply isn’t true. If you look at polls, a majority of Americans do believe that the nation’s schools are mediocre; yet that same percentage of people report that their own children’s schools are doing quite well. So, which one are they likely to be more informed about—the schools down the street, which their children attend, or the 98,000 schools they’ve never set foot in? The simple fact is that for the past four decades, since the Reagan administration’s “A Nation at Risk” report, we have been telling ourselves a story about failing schools that doesn’t match reality on the ground. And, by the way, if test scores are the currency that you value, scores are up across that period.
The bigger success, though, is public education’s inclusiveness. Over the past century, we’ve gone from a system of deep inequality—one marked by de jure segregation, rigid tracking, egregious funding inequality, exclusion of students with disabilities, and wildly disparate outcomes—to one that increasingly aligns with the American ideal of equal opportunity. I’m not suggesting that young people in this country grow up in equitable conditions or that there aren’t gaps in educational achievement or attainment. But we have come an incredible distance over the years.
So what’s not to like? Well, what’s not to like is the fact that this is an incredibly resource-intensive enterprise. If you’re opposed to redistribution, antagonistic toward government, and unconcerned with other people’s children, then this system is colossally wasteful. Sure, there’s some so-called return on investment, in the form of lower incarceration rates, lower utilization of welfare programs, and stronger economic productivity. But much of what we do in public education we do simply because it’s right—because it’s what all young people deserve.
ITPI: The vast majority of American families send their children to public schools. It would seem like that would be one of the most powerful constituencies that would fight to defend public schools. But the trend seems toward the growth of mechanisms, like charters and vouchers, that undermine funding of public schools. Is there anything you’ve found in your research that can account for that?
Berkshire & Schneider: For the past generation we have been talking about education exclusively in terms of the private good. And that starts with our leaders. Republicans and Democrats have both made the case for decades now that education is how you get ahead in the world. And to a certain degree they’re right. Education does open doors to economic opportunity. But we have to realize that the emphasis on social mobility is a product of the neoliberal political order. The Democratic Party, particularly, turned its back on more direct ways of addressing inequality. If schools could lift people into the middle class, then efforts at redistribution—whether directed by government or supported by labor unions—would be unnecessary. That logic has failed to bear out. Yet it has had a powerful influence on how we think about schooling, specifically in that it has led us to see education as a commodity that families seek to acquire for themselves.
Well, if the benefit of education is returned to the individual, rather than to the entire community, why should we invest in our schools? Why shouldn’t we move toward a privatized system, in which families make decisions in a free market?
The school choice movement of the past quarter-century has also fostered this kind of thinking. And, again, Democrats bear a lot of responsibility for where we find ourselves. When leaders like Barack Obama beat the drum for charter schools, they were helping lay the groundwork for people like Betsy DeVos. Her rhetoric about “the money following the child” would have seemed much more extreme if it hadn’t come on the heels of so much bipartisan support for school choice.
So we find ourselves in a political moment when people feel very strongly about the education of their own children, and are fearful that if their kids don’t get enough schooling they won’t get ahead in life. And it is simultaneously a moment when we have a badly atrophied sense of the public good, and when we can hardly remember why we fund schools with our tax dollars.
ITPI: Who’s winning the Education Wars right now?
Berkshire & Schneider: One of the things we point out in the book is that culture war candidates have actually been far less successful than is typically portrayed by the media. Candidates who are allied with Moms for Liberty, the 1776 PAC, and other right-wing groups, end up losing about 75 percent of the time. Why is that? Well, it turns out that if you run on an unpopular policy agenda, like book banning, for example, voters tend to reject you. We just saw this play out in Florida, where Ron De Santis weighed in in local school board races only to see most of the candidates he backed lose. We think this is a sign that the tide in the Education Wars is turning, to use a mixed metaphor. The problem is that there are powerful, deep-pocketed forces that see fanning the flames of the school culture as beneficial in helping them reach their goal of universal school vouchers. You really see this playing out in red states right now as school choice PACs pour money into state-level races in order to elect pro-voucher Republicans. In the short term, they’re having a lot of success with this strategy, and as a result the list of states that enact sweeping, Arizona-style school voucher programs is likely to grow. But they’re also alienating a lot of more moderate voters who are coming to understand that the culture wars are just a smoke screen for a really unpopular policy idea: dismantling public schools.
ITPI: What’s the best way to join the battle to defend public schools?
Berkshire & Schneider: Since we started working on the book, the movement to defend public schools has really taken off. What started as a piecemeal, grassroots effort to respond to extremist school board candidates has grown much more sophisticated and organized. We think that’s a big part of why groups like Moms for Liberty are on the ropes right now. We mention a number of organizations in the book that are doing incredible organizing. Shout out to Save Our Schools Arizona, the Wisconsin Public Education Network, and Granite State Progress in New Hampshire. One of the organizing efforts we mention in the book deserves a special mention: Public School Strong, which is a project of HEAL Together. It started in North Carolina with parents, teachers, and grandparents showing up at local school boards to show support for their local schools, and to push back against harmful policies coming down from the Republican state legislature. Then this spring, activists in Tennessee used the Public School Strong model as part of the campaign against school vouchers. They got school boards all over the state to pass resolutions opposing vouchers—and it worked. The plan to enact universal vouchers in Tennessee collapsed, in part because there were such clear demonstrations of public opposition. We also really like that Public School Strong defines itself as a movement led by “everyday” parents, educators and students, “not by wealthy individuals fueling division for political gain.” It’s a message that pairs nicely with our book!