Demystifying American Public Schools
The orientation nobody gave you.
Schools, oh my lord.1 They’re where we spend so much of our childhood. They’re sites of some of our best and our worst memories. They’re vibrant community hubs and contested political battlegrounds. Schools are also where I’ve worked for much of the past two decades and a general area of my expertise.2 There’s so much there there, I haven’t known where to begin, so for the first year of The Auntie Bulletin, I avoided wading in. But it’s back-to-school season in much of the northern hemisphere, and I know things that might be of value to people who care about stuff like kids and community and democracy and the future of humanity, so I think the time has come.
Today I want to make explicit some essentials of how the U.S. education system works, which often aren’t explained to us. (We went to school, sure, but we were children then, so we neither knew nor particularly cared how schools actually work). You might learn this content if you take college courses about education, or if you go out of your way to consume media about the education landscape, and teachers of course know much of it – but otherwise? It’s likely no-one’s ever broken it down for you. Some of what follows is U.S.-specific – as in so many other sectors of society, our education system is uniquely, Americanly unjust – but other points will be relevant to schooling anywhere. To readers outside the U.S., I hope you’ll stay tuned in and share what you notice about our systems’ similarities and differences in the comments.
Now, Aunties may not seek out content about schools, because we don’t tend to feel like K-123 education is our lane. We’re more the “after school” people. We might help kids with homework (parents, ask us to help your kids with their homework, we’d absolutely love to!), but we don’t tend to choose schools or have conferences with teachers or jump through the countless and confounding hoops required to get diagnoses and accommodations for kids with disabilities. Given all this, where are Aunties’ levers? Do we even have any?
(Hoooo boy, later this month I’ve got a post queued up all about Aunties’ – and everyone’s – levers for supporting public schools. In fact, that upcoming post is the impetus for today’s post. There was just so much I wanted to clarify before writing a post entitled “How You Can Support Public Schools.” Rest assured, it’s coming soon!)
What Everyone Should Know
Of course, there’s so much more to know about American public schools than a single post could possibly contain. I’m a teacher by profession and a curriculum and instruction person by training – most of my scholarly research has been about what teachers teach in classrooms (curriculum) and how they teach it (instruction) – but today I’m not even getting into that. The question of what and how teachers teach could – and does – fill so many excellent books.4 But today, it’s outside the scope. I also cut a whole part about the history of education in the U.S. and why, 70 years after the Brown v. Board Supreme Court decision supposedly desegregated schools, they’re still de facto segregated. Drop a note in the comments if you want me to write a post about that sometime.
Alright, enough setup. Here are some things to know!
Good public schools benefit everyone, not just kids and families.
This is an empirical fact, Aunties, not merely my personal opinion. A preponderance of research has found that high-quality public schools increase public tax revenues by contributing to stable employment, and they decrease public expenditures by lowering local poverty and crime rates and increasing community health outcomes. Fully funding public education is therefore much more cost-effective for states than paying for the consequences of failing to do so.
It would be so cool if elected officials in the United States took empirical data seriously. May it one day be so.
In one of my favorite studies on the community benefits of public schools, sociologists at Michigan State University analyzed interviews with over 20,000 people in 26 towns and cities across the United States. They found that, in places where people had positive views of the local schools, there were also higher levels of community satisfaction.
The researchers argued that it’s not just that good communities have good schools, but rather that good schools actually contribute to stronger communities. This is partly because schools offer direct amenities to the community: playgrounds, athletic facilities, computer labs, and spaces for public events. But even more importantly, schools also function as local hubs, where social connections flourish and spread.
This checks out, Aunties. Consider that public schools are among the most-utilized spaces in any residential area. When parents get involved in a school or even just make friends with their kids’ friends’ parents, they create real-life social networks that, by schools’ very nature, add new people every year.
Imagine the parent of a fourth grader and a sixth grader. By sending their kids to the neighborhood school, that parent gets to know other sixth grade parents, including a parent who also has an eighth grader (ooooooh, a middle schooler!), and that parent knows some parents who have an eighth grader and a tenth grader (ooooooh, a high schooler!), and so the network of relationships continues on up and down the chain of kids’ ages. And then some of these kids also play soccer or do community theater with kids at other schools, so the networks don’t just spread vertically up and down the age cohorts, but also horizontally across neighborhoods, and what you get is a bunch of people who all know and occasionally organize carpools or WhatsApp groups with a bunch of other people, who in turn also have carpools and WhatsApp groups with a bunch more people, and they also have carpools and WhatsApp groups with a bunch more people.
And then somebody in a WhatsApp group says, “hey, anyone want to come with me to that rally to fund the public library?”
This distributed local network doesn’t just benefit the parents and their kids, it benefits the whole community. It’s mobilizeable for school-related stuff and non-school-related stuff. Networks that originated with a school can and do pivot to focus on broader civic issues: traffic-calming measures, crime prevention, funding for local services, you name it. Because of the network that rose up around the school, everyone in the community benefits – people with kids and those of us without kids alike.
Interestingly, the researchers at Michigan State also found that the community satisfaction effect doesn’t extend to private schools and magnet schools, conjecturing that this might be because such schools don’t draw from the immediate vicinity. People are less likely to form communities with scattered groups of acquaintances than they are with their near neighbors.
It’s helpful to know that schools benefit all of us – and not just because it means we should all vote yes on the next school levy. (Always vote yes on every school levy!) It also matters because it means that the local schools belong to all of us. They’re invaluable community resources where we can and should feel investment and ownership and belonging, even if we never have a kid who goes there. The neighborhood school is our business; the neighborhood school is in our lane. The kids and families who go there are part of “us.”
Alright, very stirring, Lisa. Could we get a bit more concrete?
American public education is a hodgepodge, varying widely by state, district, and even school.
Lots of countries – including Japan, South Korea, Singapore, France, and Finland – have centralized departments or ministries of education that distribute funding and establish nationwide policies for schooling. Not so the United States! Our Department of Education doesn’t actually have much jurisdiction over the day-to-day operation of K-12 schools.5
The DOE doesn’t set curriculum or make staffing decisions, for example, and it can’t override state education laws. The department does control certain kinds of education funding, including much of the funding for programs that protect vulnerable students, families, and communities – programs like Title I (for low-income schools) and IDEA (for special education and services for kids with disabilities), as well as grant-funded programs that support before- and after-school care, teacher training, and services for language learners. The DOE is also supposed to enforce laws that protect civil rights in schools.
As you know, the current presidential administration is hostile to and actively working to dismantle all of these programs and goals. Given current conditions, I only wish the DOE were even more limited in its power.
Limits on the DOE at the federal level mean that state and local education systems in the United States are all over the place. Indeed, not even the state really determines much of what happens in schools. State offices of education set graduation requirements (this many credits of science, that many credits of history, and so on) and they dictate some, but not all, of the standardized tests students must take. They also establish and update curriculum standards, sometimes as directed by the state legislature. However, there are few state-level mechanisms for monitoring or enforcing what schools actually teach, so compliance (or not) often comes down to expectations set (or not) by school leaders.6
Now, a word about charter schools. These schools’ quality varies widely, as does their accountability to communities and their general level of sleaziness. Nationally, some charters operate on a true “for us, by us” model, whereby educators and community members design a school to meet their own needs. For example, some charter schools teach an Afrocentric and/or Latino-centric curriculum that really affirms and supports Black and Latinx kids, families, and educators. These schools are cool and important. On the other hand, many charters are run by large “education management organizations” (EMOs) which aim to maximize profits for investors. Here’s Carol Burris, Executive Director of the Network for Public Education, explaining how for-profit EMOs work:
The original charter is secured by the nonprofit, which gets federal, local, and state funds — and then the nonprofit turns around and gives those funds to the for-profit company to manage the school…. The goal is to run the charter school in such a way that there’s money left over. And the more money they save by doing things like hiring unqualified teachers and refusing to teach students with special needs, the more money is left at the end of the day.7
Ugggghhhhh, this country. This kind of thing should be so, so illegal, and in many places it technically is, but of course there are tons of loopholes involving layers of nonprofits and shell companies that allow it to happen anyway. Let’s keep moving, but before you let your friends send their kids to a charter school, do some digging, okay?
Speaking of money, funding for American public schools is super unfair and messed up.
U.S. schools get the majority of their funding from local tax revenues. Schools in affluent places have way more money than schools in poor places, and it shows – in the level of building repair or disrepair, in staffing levels and teacher salaries (and therefore teacher experience levels and turnover rates), in the curriculum and programming available to students, and in myriad other ways. As far as I know, the United States is the only country that funds schools this way – at least to such an extreme extent.
Tax revenues accrue to schools at the level of the district, so in theory, funding should be allocated equally across all of a district’s schools – or better yet, proportionally allocated to the schools and students with highest need. Districts do attempt to do this, but patterns in de facto housing segregation mean that rich schools still get richer and poor schools still get poorer, even within a single district.
All of the public schools here in Seattle, for example, are part of one urban district. However, the schools in the more affluent and whiter north end of the city still have access to way more resources than the poorer and more ethnically and culturally diverse south end. This is largely due to the fundraising capabilities of each school’s parent-teacher association (PTA).8 In affluent areas, parents and primary caregivers tend to have more time to devote to getting involved in their kids’ school, and many parents are white collar professionals who may even have specific fundraising expertise. An annual PTA auction at a well-resourced public school in north Seattle could raise tens of thousands of dollars – money that can be used to hire staff such as art teachers and mental health counselors, or to pay for amenities like playground upgrades and science lab equipment. Meanwhile, the PTA bake sale at a poverty-impacted public school in south Seattle might raise a few hundred dollars.
Given these disparities, in 2020 parents, educators, and community members banded together to create the Southeast Seattle Schools Fundraising Alliance (SESSFA), an organization that fundraises for 17 more- and less-affluent public schools in south Seattle, then distributes funds where needs are greatest. SESSFA’s annual spring fundraiser (which includes a student Move-a-Thon at each school) gains citywide attention, attracts sponsors, and garners donations totaling much more than the sum of what each school could raise alone.
SESSFA is a wonderful and powerful local organization, a testament to what communities can do when we organize for educational justice. And we shouldn’t need organizations like this, because all public schools should be equitably and amply funded in the first place.
Public schools are often so much better than their reputation.
I’ll be blunt: when a school has a bad reputation, it’s often due to racist and classist assumptions about the school’s students and community. Almost always, schools with lots of poor and working class students, lots of immigrant students, and/or lots of Black and brown students tend to have bad reputations. There will be a perception – especially among bourgeois white people in the community – that the school is “rough,” that there’s a lot of violence and crime there, that students and families don’t take academics seriously. When you hear ideas like this about an ethnically diverse or poverty-impacted public school, be very, very skeptical.
These schools also often have low average scores on standardized tests and low ratings on that massively influential arbiter of American schools’ reputations, Greatschools.org. But here’s the thing about test scores and ratings: they’re biased and they don’t tell us very much. Standardized tests advantage students whose first language is English, who read a lot at home, who have been raised in dominant U.S. culture (for example, they know the content of Western fairy tales), and who know how to use a mouse.9 These tests are better predictors of test-takers’ parental income and education level than they are of actual academic ability.
Greatschools.org is a nonprofit that purports to empower parents by helping them select the best school for their children. Public schools are given a summary ranking on a scale of 1-10: schools rated 1-4 have test scores below the state average, 5-6 are average, and 7-10 are above average. School ratings are based on three different measures, all of which are based on test scores: the school’s average scores on state standardized tests, students’ average improvements on their state tests scores year over year, and SAT/ACT scores, graduation rates, and participation in advanced courses. The education reporting site Chalkbeat, in partnership with Vox, made a great short explainer video (below), which illuminates how test-score-based ratings exacerbate inequality.
Until recently, low-rated schools were indicated by a red bubble on the Greatschools map, mid-rated schools were indicated by a yellow bubble, and high-rated schools by a green bubble. I conjecture that they’ve received feedback about the stigmatizing effect of their data display, because when I went to the site to grab a screenshot, I found that they now only display the highest-rated schools on the map; as far as I can tell, there’s no longer any way to display the lower-rated schools on the map at all. (Sorry, Greatschools, I don’t think you’ve fixed your stigmatizing problem).
Greatschools’ ratings – which are prominently displayed in home listings on real estate sites like Zillow, Realtor.com, and Redfin – don’t just contribute to stigma; they also drive residential segregation. This is because the site’s ratings actively steer homebuying parents toward whiter, more affluent areas (thereby driving property values up in these areas), and they steer buyers away from more diverse, poverty-impacted areas (driving property values down). As one group of researchers found in 2018, sites like Greatschools have “accelerated divergence” in home prices, income distributions, and the racial and ethnic composition of communities.
Here’s the thing about all these schools with bad reputations and low ratings. As a teacher educator who supervises student teachers, I’ve spent a lot of time watching both novice teachers and their experienced mentors teach kids, in a wide range of schools around Seattle and in local suburbs both affluent and working class. The schools with bad reputations? Where the test scores are low and the students are supposedly “rough”? More often than not, these schools are lovely. The teachers and staff are so wonderful and caring. The bulletin boards in the elementary schools are covered in student stories about Dia de Los Muertos or Lunar New Year. The hallways in the high schools are full of kids talking and laughing in multiple languages and teachers standing in the hallways bumping fists with students and bugging them to turn in their mariachi club permission slips.
Aunties, some of the very best teachers I’ve ever seen teach in these schools – and unlike most people, I’ve watched a lot of teachers doing their jobs.
Not only that, but I’ve also seen a lot of mediocre teaching in supposedly high-performing schools. This includes public schools that serve affluent, predominantly white communities (with the test scores to match) and elite private schools where graduates routinely get into Ivy League colleges. Actually, my dissertation about the teaching that happens in these kinds of schools, and what I realized along the way is that teachers here don’t need to hone their craft. They are already perceived to be good at their jobs because their students have high test scores and get into fancy colleges. But these external measures don't really mean much about the quality of the school or the teaching and learning that happens there.
Don’t believe the hype, Aunties. Schools’ reputations are often hooey.
Public Schools Are Our Schools
The public schools belong to all of us. We pay for them with our tax dollars, sure, but whether we have kids or not, neighborhood schools are ours in a much more profound way than that. They’re a key hub for building community and seeding social connections. I don’t know about you, Aunties, but I actually do know a decent number of my neighbors primarily because kids I love go to the neighborhood school, and I therefore know these kids’ friends and their friends’ parents a little bit. When, earlier this year, I and a few others decided to start a neighborhood WhatsApp group, like half the people in the group found their way there through the local school’s parent networks. And then a bunch of those people came to our neighborhood block party. Those connections are thanks to our local school – my local school, even though I will never have kids who go there.
I give $25 a month to the Southeast Seattle Schools Funding Alliance – even since my disability benefit was discontinued – because I’m investing in our community, our neighborhood, our kids.
If there’s one thing you take away from today’s Auntie Bulletin, I hope it’s that your neighborhood school is your school, serving your community, and it’s worthy of your serious care, protection, and investment. In a few weeks, I’ll be publishing a follow-up to this piece about how anyone – parents or not – can support our local public schools. I’ve got a lot of ideas to share and I hope you’ll plan to try some out for yourself!
Thanks for reading, Aunties.
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In case you’re interested and don’t already know this, I’m a former high school social studies teacher who worked for more than a decade as a teacher educator, preparing and training new teachers. I’m also an academic researcher with a Ph.D. in education.
For those outside the U.S. or anyone who’s not sure, “K-12 education” refers to kindergarten through twelfth grade, i.e., approximately age 5 to age 18. Sometimes you’ll see “P-12” or “PK-12” to include preschool or pre-kindergarten, a.k.a. “pre-K.” (In some places, preschool and pre-K refer to the same thing, and in others, preschool precedes pre-K).
In the future, if folks are interested, I could write about what is (or should) be taught in classrooms. There’s a ton of fascinating research that I happen to know decently well, and I also have, you know, some opinions.The school curriculum is not precisely Auntie content, but insofar as it's about building the future we want to live in, it’s also not not Auntie content. If you have requests, drop ‘em in the comments!
Why does the U.S. Department of Education have so little say over K-12 schools? My inner social studies teacher can’t resist a quick reminder about federalism – the governmental system whereby power is divided between the federal government and the states. Thanks to debates that went down when the so-called Founding Fathers were hammering out the U.S. Constitution in the late 18th century, in our system state governments are not subordinate to the federal government, but instead have equal power. The federal government is in charge of national-level stuff like coining money, regulating mail, and conducting foreign affairs. State governments are in charge of local-level stuff like business and trade within the state, public safety, and education.
Here in Washington state, we have an excellent Tribal sovereignty curriculum, Since Time Immemorial, which is required by law to be taught in all schools – but is it taught in all schools?? Who knows? In my experience, some teachers and schools take the requirement very seriously, while others don’t. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are teachers and schools and districts around the state that don’t even know about Since Time Immemorial – even though it was originally recommended by the legislature in 2005 and passed into law in 2015.
Go here to read an interview with Carol Burris, Executive Director of the Network for Public Education, explaining how education management organizations use for-profit charter schools to extract public funds and enrich private investors.
In the U.S., PTAs might also be known as PTOs (parent teacher organizations) or PTSAs (parent-teacher-student associations). They may have other names in other countries, I’m not sure. Regardless of what they’re called, the reality is that they’re mostly parent and community member associations, and they usually liaise with principals and other school leaders. Actual teachers and students are rarely involved.
Operating a computer mouse is a challenging motor skill for young children. Recently, some small friends and I have become addicted to this online color blending game, Colorfle, which requires us to operate a mouse. These kids haven’t had much occasion to use a mouse before and it’s taken time for them to figure out left click versus right click versus scrolly wheel in the middle – let alone managing to consistently get their fingers to the right place. Kids who don’t have a computer with a mouse at home may be asked to use a mouse for the very first time, without instruction, on the day of the standardized test.
Love this in depth and well articulated post. I deeply appreciate your work and the level of profound accessibility/demystification it provides.
One of the best group of studies I read in recent years was a group of schools in England that did all the background management and planning to drive over residents from senior residents something like every day or 3x a week to interact / play with / do activities w kids. Regularity built real relationships, and the measured social positive impacts were significant. Just a thought for a future post!