New Directions for Community Education

When one stops to think about it, the notion that governments would take it upon themselves to educate children is rather strange.  Governments may be well-suited for tasks such as building highways, or fighting wars, or regulating economies—but educating 7-year olds?  Isn’t that rather an odd idea?

I prefer to think of “communities” educating their children.  In my small New England town (with one public high school, one public middle school, and two public elementary schools), I think our community takes this responsibility seriously, judging at least by the annual school budget debates and town meetings that continue late into the night.  There is something admirable in how  this task is undertaken.  The model appears to work in our town, sort of.

And yet I know there are some significant problems with it.  One concerns how community is understood.  There may have been a time when “community” could be understood to be the town or city in which we happened to live, and we could assume that community education meant the education of all children within a particular town or city. 

But I don’t think this holds true today, if it ever did.  Today, community is more complicated.  When people think of the community most relevant to the education of their children, many think of things other than geography: their faith traditions, their ideological commitments, their vocational interests, their educational philosophies.  As a result, the idea of communities educating their children requires more nuance.  Rather than geographically based communities, consider the community of “people interested in ecology” educating its children.  Or perhaps the community of “imaginative- play-based leaning advocates” educating its children.  Certainly, we can imagine the community of “Buddhist-believers” educating its children.  All these seem plausible to me; the reasons why geographical communities should be privileged over other forms of community when it comes to education aren’t clear.  Indeed, it’s not hard to see how such a policy results in an injustice borne by these other communities.

That’s one problem with the traditional model.  Here’s another: many communities simply aren’t able to educate their children, usually because they don’t have the resources required (occasionally for other reasons: an unusual number of English-language learners, for example).  This is another big challenge, made worse because unequal access to education among communities only compounds the resource inequity.  Poorer communities become poorer.  Wealthier communities become wealthier.  In a country that has made a commitment to providing free K-12 education to all, not as a privilege but as a right, it’s hard to see how this lack of education equality is not an injustice borne by people in less wealthy communities.

Both of these problems are injustices.  What should we do?  While I don’t believe we need to contemplate governments actually running schools, as the agent of society charged with seeking public justice, governments do have some responsibility here.  Government’s interest in education, it seems to me, is ensuring that all children receive an education of reasonably high quality, and reasonably close to the wishes of the families receiving the education.

My most basic suggestion is to move beyond the idea of “public schools” as geographical community schools.  Instead, let’s say that any community that seeks to educate its children can establish a “public school”—or better yet, let’s do away with the whole “public-private” language entirely: let’s just talk about schools.  As long as children can graduate a program satsifying some minimum standards (we can talk later about specifics), we can call it a school.

As the government interest is to support communities educating their children and doing so equitably, it seems to me that educational resources should be allocated among communities roughly in proportion to the number of children they are educating.  One important implication is that this gives a much greater role to state (and perhaps federal) governments, at least with regard to financing of education.  I see this as a blessing of the federal system of government.  Another important implication is that schools formerly deemed “private” will become eligible for state support.  I see great public justice gains possible as a result, particularly for those families struggling in towns and cities unable to provide high quality school  systems, and also for those families “doubly taxed”—that is, required to pay both for the “geographical community” school and for their “own community” schools.  There’s also potential economic gains: so-called “private” schools tend to educate children at less cost, and with better educational outcomes, than traditional public schools.

Is this a panacea?  Certainly not—I can imagine plenty of challenges involved in a move to a system that respects this widened notion of community.  However, I doubt these challenges are any greater than those we now face in our crumbling public education system.  So as matter of policy, let’s stop making in difficult for families to access the community schools they support, and let’s ensure that families living in underprivileged neighborhoods can access the same quality education that families living elsewhere are able to enjoy.