The Origins of the Assault on Public Education
With Jennifer C. Berkshire and Jack Schneider
Why are conservatives so hellbent on dismantling public education? Project 2025 calls for the Department of Education to be eliminated. It further suggests that education policy should “follow the path outlined by Milton Friedman in 1955, wherein education is publicly funded but education decisions are made by families.”
As Jennifer C. Berkshire and Jack Schneider reveal, the assault on public schools “has never been just about education.” Rather, it connects back to resistance to the integration of schools and a long-running war on unions. And in our interview, Jennifer and Jack examine how the attempted privatization of schools would essentially mean returning to an unequal education system from hundreds of years ago.
Jennifer is the Bloch Lecturer in Education Journalism and a lecturer in Education Studies at Yale. Jack is the Dwight W. Allen Distinguished Professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Individually, Jennifer and Jack’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and many other publications. Together, they’re the co-hosts of the education policy podcast, Have You Heard, and the coauthors of two books, including most recently, The Education Wars: A Citizen’s Guide and Defense Manual.
A condensed transcript, edited for clarity, is below. You can also listen to our conversation on the Skipped History podcast:
Ben: To kick us off, can you tell us how public education began?
JS: Sure. One way to understand the vision far-right advocates have today is to look at the non-system we had about 200 years ago.
It was a world where kids from well-to-do families had private tutors. Other well-off families sent their kids to private academies. Meanwhile, in many cities, poorer students went to pauper schools, which were just as stigmatized as they sound. In other places, students were part of teaching models like the Lancasterian System—with hundreds of students crammed into a large room, one or two adult instructors, and pods of older students assisting.
You could swap out their slates for tablets and the older students for an AI system, and that’s what some envision for the future of education today.
Ben: I suppose the only reassuring difference between the Lancasterian vision then and now is that deodorant is more effective in 2024 than in the mid-19th century.
JS: True. But the world of a couple hundred years ago was intolerable to those advocating for public education. They proposed something almost unimaginable today: universal, taxpayer-supported, open-enrollment education. It was designed to serve every young person, regardless of their status, in a relatively equal way, and at public expense.
Common school advocates like Henry Barnard and Horace Mann argued that if public schools weren’t as good as private academies or tutors, they’d be stigmatized, and we’d have a two-tier system. That would affect not just social life but political life in this country. Their vision succeeded, and they helped lay the foundation of today’s system by the end of the Civil War.
Of course, it was still created by white, privileged, Protestant men, with limits in their worldview, and they insisted on kids reading the King James Bible in schools. Catholics wanted nothing to do with that. Early on they opted out of the system, which is why we have a large Catholic school education system, too.
JB: Going to the 1920s, we saw the first parents' rights crusade, which arose in response to efforts to ban child labor. Today, everything is shrouded beneath a discourse of test scores, achievement, and college and career readiness. Back then, it was more direct—some people believed kids shouldn’t be forced to work in appalling conditions, while others thought kids weren’t equal and should work in factories or mines. They opposed compulsory education on those grounds.
And I think if you peek beneath the surface of many debates today, you’ll find people who share that belief—who believe kids are fundamentally unequal, and it doesn't make a lot of sense to invest in a system that treats them as though they are.
Ben: Moving to the mid-20th century, Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 was a seminal moment in the history of public education. Suspiciously, right around that time, we also saw the rise of new arguments against public education.
Can you talk about Milton Friedman and his curiously-timed proposals?
JB: So Milton Friedman was a conservative economist. His proposal for school vouchers came just as the courts were ordering school desegregation. It’s hard to believe the timing was just a coincidence.
In the South, policymakers quickly latched onto his idea of—to use today’s rhetoric—funding “students instead of systems.” They set up what were called segregation academies—state-funded, usually private religious institutions beyond the reach of the Constitution—to keep schools segregated.
Today, all sorts of policies are being rolled out as though they’re fresh thinking: vouchers, “education savings accounts,” “tax credit scholarships,” etc. But all these alternatives, like in the aftermath of Brown v. Board, are just attempts to move kids outside of the constitutional imperative that we treat everybody equally.
Ben: You’ve both circled the intersection of education and labor. Can you talk about the rise of teachers’ unions, and how efforts to undermine public education today intersect with the long-running war on labor regulations?
JS: Teachers’ unions began forming in the early 20th century, led largely by women. Teaching has been a feminized profession for a long time, but it wasn’t always that way. Rather, teaching was intentionally feminized in the late 19th century as a way to lower teacher pay and limit autonomy—women were more socially and economically vulnerable.
Female educators began to organize in places like New York and Chicago in the early 20th century. The movement became more combative by the mid 20th century because of the New Deal, which really empowered organized labor. By the 1960s, teachers unions had become a real bugaboo among conservatives.
JB: You mentioned the New Deal, Jack, and Betsy DeVos, one of the chief opponents of public schooling today, represents a group of people whose families became enraged during the New Deal.
Both the Prince family, which she grew up in, and the DeVoses, whom she married into, viewed teachers unions, like the Michigan Education Association, as their arch enemies. Same for the United Auto Workers. So if you hear today that we have these oligarchs who’ve been angry since the New Deal and want to roll back the entire edifice of workers’ rights—well, there’s a strong case that it’s true.
Ben: And just to connect the opposition to labor with opposition to school integration, you note how employers across the South in the `50s (and beyond) viewed unions as a threat not just to their power but to segregation itself.
JB: Right. The attack on teachers’ unions has never been just about education.
Indicatively, after Governor Scott Walker enacted Act 10 in Wisconsin in 2011, which basically got rid of teachers’ unions, a study showed that the unions had been instrumental in lobbying for things like raising the minimum wage and strengthening safety nets, not just teacher pay.
JS: I’ll add that the Democratic Party has become an unwitting accomplice in undermining public ed. Centrist Democrats like Biden, Bill Clinton, and also Barack Obama embraced the idea that hey, maybe there's a place for markets in education. Maybe we don't need to ally so closely with teachers unions. The Democratic Party viewed charter schools as a kind of lasting compromise, where the right got to sort of marketify schools while the left got to say, well, this is all still happening inside the public education system.
But for ideologically committed conservatives, charter schools were always a way station en route to the long term aim of fully privatizing education.
Ben: What’s the status of privatization efforts today?
JB: Universal voucher programs are the new trend. They allow anyone to get a voucher, but they come with different names because "voucher" is such an unpopular word.
The idea is to give parents a portion of what the state spends on public education and let them decide what schooling looks like. It could mean homeschooling, online curricula, or even things like Lego sets or parachute lessons—whatever they define as education—and for this brief moment in time, the state will pay for it.
Why do I say brief moment in time? Because if you look at Arizona, for example, they’ve quickly run into problems. They’re now picking up the tab for wealthy parents who sent their kids to private schools, at the same time that they deeply cut taxes on their wealthiest residents, a pattern we’re seeing around the country. So Arizona is awash in red ink.
We think it’s only a matter of time before we start funding K-12 like higher ed, with much more of the burden shifting onto the consumer.
Ben: In your minds, what are the broader consequences to this sort of choose-your-own adventure approach to education?
JS: To me, there’s a clear societal cost.
Public education advances the common good. School is the way that we, as a society, try to create the conditions for living alongside one another. And in a society where we can increasingly self-select into micro-communities—where we can sort of carefully put together the Netflix profile of our lives—public schools become more important than ever in helping kids learn how to live side by side in a diverse, pluralistic democracy.
Ben: I think that’s a wonderful mission statement for your work—and also an admission that you have a "Coexist" bumper sticker on your car.
JB: He has it on both of his Prii, I’ve seen them!
I agree with Jack. And public education may be more vulnerable than it has been at any time in recent memory, but the coalition of individuals defending it is also growing. That’s why we called our book The Education Wars: A Citizen’s Guide and Defense Manual. We hope to recruit a much bigger force to defend and protect public schools.