Articles by Frederick M. Hess, Linda Nathan, Joe Nathan, Ray Bacchetti, and Evans Clinchy, Phi Delta Kappan
February 2004
This month Kappan offers six essays examining and debating the notion of "public" schooling. Rick Hess frames the discussion - and offers the most interesting insights - by penning the opening article and a rejoinder. In the middle are four pieces from teachers and scholars offering varying views on Hess's arguments. His central point is that we need not constrain our definition of a "public" education to include only schools run by government employees; rather, we should think broadly about our goals and criteria for public schooling and then be flexible in how we achieve these. Thus school choice, private management organizations, and other arrangements could fulfill our needs; likewise, our current public school system may actually be less "public" than we're willing to admit. His related point is that examining what's "public" about education quickly exposes the silliness of those who oppose reforms as being "anti-public school." The rebuttals also raise interesting questions. For example, how can the standards movement, with its top-down interventions, be consistent with democratic control of schools? How do we balance "the relative claims of the student, family, community, nation, and the wider world on how and what schools teach"? Unfortunately, however, most of the counterarguments miss the mark. From Evans Clinchy's call for "safeguards against the threat of vouchers and further encroachment of the private corporate sector into the field of public schooling," to Joe Nathan's preference for constructivist learning, the rebuttals focus on ancillary issues while only loosely addressing what is "public" about education (and then of course they tend to conclude that the optimal answer is something awfully like the status quo). Perhaps we should view this collective changing of the subject as evidence that Hess is right - logic does dictate a rethinking of "public" education - but we worry that most of the education world would simply prefer to ignore this issue. The articles are available online (subscribers only) at http://www.pdkintl.org/kappan/kappan.htm, or you can pick up a hard copy and flip to page 433.
