Education would be better off if it were more democratic, argues an advocate of a new schooling model.

A key fault line in contemporary education is between those who see public schools as foundational to democracy and those who regard them as ineffectual and captive to union interests. In his new book Publicization: How Public and Private Interests Can Reinvent Education for the Common Good, Jonathan Gyurko sets out to bridge this divide. Jonathan is the president and co-founder of the Association of College and University Educators (ACUE) and previously worked for the New York City school district, the United Federation of Teachers, and the Coalition of Public-Independent Charter Schools. I recently had a chance to talk with him about his book and what it means for educators. I hope you find the conversation as illuminating as I did. Here’s what he had to say.

— Rick

Rick: So, Jonathan, the title of your book is Publicization. What do you mean by that?

Jonathan: First, Rick, thanks for bringing attention to my book. In your new book, Getting Education Right, you argue that education isn’t a “public” or “private” good. It’s a mix. I couldn’t agree more. Schools both focus on a family’s particular interests and advance common aims — to prepare engaged citizens, productive workers, good neighbors, and stewards of the planet. But the mix isn’t set. We get to decide. As I show in my book, the past decades have seen a lot of reforms that privilege private interests like choosing a school that’s “right for my child” and various forms of market-inspired privatization. But this puts common purposes at risk — just look at our political division, economic inequity, cultural divides, and environmental degradation. Publicization shows how any type of school — district, charter, or independent — can reset the balance through more democratic governance and operation.

Rick: So, tell me a bit about your experiences in education and how they led you to write this book?

Jonathan: Sure. I started teaching in South Africa right after apartheid. The school, Tiger Kloof, wasn’t fully public, but it wasn’t private, either. Teachers, books, and a curriculum were provided by the government. Our students took state tests. However, it operated on private property with supplemental programs managed by a charitable board. After that, I spent many years in New York’s charter movement as a founder, board member, authorizer, and even union organizer. Seeing the sector from many angles got me thinking: Why not consider a school’s “publicness” by what it does instead of its legal status?

Rick: In your eyes, just how public are today’s public schools, anyway?

Jonathan: If by “public” you mean “district” schools, then as I write in the book, not very. Here’s why: In the plainest sense, public goods are nonexcludable and nonrivalrous, like the air we breathe and national defense — we’re all equally affected and protected. In contrast, private goods are excludable: When I eat an apple, it’s all mine. Publicization turns this economic concept into an “exclusion test.” When applied to how schools operate, it’s not pretty. Exclusionary practices exist everywhere. Simply put, these practices make schools less public and more private.

Rick: Where do you think those engaged in the familiar debates may be getting this wrong?

Jonathan: Take district attendance zones and town boundaries. They fail the exclusion test because they bar families from accessing a particular school if they live on the “wrong” side of a politically determined line. On this measure, open-lottery charters are less exclusionary — more public — than district schools. Another example is school funding, which excludes some students from better-resourced schools when it is tied to local wealth. Curriculum, when made by experts without input from other stakeholders — including employers, civic leaders, students, and taxpayers — also fails the exclusion test. Publicization, by contrast, offers a hopeful vision. By reframing our understanding of what makes any school more publicly purposed, I show how to achieve more of the common aims that schools have historically supported.

Rick: What are some of those common aims?

Jonathan: The book takes as a given several common aims found in American history. Preparing each generation for democratic citizenship has been championed since the Founding Fathers. In the 19th century, Horace Mann and the common school leaders aimed to foster greater social cohesion. In the 20th century, skill development became a priority for economic competitiveness. Note that all three concepts — democratic citizenship, social cohesion, and economic competitiveness — are themselves public goods, in that it’s hard to isolate oneself from the benefits or failures of any of them. To these I’ve added a fourth: preparation for environmental stewardship. Again, hardly anyone will escape our climate future. Put together with the exclusion test, these aims form my proposed definition of what makes any school more public than private: It produces public goods and doesn’t exclude stakeholders from participating in educational decisionmaking, displace facts with beliefs, or prevent students from attending.

Rick: You set up “publicization” as an alternative to “privatization,” and suggested that teacher evaluation and accountability systems are examples of “privatization.” I didn’t quite follow the logic there. After all, these have been adopted in traditional, publicly governed schools and systems after being legislated by democratic leaders. Can you say more?

Jonathan: Again, I encourage readers to think of the “publicness” of education by what a school does and not by its legal status. This framing makes room for different types of schools to advance common aims. It also exposes the privatizing practices in “traditional” schools. For decades, American policymakers — both Republicans and Democrats — rode an intellectual tide premised on efficiency, markets, and competition — collectively, privatization. It’s what Elizabeth Popp Berman, in Thinking like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in U.S. Public Policy, calls an “economic mode,” full of incentive alignment and extrinsic incentives that found their way into education. Examples of this economic paradigm include Race to the Top’s teacher-evaluation requirements and No Child Left Behind’s sanctions on schools not meeting adequate yearly progress. Publicization offers an alternative.

Rick: Are you suggesting that attention to efficiency or incentives makes something “private”? Does this mean principals are rejecting the public good when they budget responsibly?

Jonathan: Rick, this feels a little extreme. Of course the prudent use of tax dollars is in our common interest. But efficiency is just one of many competing policy goals, and we need political processes to judge its relative importance. For example, the proliferation of small district schools and charters created inefficient redundancies in school administration and student transportation. But choice advocates — myself included — felt the inefficiency was worth it.

Rick: You also call for a new education politics that seeks to “broaden the dialogue, by encouraging others to engage, particularly those with divergent views.” That sounds good to me, but I’m curious how you square this call with your suggestion that proponents of school choice or test-based accountability are engaged in a “privatizing” assault on democratic schooling?

Jonathan: Well, my friend, “assault” is your word, but let’s look at this more closely. I don’t expect the most ardent supporters of school choice to join the conversation, because pure choice requires no mutual accommodation. You vote with your feet to serve your private interests. That’s more than an assault on democratically determined schooling. It’s a threat to collectively reproducing and reimagining the common aims that hold a country together.

Rick: For what it’s worth, this doesn’t seem like the kind of respectful, good-faith critique you urge in your book. Plenty of leading proponents of educational choice — including figures like Howard Fuller, Patrick Wolf, Ashley Berner, Derrell Bradford, and Neal McCluskey — have long made the case for expanding parental choice in ways that are very much about citizenship and democracy. It strikes me that you’re not engaging them in the kind of conversation you’re calling for. Your take?

Jonathan: Rick, I’ve worked closely on these issues with thought leaders as divergent as Joel Klein, Randi Weingarten, John Chubb, Leo Casey, and others. I’ve learned something from all of them, and Publicization attempts to bridge our field’s intellectual divides — just like this conversation’s give-and-take. It does require some soul searching on both sides, and we should work with those with whom we disagree to form a new coalition of change makers that both you and I are calling for.

Rick: You argue that “the privatization project is premised on control.” But it seems to me that privatization is typically understood to be about market-based reform, in which the goal is to expand options and loosen centralized control. What do you have in mind here?

Jonathan: Just because the hand is invisible doesn’t mean it’s not controlling. Think about the assumptions of the “economic mode” that underlie privatization. Performance contracts, in the form of charter schooling and outsourcing to education management organizations, aim to control for the principle-agent problem — in other words, since it’s impossible to monitor inputs, these methods of control regulate outcomes. Evaluations based on test scores aim to align incentives around performance — a better way, it’s argued, to control teachers’ work. As I see it, school reform efforts have become a tired fight between market-based control and centralized regulatory control. Publicization argues for a third, complementary possibility: more democratic control through greater engagement and participation at different levels of decisionmaking.

Rick: Earlier, you mentioned that school funding isn’t working today. From your perspective, what are we getting wrong with school funding? And what kinds of changes would you like to see?

Jonathan: I simply give no quarter to the argument that schools are sufficiently funded — not when Dream Charters, where I spent a decade on the board, spends nearly twice as much per student than federal, state, and local governments spend on traditional district schools. Nor when suburbs choose to spend meaningfully more on schools than rural and urban areas do. Nor when wealthy families willingly pay exorbitant private school tuition. Here’s a possible change: In 2022, the IRS failed to collect about $600 billion in owed taxes because of understaffing. That’s enough to double school funding in about half the states and decouple funding from local wealth. Much greater federal funding would better align fiscal responsibility to common aims that are now of national scope. It strikes me there’s a national deal to be brokered here — for any school serving the public good — particularly when the education of students in a handful of swing counties affects everyone nationwide.

Rick: This response doesn’t seem to really engage those concerned about how effectively school dollars are spent today, especially given your suggestion that “efficiency” is a problematic concept. Given that, what kind of “deal” do you have in mind?

Jonathan: Let’s not conflate fiscal adequacy with prudent spending. I am not advocating for golden toilets. I would like to see schools that are more conducive to learning. Take our 100-year-old industrial-custodial model of shuffling students from one crowded room to another. Instead, imagine settings designed for small-group collaboration and active learning, equipped with the latest tech, and managed by teachers prepared to develop students’ intellectual and emotional capabilities. We’d get better outcomes, and students’ transition to college and work settings wouldn’t be nearly as jarring. As for a deal, I could see Congress becoming the majority funder of schools, up from today’s 9 percent, with bipartisan support through a transformative increase in funding — one that attracts Ivy League grads into education careers instead of those in finance or consulting — if backed by district, charter, and publicly purposed independent schools. That’s how the Elementary and Secondary Education Act passed in 1965, with support from both district and Catholic school advocates. Why not again?

Rick: You call for “mutual accountability” as a mechanism to replace the traditional top-down school accountability. In your formulation, “responsibility is vested among stakeholders for what can rightly be considered each’s respective obligations.” Can you say a bit more? For starters, who are the various stakeholders you have in mind?

Jonathan: It’s all of us, really: taxpayers, employers, neighbors, educators, families, and students. The trouble is, most stakeholders today are excluded from schooling — either by district experts, who insulate themselves to run “the one best system” — or by school choice laws, which result in families making school decisions on their own. For example, calculus remains a crowning high school achievement and a ticket to elite colleges — where students may never use it again — even when statistical reasoning and analytical thinking is arguably more valuable and desired by employers. Now imagine recurring processes for standards and curriculum that actually take employers’ needs seriously. Schooling would look different with that kind of collective participation.

Rick: OK, so what does it mean to hold taxpayers or schools of education accountable? And what’s to stop each group from saying, “We did the best we could, but those other folks didn’t do their part”?

Jonathan: I don’t think there’s any need to stop someone from saying, in good faith, “I did the best I could, given the circumstances.” It’s the circumstances that need changing. As for stakeholders doing their part, I write in Publicization that accountability follows legitimacy. When citizens are proud of their schools, businesses get the employees they need, parents perceive what’s going on as education and not indoctrination, schooling is seen as legitimate, and stakeholders are more willing to uphold their responsibilities.

Rick: Last question: If you had to spotlight one practical tip that educators or education leaders might take from Publicization, what would it be?

Jonathan: Show up and invite others. Education in a democracy requires participation. It also requires norms and procedures for decisionmaking that feel fair and nonexclusive. But it all starts by showing up and looking around the room to see who’s not there and bringing them into the conversation. John Stuart Mill’s famous defense of liberty included the freedom to make our views public and subject to the community’s judgment. That only works if the community is expected, present, listening, and responding. It only happens if we’re willing to bring more of our fellow Americans into the community of unforced agreement, as pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty explained over decades of writings, including his final summative work, Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism. That’s how, in a pluralistic democracy, we can collectively decide what it means to flourish and how schools prepare young people for that future. Otherwise, we are educating for authoritarianism — based on the exclusionary decisions of experts or the silent, unilateral choices of the market. We can do better, and the country needs us to.

This post originally appeared on Rick Hess Straight Up.