EXCERPT: Reflections on the Public School and the Social Fabric by Mike Rose

There are over 130,000 public K–12 schools in the United States. All of these have their origins in Horace Mann’s revolutionary reimagining of schooling. Before Mann, most schools in the United States were private, religious, or charity-based institutions of limited reach; Mann’s vision was of a universal common school, free to all children, not attached to church, funded by the public, for the public. Under his leadership as the first Secretary of Education for the state of Massachusetts and his subsequent advocacy, lecturing and writing, schools proliferated throughout Massachusetts and other northern states. Mann was a Mid-Nineteenth Century social reformer, so elements of his world view are certainly ripe for criticism—for example, that universal schooling could level economic inequality—but he still achieved something extraordinary: he generated a new idea into public consciousness. The public school became part of the American social fabric and the American identity.

While this tight connection of school and society is one of our country’s grand democratic achievements, the connection also results in school enacting our society’s capital sins: racial segregation; assaults on culture and language; gender, race, and class biases encoded in curriculum.

The public school has evolved into a complex, multi-dimensional institution. To examine this institution as it exists today and to help us further consider Bobby Sherman’s high school and Dyett and its community, I’m going to adapt a technique from a classic article by historian David Tyack on a topic related to the present one, “Ways of Seeing: An Essay on the History of Compulsory Schooling.” Tyack sets out to explain the development of compulsory school in our country by applying five different conceptual frameworks or “ways of seeing” to the emergence of legislation from the Mid-Nineteenth through the early Twentieth Centuries requiring that children attend school. Each of the frameworks reveals certain political, economic, or sociological-organizational aspects of the rise of compulsory schooling while downplaying or missing others, for as rhetorician Kenneth Burke, whom Tyack quotes, puts it: “a way of seeing is always a way of not seeing.” Tyack argues that each of these conceptual frameworks draws on different kinds of evidence and “depicts different levels of social reality” and, therefore, by strategically combining them we gain “a wider and more accurate perception” of how and why compulsory schooling developed as it did. In practice, in its dayto-day functioning, the American public school is an amalgam of what is revealed by the ways of seeing I’m going to present, but for analytic purposes, let us take each in turn.

Public schools are governmental and legal institutions and therefore originate in legislation and foundational documents. Both Bobby Sherman’s high school and Dyett Middle School began as site-specific proposals. They, like all schools, exist in bureaucratic systems of administration and managerial authority, and decisions made about one school have the potential to affect other schools in the district. They are supported with public funds which are subject to oversight, and they have codified legal obligations and protections for employees and for students. Though school systems function according to the principles of modernity’s organizational rationality, they are also subject to the turbulence of regional and national politics, which affects funding, regulations, and the content of curriculum. Because public school funding in the United States depends heavily on local property taxes, broader patterns of economic inequality get reflected in a particular school’s budget. And, finally, in our time, there has been resistance to the structures of school bureaucracy with attempts to create alternative management structures, such as charter schools, which, whatever their merits, affect the funding and enrollment of other schools in the district.

Like all institutions, schools have a purpose, are goal-driven. The public school’s primary purpose is to educate, so it exists in a policy web of curriculum frameworks and standards; textbooks and instructional materials and technologies; student grades, certificates, and assessments; teachers’ contracts and union negotiations; counseling and advising practices, and more. None of these elements is static, but subject to change for a host of reasons, from budget allocations to emerging societal demands—in our time, for example, there are calls for more math and science, for instruction in computer technology and literacy, for courses on the histories of non-dominant groups, and for compensatory programs to address inequality. The class I visited at Dyett was part of a program to enhance the education of low-income Students of Color.

Equally important as the content of curriculum are the institutional assumptions about ability, knowledge, and the social order that underlie it. The distinction between academic and vocational knowledge, the practice of curricular tracking, gifted and talented programs, honors courses are all based on theories of intelligence, the structure of knowledge, and the role of schooling in the social order. And although the fundamental purpose of the public school is to educate the young, within that meta-goal there are historically shifting goals concerning why we educate. For Horace Mann, a preeminent goal was to heal social fractures and level class differences through a common educational experience. There is in our history also a strong civic goal—we educate to create citizens—and an ethical-moral goal, to foster virtue and right action. (Mann also subscribed to these.) We educate, as well, to aid intellectual and social development. And we educate to enable people to participate in the economy—a prevalent goal in the contemporary United States.

They, like all schools, exist in bureaucratic systems of administration and managerial authority, and decisions made about one school have the potential to affect other schools in the district. They are supported with public funds which are subject to oversight, and they have codified legal obligations and protections for employees and

Public schools are physical structures. Each has an address, sits on a parcel of land with geographical coordinates, is of a certain size, spatial configuration, and architectural design. Within its boundaries are buildings, classrooms, seats, walkways, benches, tables, and possibly landscaped spaces, playgrounds, and athletic fields. These physical features affect the flow of social life in the school, and can reflect levels of funding and of political and/or community support. Other features of the built or natural environment—which can change over time—surround the school and affect both the function and perception of it. The removal of public housing projects close to Dyett significantly reduced its enrollment, and low enrollment would become a factor in the decision to close the school.

By virtue of its location in a community, the school is embedded in the social and economic dynamics of that community. Current employment patterns and job opportunities, demographics, and political decisions affect a school’s reputation, enrollment, workplace satisfaction, and a host of student characteristics from security about housing and food to beliefs about opportunity. Bobby Sherman was in high school when coal was in decline, and that had to affect his sense of the future in Martin, Kentucky, a place tied to his identity. There is a history to this current reality which has an effect on the present. Earlier economic conditions, demographics, and political and policy decisions live on affecting current educational and administrative practices as well as narratives and attitudes about the school. The designation of Dyett as a “failing school” and its scheduled closing was rooted in the demolition of public housing, changing demographics, and earlier administrative decisions to convert it from a middle school to a general admission high school.

The school is a multidimensional social system rich in human interaction. The continuous and fluid relationships among students, teachers, aides, counselors, and coaches are central to the school’s educational mission. And there are other planes of interaction as well: among custodians and groundskeepers, food service workers, administrative staff, yard monitors, security, and, one hopes, nurses and librarians. Professionals from outside the school’s regular staff—social workers to speech therapists—as well as parents and other caregivers also enter this social system. And because schools are porous, social norms and structures beyond the school involving race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability can be replicated within the school or, with effort, revised or resisted. There is much life lived on any given day which in small ways and large affects the experience of attending or working at the school.

With the increasing application of technocratic frameworks to social and institutional life during the Twentieth Century and into our time, it becomes feasible to view schools as quantifiable systems, represented by numbers, tallies, metrics. Some school phenomena lend themselves to counting, though counting alone won’t capture their meaning: budgets and expenditures, seating capacity, attendance, truancy, and graduation rates. Other phenomena that are more complex have been converted to numbers, for example using standardized test scores in reading and math to measure learning or teacher quality. Numbers provide precision, an air of certainty when faced with multi-layered and often politically messy policy decisions. Declining attendance and low standardized test scores were key metrics used in the decision to close Dyett.

And schools can be thought of as part of the social fabric of a community, serving civic and social needs: providing venues for public meetings and political debate, polls, festivities, and, during crises, shelter, distribution hubs, sites of comfort. But, of course, it is as an educational institution that the school becomes embedded in community and family life. Young people spend critical years of cognitive and social development in school, learning about themselves, others, and the world. To varying degrees, parents participate in their children’s schooling; if nothing else, kids bring their school experiences home with them, affecting family dynamics. Because children come of age in school, school lives on in them, sometimes to damaging effect and sometimes positively, as was the case for Bobby Sherman Dingas. And over the years schools become part of community history and memory, at times with vital local meaning, as we can assume with Bobby Sherman’s high school in a small coal-mining town, and as we saw with the protest activities surrounding the threatened closure of Dyett in Chicago.

And schools can be thought of as part of the social fabric of a community, serving civic and social needs: providing venues for public meetings and political debate, polls, festivities, and, during crises, shelter, distribution hubs, sites of comfort. But, of course, it is as an educational institution that the school becomes embedded in community and family life.

It might not be possible to consider all or most of these perspectives when making major policy decisions about a school—to open it, modify it, or close it—but involving multiple perspectives should be the goal. The more ways we have of seeing a school, the more information from more vantage points we have, the richer and more comprehensive our understanding will be. As a rule, public policy decisions in our technocratic age tend to focus on the structural-bureaucratic and quantitative dimensions of the institutions or phenomena in question—that which can be formalized, graphed, measured. The other perspectives we’ve been considering, those dealing with economic, political, and social history and with the place of the school in a community’s social fabric, tend to be given short shrift or are ignored entirely.

To appear in: Public Education: Defending a Cornerstone of American Democracy. Edited by David C. Berliner and Carl Hermanns (New York: Teachers College Press, 2021).