Schoolhouse Burning: Public Education and the Assault on American Democracy

Black, a professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law, provides the historical context for contemporary debates over U.S. public education policy in this incisive and technically minded debut. From the nation’s founding through Reconstruction and the civil rights movement, Black writes, “the commitment to public education—to the right to education—has served as the ideological and practical anchor for democracy.” He documents John Adams’s and Thomas Jefferson’s thoughts on the link between education and civic participation, explains how the Northwest Ordinances (which predate the Constitution) “placed public education at the literal center of the nation’s plans for geographic expansion and statehood in the territories” (though he notes that provisions for financing public school systems fell short), and details the addition of affirmative education clauses to Southern state constitutions after the Civil War. Black also provides a lucid reading of court cases that paved the way for Brown v. Board of Education, and the backlash that followed. He blames the “setbacks of the last decade,” including sweeping expansions of charter schools and the gutting of teacher ranks, on the “radical individualist-libertarian movement,” but holds out hope that bipartisan support can lead to states “mak[ing] public education their foremost financial priority.” The result is a well-informed and cautiously optimistic defense of public education’s central role in the American experiment. (Sept.)