Schoolhouse Burning

July 27, 2020
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 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.

August 15, 2020
A polemic against the ongoing dismantling of public education. Black, a law professor at the University of South Carolina, boasts an unusual background. Though he grew up in a pious, politically conservative, and overwhelmingly White community--"the three categories were so intertwined that I never thought to distinguish them"--he elected to major as an undergraduate in African American studies. If, as Black writes, it was public education that gave him access to the American promise of upward mobility, so should public education serve the same purpose for all Americans. The assault on the system by private individuals, to say nothing of ideological enemies such as Betsy DeVos and the Koch brothers, serves the interest of inequality and has clear racial and anti-democratic components. Arguing that public education may provide the glue necessary to put the country back together after the Trump era, Black embarks on an insistent, sometimes repetitive consideration of its constitutional foundations, noting that education is enshrined as a right in every state constitution--an elevated role that, indeed, was a sine qua non for formal admission into the federal system. It is precisely in the states of the former Confederacy and its satellites that the war against public education has been most pitched, areas in which there are high concentrations of African American students. Black's argument is persuasive, though too often themes and bits of data are repeated to no real purpose. Still, the author makes a solid and well-founded case for considering public education to be a pillar of American democratic governance and not a commodity to be cheapened, bargained away, and privatized, the apparent goal of the current presidential administration. Instead, Black writes, "states do not need to experiment with public education; they need to fund it." Education reformers and public school advocates will find a powerful ally here.

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