The United States gave birth to the world of public education. Federal legislation “granted federal lands to new states and set aside a portion of those lands to be used to fund public schools”.
It was the promised American dream, supporting public schooling for society’s good. In fact, by the time the 20th century rolled around, graduation rates from American high schools had nearly quadrupled in comparison to the 1920s. Economic equality was seen as a fundamental right with the rise of educational television programs, such as PBS and NPR, that generations grew up watching, deeply rooted in egalitarianism.
Public education in the United States is a system where free schooling is accessible to all children within a community—primarily funded by taxpayer money—despite their socio-economic status, disadvantaged backgrounds, or even varied educational needs and attainment.
But that era of educational prosperity may meet its decline sooner than we think.
Nearly sixty years after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 into law to support the “instructional, educational, and cultural purposes” of broadcasting for the American people, especially “children and minorities,”; Congress had eliminated nearly five hundred million dollars in funding—forcing PBS to cut its budget by a fifth. For the sole purpose of accusing PBS and NPR of “left-leaning” bias and being a “waste of taxpayer funds”.
People are left to question: What does this overarching agenda stem from? Could it be attributed to the Trump administration’s need to bankroll private family-owned foundations?
For the Wealthy, By the Wealthy
The Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions’ committee chair, Senator Bernie Sanders (who has established close ties with the Democratic Party), pointed out that on average, America’s public school teachers are making nearly a hundred dollars less weekly than they did 28 years ago, considering inflation.
When commenting on this present-day disparity, Sanders said, “The situation has become so absurd that four—one, two, three, four—hedge fund managers on Wall Street made more money last year than every kindergarten teacher in America,”.
Sanders’s reports, published via the Senate Committee for Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, state that Republican-led legislatures are expanding (“under the false promise of “school choice”—which in turn is being rolled nationwide as part of Title I-A for private students) to dismantle public education and pay for private school vouchers that largely benefit wealthy families.
The catch? It enables corporations to “avoid paying their fair share of taxes”. Companies like the DeVos Family Foundation and the Koch Foundation are involved in lobbying campaigns that earmark public tax dollars for private schools. This provides an incentive for high-income families to claim voucher credit to attend private and/or secular schools. For instance, the “universal-eligibility” private school voucher program was enacted first by Arizona nearly two years ago.
The Monopoly of High-Income Families
How is the program disproportionate for middle and low-income families within the United States? An ITEP (Economic Policy) study found that 60 percent of the families [that claim the Arizona voucher credit] have incomes over $200,000, with households that earn [that amount] making up 87 percent of families getting tax dollars for private school tuition in Virginia. Families that can already afford to pay for private education and one-on-one teaching benefit the most from private school vouchers (i.e., as proposed by the Trump administration).
The report frames pro-privatisation advocates, who view these policies as “an alternative to families with low incomes”, though the vast majority already send their children to expensive private schools. Take, for example, early data from eight states (i.e., Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Missouri, New Hampshire, and Wisconsin), which show that 65 to 95 percent of students who participate in private school voucher programs never attended a public school in the first place.
Moreover, students living in the highest income zip codes benefit ten times more than students in the lowest income zip codes, according to Arizona’s Department of Education.
It’s also important to identify that similar analyses have found that, regardless of the type of “socio-economic” measure used (this includes everything from poverty rates to educational attainment), in the end, the more advantaged communities will always disproportionately benefit from “school-choice” policies.
Voucher advocates for private funding claim that states can save money “educating students via vouchers [for private school tuition]. Yet, these claims ignore numerous realities of the underprivileged communities here in the United States—for instance, the Southern Poverty Law Center observed that they concentrate higher-need students in “already-underfunded public schools” nationwide.
What does this mean for the political momentum behind public education?
The Trump administration sees public education as a pivotal tool in shaping Republican-led and dominated legislatures.
Basic funding that assists in student-led and economically viable research has been cut—$783 million—amid an anti-DEI push; halting such studies can “harm the country’s potential for scientific breakthroughs”, as argued by sixteen Democratic state attorneys as part of public-health advocacy groups.
Katya Schwenk, a criminal legal system journalist based in Arizona believes the effort towards pushing equity in education nationwide has a single challenging goal: to convince students from average-income families that the one thing they do not want to do is “make sure the rich and powerful pay their fair share of taxes”, and that when big companies dodge taxes? It helps “protect employment and job creation”.
After all, the American dream thrives on the lack of economic disparity—a free future for all. How much longer will that be propelled towards the mainstream? It’s uncertain, but one thing isn’t: the reaping of public education.