Parent leaders in Jersey City Together are consistently saying this in our public conversations: public schools are a public good. This essay is inspired both by their consistent leadership in making this point, and our shared frustration that we must keep making this point; that is, that it is not already a common public understanding that public schools are a public good in democratic public life:

Almost never is there an expressed concern about the public realm; there is silence about renewing the common world and about what that common world should be. What is it that lies in between, that holds us together, that we can cherish and try to keep alive? Where, when we ponder it, are we to turn? Questions like these move me to explore the role that might be played by public education in bringing into being an authentic public space, one that might give rise to a significant common world. Maxine Greene, 1982.

I recently came across the address given by the late Maxine Greene in 1982 when she served as president of the American Educational Research Association. The title is “Public Education and the Public Space,” and she speaks of the possibilities that are part of the purpose of education: “…we are educators, and education has to do with new beginnings and with reaching toward what is not yet.”

Greene speaks of what is missing in the conversation about public education in the 1980s, and it is equally true today. Discussions of funding formulas and graduation rates are important, but frequently these conversations divert our attention from any focus on the public purposes of public schools. Greene is speaking to educators, but she is also speaking at a time when the movement for our current regime of testing as accountability was on the rise. Just before the passage quoted above, she says, “literacy is talked about as though it were part of the gross national product.” What about the intrinsic joy of reading? What about the democratic civic purposes of an educated public?

We have become accustomed to speaking of schools in terms of achievements on tests, graduation and drop out rates, per pupil spending. Even Dennis Shirley, in his (very useful) discussion of the Alliance Schools program in Texas, speaks of test scores as one measure of the success of this community school program. All of these are important. But they are not all of what public schools are or can be.

Public schools serve public purposes for democracies. This is a simple, straightforward, necessary idea. This is not a new or original idea. But it is crucial.

In an article on the growing number of teacher strikes last year, Sarah Jones argued that one of the reasons for these strikes and for the conflicts over public schools more generally is that public schools “are some of the last public squares in this country”. Discussing the requirements in U.S. state constitutions for public education, she notes that three common words that describe public education are “Free, common, and efficient. These words tell us that public schools should be accessible and ubiquitous, and that they should function. ”

Yes. Public schools should function. They should help children to develop their human potential. They should provide appropriate, supportive environments for all students to learn. They should have space to play, to create, to imagine. These things are happening every day in Jersey City Public Schools. But there are many, many challenges as well.

In order for public schools to function, school facilities need to function. Public schools should not have classrooms that are dangerously hot or cold, that are infested with cockroaches, that are falling apart. They should have potable drinking water. They should have functioning bathrooms. That we are fighting for these very basic, functional facilities in Jersey City is shameful.

The story of why this is so is long and complicated, of course, implicating state as well as local officials and the failure to fully fund the School Development Authority despite the Abbott court’s order. Some beautiful schools have been built in Jersey  City.  But funds for repairing our ageing schools have not been appropriated. And the lesson of who is valued, and who is not, is starkly clear to young people in Jersey City. We have beautiful, new high rises, and crumbling high school facilities.

Greene goes on to cite Dewey, and his notion of the “eclipse of the public” articulated in The Public and its Problems (originally published in 1927). The persistence of this concern tells us that we should resist the temptation to refer to some nonexistent golden age; attention to the public realm and to public things is one of the key ongoing problems of democratic public life. Civic life requires us to be engaged in the ongoing project of renewing the democratic public realm. We have to organize.

At the end of Deborah Yaffe’s book Other People’s Children, about the long effort by the state of New Jersey to refuse to provide a thorough and efficient education to all of the children in the state, despite decades of court orders to do so, she notes that she is often asked “did it work”? People mean different things by that question, and one of the problems with answering it is that in some arenas, the state never did really comply with the court orders. But at the very end of the book, she makes reference to the public purposes of public schools, quoting one of the named litigants in the Abbott cases, Hector Figueroa. “‘You’re not guaranteed a home life, but you should be guaranteed a school life.'” And Yaffe says, “Public institutions matter, even if they are not the only things that do.”

Public schools matter. We must create more possibilities for schools to be the kinds of public spaces that are so vital to democracy. We have to dare to try.