Schoolhouse Burning: Public Education and the Assault on American Democracy

by Derek W. Black

Overview

The full-scale assault on public education threatens not just public education but American democracy itself.


Public education as we know it is in trouble. Derek W. Black, a legal scholar and tenacious advocate, shows how major democratic and constitutional developments are intimately linked to the expansion of public education throughout American history. Schoolhouse Burningis grounded in pathbreaking, original research into how the nation, in its infancy, built itself around public education and, following the Civil War, enshrined education as a constitutional right that forever changed the trajectory of our democracy. Public education, alongside the right to vote, was the cornerstone of the recovery of the war-torn nation.


Today's current schooling trends — the declining commitment to properly fund public education and the well-financed political agenda to expand vouchers and charter schools — present a major assault on the democratic norms that public education represents and risk undermining one of the unique accomplishments of American society.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781541788442
Publisher:	PublicAffairs
Publication date:	09/22/2020
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	654,510
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Derek W. Black is a professor at the University of South Carolina Law School where he teaches constitutional law, civil rights, and education law. He is a well-known and outspoken advocate of the importance of public education and his work has been published in both professional legal journals as well as the mainstream media.

Table of Contents

Prologue 1

Introduction 11

Chapter 1 The Current Crisis 31

Chapter 2 A Nation Founded on Education 51

Chapter 3 Education as Freedom 73

Chapter 4 Reconstruction: A National Recommitment to Education and Democracy 95

Chapter 5 A Constitutional Chorus for the Right to Education 113

Chapter 6 The Fall 135

Chapter 7 The Second Reconstruction 157

Chapter 8 The Civil Rights Backlash 179

Chapter 9 Rediscovering the Constitutional Right to Education 201

Chapter 10 Through History's Eyes 225

Chapter 11 Final Thoughts 251

Acknowledgments 261

Notes 263

Index 295

Editorial Reviews

07/27/2020

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. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

"A well-informed and cautiously optimistic defense of public education's central role in the American experiment."
—Publishers Weekly

"A polemic against the ongoing dismantling of public education... Education reformers and public school advocates will find a powerful ally here."
—Kirkus

“Black’s book is packed with information and analysis, but remains exceptionally accessible, like getting a detailed explanation from a legal scholar who just happens to speak plain English. Beyond the well-researched history, Black also provides a convincing argument in favor of public education in this country, a defense of a foundational institution at a time it is once again under attack.”—Forbes

“Derek W. Black analyzes the problem with public education in the United States today, and lays out a plan to fix it.”—Bustle

"I loved Schoolhouse Burning for its stirring defense of the central importance of public education to American democracy, and for Derek Black's groundbreaking research. He definitively shows that the founders of the nation enthusiastically promoted public schools, that public schools enjoyed overwhelming bipartisan support, and were established in every state as central to democracy. The current efforts to privatize them with vouchers began with segregationists in the 1950s and continue today with charter schools, reinvigorated vouchers, and deep cuts to public school funding. I highly recommend Schoolhouse Burning as an important counter to a destructive trend."—Diane Ravitch, author of Slaying Goliath and Reign of Error

"Derek Black has written a magnificent book on the history of public education in the United States. Professor Black shows that the future of American society-its equality, its democracy-depends on improving its public schools. This beautifully written book offers a path forward to making a right to a quality education for all children a reality."
—Erwin Chemerinsky, dean and Jesse H. Choper Distinguished Professor of Law, University of California, Berkeley

"Derek Black is the rare education law scholar willing to put his vast skills and knowledge in the service of defending our nation's public schools. Schoolhouse Burning is a searing analysis of the current assault on public education by those intent on its destruction and, with it, the further erosion of our democratic institutions. It is also an urgent call to action to join with parents, advocates, teachers, and lawyers on the front lines of ensuring the right of every child to a high-quality education remains prominent, paramount and fully protected."
—David Sciarra, executive director of the Education Law Center

"Black argues that education does indeed play a foundational, constitutional role in American democracy and that it is the state's obligation—often the state's primary obligation—to provide it....[H]e takes us back to several crucial moments in American history when questions about the meaning of democratic governance became inescapably acute, and he reminds us of the central role that public education played in each of them."
—Derek Gottlieb, author of A Democratic Theory of Educational Accountability

From the Publisher

2020-07-23
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.

Kirkus Reviews