Public education in the U.S. has traditionally aimed to balance both individual success, by fostering academic and personal growth, and collective benefits, by cultivating a responsible, tolerant, and skilled citizenry. Increasingly, these collective goals of schooling are being contested. In this study we assess the prevalence of key collective goals as expressed in school mission statements. We seek to understand whether the incidence of these collective goals varies by local partisan political leanings, institutional type (charter school status), and locale. Examining school mission statements from a national (N = 5,514) and a Texas (N = 3,146) sample of schools, we find that all three factors are influential. Our findings suggest a meaningful role for place-based cultural and partisan contexts shaping, and potentially reshaping, the communal purposes of public education.
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