Putting the ‘public’ back into public schools in the US

Abstract

Public schools serve as vital centers of urban life. However, the long history of these centers are racialized, classed, and produce disparate outcomes across space in the United States. This commentary outlines this history and puts forth the need to re-center the increasingly diversifying and high-need public in the production and maintenance of these critical infrastructures.

Public schools are vital centers of American daily life. There are over 50 million students attending public K-12 schools in the United States, and these schools employ nearly 6 million teachers, staff, and administrators (Filardo, 2021). In sum, nearly 1/6 of the US population spends a substantial portion of their daily lives in public school facilities. Although public schools are frequently framed as sites of opportunity, socioeconomic mobility, and education, these outcomes vary greatly across the racialized and classed places of the United States (Chetty, 2016; Nelson, 2005). In majority-Black and Latinx urban communities in particular, public schools are underfunded, understaffed, and under-resourced relative to their majority-white, suburban counterparts (Diamond and Posey-Maddox, 2020; Lewis and Diamond, 2015; Lleras, 2008). Even in suburban, majority-white schools, Black and Latinx students and teachers struggle to gain access to the advantages of these infrastructures, producing disparate graduation, achievement, and retention outcomes (Collins and Schaaf, 2020; Hasberry, 2013; Heavens, 2022; Mabokela and Madsen, 2003).

In McFadden's article, ‘Infrastructures of Social Reproduction: Schools, Everyday Urban Life, and the Built Environment of Education’, the author reframes the role of public schools in under-resourced, majority-Black urban communities as a critical sites that exposes the ‘frictions between the social reproductive needs of capital and social reproduction needs of communities’ (McFadden, 2025). Extending the literature on public schools as infrastructure, McFadden engages with the tensions between schools as sites to train future workers and as sites of care – or the tensions between human and care capital (Anttonen and Sipilä, 2007; Rodriguez, 2022). Within the context of the City of Chicago, which experienced over 50 school closures in majority Black and Latinx communities over the past decade, public schools have long-served in a ‘shadow-state’ role, providing public goods and services to communities underserved by their elected representatives (Lake and Newman, 2002; Warren, 2013). During the school closures of 2013, Eve L. Ewing detailed the ‘dueling realities’ of how public schools were perceived by Chicago Public Schools’ leadership and attendees at a school recommended for closure (Ewing, 2018: 94). While the former highlighted the failure of the school to meet the social reproductive needs of capital – through quantitative measures of facility underutilization and standardized state test achievement – the latter emphasized the fictive kinship of the school's attendees and employees in creating an environment of safety, care, and support through qualitative storytelling and narratives (Ewing, 2018).

The racialized, classed, and spatialized disparities in public school resources and outcomes have hardened over time due to the legacy of residential segregation and the primary funding mechanisms of public schools – property taxes (Baker et al., 2018; Morgan and Amerikaner, 2018; Nguyen-Hoang and Yinger, 2011). Nonetheless, majority-Black and Latinx public school communities in urban and rural environments have an equally long history of resistance and re-appropriation of these uneven educational landscapes. In these communities, public schools serve as critical public infrastructure: as sites of mutual aid, care, stable employment, and social reproduction (Antrop-González and De Jesús, 2006; Dozono, 2022; Farinde et al., 2016; Rodriguez, 2023). Access to well-funded and well-resourced public schools was a cornerstone of the early Black and Chicano Civil Rights Movements and the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund (Affeldt et al., 2006; Shager, 2002). Yet lawsuits to equitably fund public schools in low-wealth districts persist in the present-day, and ongoing attacks on the necessity to even fund public schools dominate media narratives, school board meetings, and state budget hearings (Davies and Harrigan, 2019; Huangpu, 2023; Kitzmiller, 2022).

Due to both its long history of inequities and its concomitant history of resistance and re-appropriation, public schools are under attack. Public schools enrollments in large, low-wealth urban districts across the United States are declining, a trend that was occurring long before the destabilizing impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic shelter-in-place orders (Cohen, 2023). From book bans, to mask mandates and transphobic gender surveillance and policing, the liberatory possibilities of public schools to serve as sites of care and socioeconomic mobility for low-wealth, marginalized communities are perceived as a threat to whiteness and traditional capital accumulation in the United States (Malkus and Audet, 2022; Mayo, 2021; Meyer et al., 2022; Rehn, 2022; Schroeder, 2021; Yang et al., 2022). These attacks on public schools, and by extension, the teacher unions that serve these schools, are outcomes of the reality that schools are not truly a public good, but are actually a white good (Justice, 2023).

The attacks on public schools both conceptually, politically, and financially are also part of a broader attack on public goods that serve an increasingly diverse nation. Following the legal and policy wins of civil rights activists in the mid-20th century to desegregate and equitably fund and protect access to public goods and services – the second emancipation for many nonwhite citizens – US public policy has been besieged by efforts to annex, privatize, and devolve the benefits of white public goods from the nonwhite public (Anderson, 2017; Blight and Scharfstein, 2012; Kretsinger-Harries, 2021; Lipman and Haines, 2007; Moeser and Dennis, 1982; Rabig, 2016). The history of urban public goods – from public housing to public parks and public schools – follows a similar pattern in the United States (Rodriguez et al., 2021). Originating as goods largely supported by private and philanthropic funding before becoming socialized for a majority white nation in the early 20th century, public goods were legally segregated during the period of the Great Migration (1910–1960). Efforts to desegregate and equitably fund these goods and services were successful just as urban tax bases were declining due to suburbanized white flight, and the federal government shifted towards devolving these fundings and authorities to state and local governments. Finally, urban public goods have increasingly become privatized since the 1970s, with cities relying on corporate- and philanthro-capitalism to shore up its depleting coffers that fund public goods and services. The result is an uneven landscape of public goods and services that produce disparately racialized outcomes across the nation.

The purpose of physical infrastructure is to connect places and people in ways that ensure mobility and accessibility. Increasingly, these infrastructures have become critical as a defense mechanism against climate change to promote community resilience (Neumann et al., 2021; Osei-Kyei et al., 2021). Thus, the spatialized and racialized unevenness of these urban infrastructures has national implications. As McFadden writes, ‘[a]nd while urban infrastructures facilitate everyday life in the city, they can constrain as much as they enable. Infrastructures can be violent, cumbersome, incoherent, and exclusionary, even as they can allow the flourishing of urban life…despite their supposed invisibility, they at times become hyper-visible, contentious, and politicized’ (McFadden, 2025). Public schools in urban communities have certainly been invisibilized as critical infrastructure in both our local, state, and national funding priorities and political advocacy, while simultaneously becoming hypervisible as targets for defunding, privatization, and narratives of dysfunction and territorial stigma. This hypervisible/invisible duality of public schools as infrastructure for under-resourced communities perpetuates a cycle of declension and disinvestment: schools without funding are further defunded for underperforming, close due to this underperformance, which depopulates neighborhoods and reduces overall property tax revenues to support other public goods and services, beginning the cycle anew. This cycle has repeated across many large urban school districts in the last two decades, from Chicago to Philadelphia (Bierbaum, 2021; Good, 2017; Lipman and Haines, 2007).

Addressing the tensions between schools as sites of social reproduction for capital and social reproduction for communities requires a firm decoupling of school funding and resources (and thus a perceived reality of ‘school quality’) and local property values and state funding. It has been demonstrated that local and state funding structures are inadequate for addressing the extensive needs and multiple roles that public schools play in our under-served communities. Further, there should be greater resources allocated to the roles schools play as sites of social reproduction for communities, by strengthening school-community partnerships, extending hours and accessibility for school facilities, and centering the voices and decision-making expertise of school users and the broader communities they serve. Recent policies and announcements from the Biden Administration suggest renewed interest in funding school facilities for multi-use purposes, but for some districts that are under-resourced and undergoing closures, it may be too late. But until such strong federal intervention, along with state and local cooperation and revised school funding formulas occurs, the liberatory possibilities of public schools will remain secondary to the ulterior goals of reproducing for capital accumulation and whiteness.