US Education Secretary Miguel Cardona this week embarked on a five-state bus tour to “fight for public education.” His campaign, amplified on social media, is ostensibly to rally support for traditional public schools. However, this “fight” is built on two flawed assumptions that, when scrutinized, reveal both the limitations of Cardona’s vision and an overtly political agenda. What Cardona is really fighting for is Kamala Harris’ White House bid (three of the five states on the tour are swing states critical to Democrats’ chances in November) and to enshrine in voters’ minds a narrow and impoverished view of public education strictly limited to traditional, district-run schools—a view that is already becoming an anachronism as new models and mechanisms for educating America’s children continue to gain traction post-Covid.

Cardona, who was Connecticut’s education commissioner before he was plucked from obscurity and named Education Secretary by President Biden, tweeted earlier this week that public schools are a “powerful engine driving the American Dream.” Isn’t it pretty to think so? This homily suggests that public schools are an equalizing force, particularly for low-income students and students of color. The reality has never matched the rhetoric: Despite decades of reform efforts, substantial public investment, and increased staffing levels, outcomes in public schools, especially those serving disadvantaged communities, have barely budged in half a century, leaving many students ill-prepared for college or the workforce.

Implicit in Cardona’s “fight” is the assumption that only schools run by the country’s nearly 14 thousand school districts are “public education.” Every other form—from charters and private schools to homeschooling—is not public. But this binary is already far more anachronistic than many Americans probably realize. Discontent with the curricular content, school culture, and poor academic performance has led to a groundswell of support for “education saving accounts” (ESAs) in recent years. An ESA is functionally a school voucher, but it can also be used to defray costs associated with homeschooling or other educational expenses. ESAs have been around for over a decade. But until recently, eligibility was limited to students with disabilities, low-income families, and kids in failing schools. Starting with West Virginia in 2021, about a dozen states began expanding access, making ESAs “universal” or nearly so. Parents can use public dollars to offset the cost of private school, pay for tutoring, purchase textbooks, technology, or almost any conceivable service they deem necessary to meet the educational needs of their child. If Texas adopts universal ESAs, as it seems poised to do, it would mean almost half of American families would have, should they wish to exercise it, direct control over how state public education dollars are spent on their children—a potential body blow to the district-run public schools Cardona lionizes—and whose largely unionized workforce is a core Democrat constituency. 

The disruptive effect of putting parents in control of how public dollars are spent to educate their children cannot be overstated. The Secretary knows this and it’s implicit in the misleading words emblazoned on the side of his bus: “fighting for public education.” But there is no fight against public education. Americans have long accepted the need to educate every child and to socialize the cost: Even the childless pay school taxes. Thus the “fight” is not “for public education,” it’s over who gets to educate children at public expense. Lawmakers, so far mostly in red states, have started an overdue debate about whether government should be the exclusive provider or public education or, as is the case in many other countries, merely fund it. The rising move to adopt universal ESAs pushes our definition of public education in the direction of countries such as the UK, the Netherlands, and Sweden, where public funds support a range of school types, and whose “plural” school systems consistently outperform the United States in educational outcomes. These systems recognize that public education can be publicly funded without being exclusively government-run, offering parents more choices and tailoring education to the diverse needs of their children, while still recognizing the public’s interest—and investment—in their outcomes.

To be fair, most Americans likely share, in a limited sense, Cardona’s view. Say the phrase “public school” and most people reflexively associate it with the neighborhood school they or their children attended because of their zip code. But Cardona surely knows better. His overtly political bus tour, which started in Wisconsin and ends in Pennsylvania—swing states critical to Democrats’ November election prospects—and his “fight for public education” suggests that he sees his role as less Secretary of Education concerned with raising student outcomes than “Secretary of Educators,” advocating not for those educated in traditional public schools, but those employed in them.

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