A report from the Cato Institute opens with Horace Mann’s well-known conviction that public schools are the bedrock of a democratic society – a public good that should be made available to all. Yet the report, Is Public Schooling a Public Good? An Analysis of Schooling Externalities, improperly conflates the civic and economic definitions of a public good. Although the report begins with Mann’s vision of the role of public schools as building a better society, it then misleadingly shifts the analysis to the economic value of public schools as a market-based “good” like steel or corn. The report relies on a false equivalence of the civic and economic definitions of a public good to advance a proposal for de-funding public schools and introducing a nationwide education savings account (voucher) program. While there is extensive research on the educational purposes of schooling, the Cato report’s limited review of this literature consistently misrepresents the meaning, scope and implications of this literature. The result is a portrayal of public schools as “agents of harm” for what appears to be an ideologically driven thought experiment. Even for those who might be in favor of vouchers, the report’s imbalance, flawed logic and limited research base render the report of no use to policymakers.

Philanthropic involvement in K-12 education is growing, and it increasingly shapes the direction of reforms pursued throughout the country. A recent report from the NewSchools Venture Fund offers a thought experiment on how philanthropists can make a “big bet” over the next decade on innovative schools—a broad category that generally includes schools with a high degree of education technology use and so-called personalized approaches to learning that likely utilize digital platforms. Unfortunately, the report fails to provide a meaningful examination of research or a thorough basis for its recommendations. This critique focuses on six key concerns regarding the report: it fails to consider human capital constraints or to sufficiently consider obstacles confronting classroom technology usage, it overlooks equity concerns and past problems with dependence on external professional services, and it ignores both the potential for disruptive reform churn and the danger of philanthropic efforts altering public education systems in undemocratic ways. For these reasons, the report’s usefulness to policy and practice is limited.

This report presents the findings of research on parent organizing within what the report calls Education Reform Advocacy Organizations (ERAO), such as Stand for Children and Parent Revolution. The ERAO agendas focus on standards, test-based accountability, teacher tenure reform, and parent choice. The report recognizes that ERAOs are often criticized as astroturf organizations that mobilize parents behind their agendas instead of building authentic parent power; it then presents some evidence that many groups are committed to long-lasting parent engagement, and it reports on the community organizing practices they use to build parent leadership. Unfortunately, the report’s presentation of research methods is so weak that the research cannot be relied upon without a better idea of the rigor or lack of rigor of its approach. The findings may be valid for the groups studied, but the selection is biased towards ERAOs that work to build sustainable forms of parent participation; it is unclear if those groups are representative of the broader field of ERAOs. While the report suggests some community organizing strategies can be used to advance the ERAO version of education reform, this approach undermines an understanding of community organizing as a democratic practice through which organizations and agendas emerge out of the concerns and through the actions of indigenous community leaders working to build a more inclusive public democracy.

This sincere and well-written but methodologically and politically unsophisticated report argues states should step aside from any direct involvement in the reform business and hand it over to an “ecosystem of nonprofit organizations.” The report makes five assertions about State Education Agencies (SEAs): they suffer from a lack of human resources; their procurement practices are cumbersome and time-consuming; they suffer from antiquated rulemaking; they are undermined by statewide politics; and they suffer from “institutional sclerosis.” These claims set the stage for the report’s basic recommendation: “The SEA should not attempt to implement the nuts and bolts of school improvement, but instead create an environment in which a variety of other organizations can fill the void.” In place of expanding the authority of the SEAs, the report suggests a“4Cs” model of operation: control, contract, cleave and create. Drawing on secondary materials, the report’s claims about the failures of the SEAs are strong but unsubstantiated by data independent from advocacy. Privatizing educational reform is an idea whose time has not come, and most likely never will, because it’s an abstraction based on a model of American education disconnected from the democratic ethos that animates public education. Public education is a public good; it is the loom by which citizens together weave the social contract.