Critiques of public education have intensified in recent years. While some of these criticisms have merit—public education has many areas in need of growth and improvement—many of today’s critiques are generated and trumpeted by organizations seeking to manufacture crises. These critical narratives about public school failure often ignore counterevidence, instead employing deceptive language to persuade the public that the system as a whole is problem-ridden, perhaps hopelessly. While honest critiques of public education can drive beneficial reforms and investments necessary for school improvement, these claims of purported school crises have led to a weakening of the public system and are attached to attempts to undermine that system.

Accordingly, this policy brief examines the subset of public education critiques that are about demolition, not improvement. We identify five core themes: (a) underachievement, (b) inefficiency, (c) inequality, (d) lack of school choice; and (e) indoctrination. After exploring these and related attacks on public education, we take a step back and consider the cycle of disinvestment that the attacks are feeding.

The achievement attack is grounded in disappointing test scores, with critics continually and loudly proclaiming that public schools are failing in their basic responsibility to educate students. Such criticism, however, ignores the large influence of poverty and inequality on student performance. Moreover, polling data consistently show that parents rate their own public schools highly—but given the pervasiveness of the failure myth, they accept that public schools in general are failing. This misalignment between a broader constructed critique of public schools and what adults perceive about the schools they know suggests that the crisis narrative is fabricated.

A second charge is that public schools use funding inefficiently, purportedly as a way to meet the demands of overly powerful unions, ignoring the multiple ways unions have helped improve school conditions and advanced policies that benefit middle- and working-class families. Other critics touting inefficiency in schools contend that more money has brought little return on investment in terms of student outcomes—based on narrow student test scores that obscure more than they reveal. Yet, recent rigorous research underscores that increased school funding improves student achievement, particularly for low-income students.

A third critical claim is that public schools exacerbate inequality, citing tracking practices and discipline disparities. While these practices do need reform, the system as a whole is necessary to positively address inequality—and research has demonstrated the link between conditions of inequality and inequitable funding and resources for marginalized groups of students.

Some public school critics have attached to the inequality and inefficiency arguments a fourth claim that schools lack sufficient choice for parents, and they propose school choice and vouchers as a remedy—particularly for marginalized families. However, recent research shows large-scale voucher programs lowering student outcomes and furthering segregation.

Finally, critics allege public schools indoctrinate children. But these critiques rely on sensationalized evidence that ignores the reality that most content is uncontroversial and inclusive.

Again, while some of the criticisms may hold true for some schools in some places and should be addressed in those cases, there is a very real and problematic danger in the overstatement and in the manufacturing of a crisis. When people believe that these overstated crises apply to the public school system overall, the negative portrayals undermine public support, fueling a cycle of disinvestment, with reduced funding following from reduced political support and reduced enrollment. With fewer resources, school quality suffers, generating still further criticism, repeating and deepening the disinvestment cycle. Moreover, reductions are continuously being made amidst high, and growing, levels of need among students.

Disinvestment weakens the public system while advancing the privatization of what has long been considered a public good. Even as sustained underinvestment has led to school closures disproportionately impacting Black and Latine communities, states have adopted policies that entice other families to move their children out of neighborhood schools. In particular, voucher and other school choice policies further drain resources from already struggling schools, sometimes resulting in state takeovers of school districts. In such cases, states often turn to private providers, as contractors tasked with to managing public schools.

This steady march toward privatization has not been slowed by high-quality research finding little to no benefit to students—and that sometimes finds very real harm. Meanwhile, policies that micromanage schools, purportedly to improve matters, have ignored research showing detriments to schools and students, causing harm to those students. For example, California’s ban of effective pedagogy for English Language Learners in Proposition 227 turned out to be so harmful that it was rescinded within a decade. What such policy trends have in common is that they strategically ignore research evidence on the societal forces that shape schooling, such as poverty, segregation, and chronic inequality.

Recent developments, including COVID-19 disruptions, culture wars, universal voucher expansion, immigration enforcement in schools, and other federal policy changes threaten public schools still further. Policies to expand choice, constrain schools, and restrict funding are being adopted on a rapid timeline. The Trump administration has made and threatened additional major cuts in federal funding while laying off U.S. Department of Education staff and sending immigration agents after schoolchildren.

In this moment, the threat to public education is at an all-time high. The cycle of alarmist critique and disinvestment in public schools threatens students, schools, and communities. Unless it is disrupted, manufactured crises will be leveraged to continuously underinvest in schools, exacerbate inequalities, and roll back hard-won gains in equity and student outcomes.

Policymakers can do much to disrupt this ruinous cycle and to renew and strengthen a collective commitment to thriving public schools. We do not include specific recommendations here focused on federal policy, which would necessarily involve reversing recent damage. But federal policy could also facilitate the following recommendations for state lawmakers, district leaders, and school leaders:

Reject policies that privatize or otherwise undermine public education;

• Invest in public education by addressing the daunting resource needs facing public schools, through increases in school funding using progressive school finance formulas and dedicated money for aging facilities and deferred maintenance;
• Target these resources to support students from low-income backgrounds;
• Prioritize spending on effective instructional programs and strategies, including small class sizes and salaries that recruit and retain great teachers;
• Adopt instructional materials and programs that have a sound research base, including ethnic studies programs and other types of culturally relevant pedagogy;
• Close opportunity gaps and improve educational outcomes by counteracting the effects of poverty through alignment of education policy initiatives with housing, health and economic policies, such as community schools and expanded access to childcare and early education;
• Conduct systematic regular polling of parents to help understand what parents truly desire and what their critiques are of public schools, rather than relying on advocacy group narratives, and use this information to guide key decisions and counter extremist voices; and
• Adopt tested messaging strategies, such as those from the Frameworks Institute, when engaging the general public and policymakers about policy ideas.