When did caring about public education become a radical position?

Remember when school was the light shining on a community’s future? Doesn’t our patriotism stem from daily classroom recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance even before we sang the A-B-C jingle? Among our iconic images of U.S. flags unfurled and waving bravely, aren’t a few of those flags poised over our public schools’ roofs and lawns?

Public education is a fundamental institution in our nation’s democratic system. Public schools are as central a part of U.S. democracy as the three official branches of government: the executive, legislative and judicial. Doing away with public education should be as appalling an idea as lopping off one of these branches. Imagine no president or governor, no Congress or legislature, or no court system. The other two branches would collapse under the weight of losing the third. Similarly, elimination of U.S. public education is an idea that ought to sound as radically threatening to U.S. society as any outright attack on Washington.

Despite how public schools have shaped American life and values, free public education is under attack from those who pretend to be offering a conservative proposal. Their modest suggestion is to unleash free-market forces on the U.S. system of schooling. Their argument is that just as the free market has benefited the U.S. corporation and workers, choice, charters and vouchers will benefit students, families and communities. Their argument is not modest and is loaded with flaws. I choose only two to illustrate the seriously radical threat of this “conservative” proposal.

First, let’s examine the mistaken notion that the U.S. economy benefits from pure free-market forces. Across decades, even centuries, many U.S. enterprises — steel, textiles and agriculture — flourished under protection from free global markets. U.S. workers needed unions and legal protection from their own companies’ worst exploitation under free market conditions. Today, U.S. businesses are downsizing their work forces due to global market shifts based on free market forces. Perhaps these businesses will stabilize, but in the meantime, families and communities are devastated by unemployment. Recovery from free-market forces can take communities as much as a decade, and some families never recover.

The second flaw in the argument surrounding choice, charters and vouchers is the notion that families and students will reap greater benefits than from the current U.S. public education system. The argument says that once given freedom from the rules and regulations of bureaucracies, schools with choice will encourage creative educational practices. After nearly two decades of repeated experiments with choice, charters and vouchers, only a handful of the hundreds of experimental schools have shown any creativity. The majority of these free-market schools replicate common U.S. educational practices. Indeed, even more public schools than charter schools have shown the ability to innovate new programs and practices that improve teaching and learning. Few studies of free-market schools show any greater improvement in student achievement than public schools have produced.

Why have the proponents of free-market schools clothed their enthusiasm in so-called conservative, yet flawed, arguments? Despite their nod toward American values, those who would do away with public schools don’t have the interest of the larger community at heart. They claim conservatism in a masquerade for undoing U.S. education — a free and appropriate education for all students. They are more interested in personal gain than the greater good. They care only that their children benefit from schooling, and they don’t care about other people’s children.

Other people are people they don’t know, who live in apartments or public housing, not in their neighborhood. The other people are single parents or immigrants working two or three jobs daily to put food on the table. The other people have different skin color, different abilities or disabilities, different languages, different religions and different politics.

The U.S. public education system opens doors for everyone to the American Dream. A conservative proposal would be to preserve public schools to continue their mission of furthering the American way of life to all students, families and communities.

Dr. Lindle is a Eugene T. Moore professor of educational leadership at Clemson University.