Whose School Is It Anyway?

Teachers and public schools wield prodigious influence over a captive audience of other people’s children. Who gives them permission to choose politically charged curriculum?

Another day, another curriculum controversy. This time, it’s in Philadelphia.

In a report for The Free Press, Frannie Block reveals that the city’s school district has created a controversial eleventh-grade world history course and other social studies materials with assignments and lessons that encourage students to reinterpret U.S. and world history through the lens of systemic injustice and activism. Students are asked to select a song to replace the national anthem after reflecting on racism and, when studying the Civil War, to understand that “racist attitudes played a foundational role in the formation of American identity.” Other lessons frame westward expansion and the Cold War in terms of American supremacy and racial exclusion, encourage students to view U.S. foreign policy through the lens of racism, and describe wartime propaganda as creating a manufactured sense of national unity. A unit in world history teaches that economic inequality shows “the need for systemic changes and equitable economic policies.” The unit examines “the intersections of climate justice, economic justice, anti-fascism, and human rights.”

Frannie Block’s piece in The Free Press. Read the full piece here.

The most important line in Block’s piece, however, is also among its most easily overlooked. This curriculum is not required for Philly teachers, merely “recommended,” she writes, “which means they have the power to decide whether to follow it in their classrooms.”

There are two ways to respond to this. You might choose to be reassured. At least the district isn’t mandating the content. No one is forcing teachers to use it. But this invites a second thought, potentially more urgent and troubling: Hold on a second. Who gives teachers—public employees with prodigious influence over a captive audience of other people’s children—the license to choose such a politically charged curriculum? And how were school district personnel empowered in the first place to create such an aggressively political curriculum at taxpayer expense? What democratic process or recognized public authority gives them this permission?

Philadelphia’s social studies materials were not created surreptitiously. Block quotes Ismael Jimenez, the district’s director of social studies curriculum, who said, “Every child should walk into a classroom and feel the revolution stirring in the air because that’s what real education is: liberation with a syllabus.”

To state the matter mildly, it’s unlikely that a majority of Pennsylvanians agree with that vision for their schools, or that they would endorse revolution at public expense within a school district staffed by government employees.

This forces us to confront a seldom-examined tension that is baked into the culture of teaching and the structure of public education. Education is widely assumed by Americans to be a politically neutral government service focused on impartially equipping students with knowledge and skills they need to be independent and productive adult citizens. Yet many teacher preparation programs explicitly train educators to “teach for social justice” and commit to challenging systemic inequities. And those commitments are situated within a professional culture that is uniquely well-suited to advance them, if teachers are so inclined.

As I’ve noted elsewhere, no category of public employee enjoys more freedom, flexibility, or insulation from democratic oversight than teachers. A bus driver cannot choose to drive for social justice, disregarding his assigned route; a police officer cannot patrol a different beat if he perceives a more urgent need in a different neighborhood. By contrast, teachers—and those in their states and local districts who develop materials for classrooms—possess almost unlimited authority to shape what students read and hear by choosing texts, guiding classroom discussions, and selecting resources to reflect their educational priorities or philosophy. Those unfamiliar with classroom practice (and even some inside) assume that public education is a top-down enterprise: states, districts, or school boards choose a curriculum, and teachers robotically deliver officially sanctioned lessons. It’s simply not so. The vast majority of classroom teachers create, customize, or simply download teaching materials from the Internet with no meaningful oversight or controls for fairness, accuracy, or quality.

To be clear, there are good reasons for teachers’ operational flexibility. It enables educators to differentiate instruction, respond to local contexts, and craft lessons that resonate with students. Done well, it reflects professionalism and skill. But there is no limiting principle. It is only when controversies like this one in the City of Brotherly Love erupt into public view that we’re forced to reckon with the conflict between public education’s status as an ostensibly neutral government function and the field’s conception of itself as anything but neutral.

Nor is this a new or novel tension. Twenty years ago, a comprehensive American Educational Research Association (AERA) review observed that “conceptualizing teaching and teacher education in terms of social justice has been the central animating idea for education scholars and practitioners who connect their work to larger critical movements.” In that framing, the teacher is not merely a professional educator, but also an activist committed to diminishing the inequities of American society. So, too, are some number of the “education scholars” who participate in curriculum development.

That’s why examples like the one Block highlights are not aberrations. They’re inevitable. When public school teachers are not encouraged to see themselves first and foremost as public employees and state actors, when they regard themselves free agents, and when ideologically charged materials are promoted without oversight or democratic vetting, the results are predictable. No board votes. No public hearings. Just quiet diffusion of politically-charged content from central office to classroom, and a professional culture—not universal, but not uncommon—that has been acculturated to see politicization not merely as uncontroversial, but appropriate and even a professional requirement.

To be sure, this could work in the opposite direction just as easily. The same permission structure that allows teachers and central-office mandarins to build lessons around the 1619 Project or Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States also allows them to select PragerU or materials from 1776 Unites as they do every day and uncontroversially.

The louder debates over “book bans” and anti-DEI legislation often dominate headlines. But those controversies, for all their heat, are more visible and easier to adjudicate. The tension between public education as a civic institution and education as a vehicle for social justice is harder to resolve, precisely because it is stamped on education’s DNA. It doesn’t arrive as a policy change. It enters quietly, through teacher training programs, professional development, and curricular “recommendations.”

Public schools are among our most important civic institutions, essential to both individual opportunity and democratic life. But they cannot be both a core government service and a platform for personal or political expression. The tension between those roles has been allowed to fester unexamined for too long. The result is a steady erosion of public trust—not because Americans don’t value education, but because they can no longer be certain whose interests it serves. If schools want to reclaim that trust, they must first be clear-eyed about the role they play. And then act like it.

Photo by Redd Francisco on Unsplash