From Ideal to Institution: Reclaiming Public Education Through School Choice
The History of Public Education and a Proposal for Reform Part 1
I. Introduction
My goals in writing this series of essays are to cover the following territory:
Review the founding ideals of public education, emphasizing its moral, civic, and democratic underpinnings.
Demonstrate how the modern institution has diverged from those ideals, citing structural incentives, union entrenchment, declining outcomes, and ideological capture.
Argue that internal reform is structurally impossible, due to bureaucratic inertia and monopolistic protection.
Introduce market competition through vouchers as the only viable reform.
Conclude with a call to action: a California Constitutional Amendment via initiative.
In the course of these articles, I will address the following topics:
The Founding Ideals of Public Education
Historical roots: Horace Mann, the Common School movement that emphasized universal access, moral education, and civic virtue.
Constitutional foundations: public education as a state responsibility, not a federal one, tied to preparing citizens, not employees.
Jeffersonian ideal: education to secure liberty and self-governance.
California’s early education framework: a tool for assimilation, literacy, and meritocracy.
The Institutional Drift
Bureaucratization and centralization: Schools no longer serve the community, but the system.
Union entrenchment: CTA and NEA's influence over curriculum, staffing, and legislation.
One-size-fits-all mandates: curriculum standardization, test-based funding, and compliance regimes.
Cultural and ideological capture: teaching orthodoxy rather than civic pluralism.
Failure to serve the disadvantaged: high dropout rates, literacy decline, and persistent achievement gaps despite increased funding.
The Impossibility of Reform From Within
Incentive misalignment: school districts have no competition and are exposed to limited consequences for failure.
Resistance to parental authority and local control: masking mandates, ideological curricula, and contempt for dissenting families.
Statutory and contractual rigidity: Tenure laws, LIFO (last in, first out) seniority rules, and collective bargaining all operate to block innovation.
The Case for Vouchers and Market-Based Education
Parent-driven choice: empowers families to match schools with values, learning styles, and goals.
Competitive pressure: incentivizes improvement, responsiveness, and innovation.
Examples of success: Milwaukee, Florida, Arizona's ESA programs.
Equity through empowerment: especially benefits low-income and minority families.
A Case for California Constitutional Amendment Initiative
Constitutional change is needed because statutory reform is too easily blocked or reversed.
Language goals:
Recognize education as a right exercisable through public or private means.
Require the state to fund each student equitably, regardless of school type.
Prohibit discrimination against private or religious schools in voucher eligibility.
Implementation strategy:
Voter education campaign
Coalition-building with minority communities, religious groups, reform-minded liberals, and conservatives
Legal defense preparation for inevitable challenges
Summary and Conclusion
The promise of public education was liberty, not conformity.
Bureaucracies cannot reform themselves. Only competition and free choice can revive the mission.
The people of California have the power to act directly.
It's time to return education to its true stakeholders: parents, communities, and children.
In the Beginning: The Prussian Influence on American Public Education
The Prussian model heavily influenced the structure and objectives of the American public education system. While its rhetoric emphasized civic uplift and democratic participation, the actual design and structure served more pragmatic and disciplinary goals, especially after the Industrial Revolution.
Origins of the Prussian Model
In the early 19th century, Prussia (a German kingdom) developed the first centralized, compulsory state-run education system in the modern world. The key architect was Johann Gottlieb Fichte, a philosopher and nationalist, who in his Addresses to the German Nation (1808) argued that schools must instill obedience and loyalty to the state.
The core goals of the Prussian system were:
To produce obedient soldiers for the army.
To train capable workers for industry.
To inculcate loyalty to the crown and state.
To standardize the national language and culture.
To suppress individuality in favor of conformity and duty.
Schools were tiered to reinforce class stratification. “Volksschule” prescribed the required basic education for the masses, mandating training in reading, writing, arithmetic, and religious obedience. “Realschule” and “Gymnasium” were prescribed for middle and upper-class children, emphasizing leadership, administration, and classical education.
Importing the Prussian Model to the United States
The most influential American proponent of the Prussian educational system was Horace Mann, Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education (1837–1848), who visited Prussia in 1843. Mann admired the efficiency, discipline, and universality of the system, calling it a “great equalizer of the conditions of men.”
Upon returning, he published his Seventh Annual Report, where he praised the Prussian structure and advocated for compulsory attendance laws, professionally trained teachers, state-controlled curricula, standardized classrooms and grade levels, and nondenominational moral instruction.
Although Mann and his allies framed education in terms of democratic preparation, elite industrialists and state actors saw a more utilitarian purpose.
The Hidden Goals: Obedience, Order, and Labor Preparation
As the 19th century gave way to the 20th, especially in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, American education adopted Prussian-style regimentation more overtly:
John D. Rockefeller funded the General Education Board (1902), famously declaring:
"I don’t want a nation of thinkers. I want a nation of workers."
Frederick T. Gates, Rockefeller’s education advisor, added:
“We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or science... The task we set before ourselves is very simple... we will organize children and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way.”
Ellwood P. Cubberley, dean of Stanford’s School of Education and major voice in educational administration, wrote in Public School Administration (1916):
"Our schools are, in a sense, factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned into products to meet the various demands of life."
As a consequence of this influence, American educational systems adopted the systemic features adopted from Prussia and adapted for industrial America:
The bell schedule was modeled on factory whistles.
Age-based grading: a form of academic assembly line.
Uniform curricula: minimal variation allowed by locality.
Suppression of individuality and dissent.
Teacher authority was reinforced by licensing and loyalty to state curricula.
Public vs. Private Justifications
While the benefits of this educational reform were publicly framed as “progress” in the industrial age, the industrialists had more practical objectives in mind.
Legacy and Consequences
While the system succeeded in creating universal literacy and institutional unity, it came at the cost of stifling creativity and autonomy, suppressing alternative education models, normalizing state control over moral and cultural instruction, and treating children as units in a production process.
The result is a system that functions not as a tool of liberation, but of sorting and control, increasingly alienated from parental authority, local culture, and innovation.
This was a dramatic and profound departure from the past century of early American education, which was decentralized, community-based, and surprisingly rigorous, especially when compared to today’s diluted standards.
Before the Prussian System: American Education in the Republic’s First Century
From 1776 to the early 20th century, most American education took place in local, often rural, community schools, not in state-run bureaucracies. These schools reflected the needs, rhythms, and values of agrarian life.
One-room schoolhouses were the norm, serving children aged 5 to 16 in a single classroom. Teachers were community members, often young women or educated men, trusted more for their character and learning than for holding credentials. They were hired and paid directly by the community in which they taught. The school calendar followed the agricultural cycle, with shorter sessions in spring and fall, so children could assist with planting and harvests. Multi-age learning fostered peer teaching, flexibility, and mastery at one’s own pace. Emphasis was placed on memorization, recitation, and moral instruction, often grounded in the Bible and McGuffey Readers.
High Expectations, Even With Limited Resources
It’s a common misconception that early American education was primitive or unsophisticated. In fact, students were held to remarkably high academic standards compared to today.
The 8th Grade Graduation Exam, used in parts of Kansas and other frontier regions in the late 1800s, included algebra, geometry, and word problems requiring multi-step reasoning, U.S. History and Civil Government questions that demanded detailed recall, sentence diagramming, spelling, and grammar exercises at a college-prep level, and geography questions requiring both global knowledge and local application.
Here are typical questions from the 1895 Salina, Kansas exam:
"Name and locate the principal rivers of Europe."
"Define: government, monarchy, republic, democracy, and anarchy."
Today, a large share of high school seniors would struggle to pass this test, let alone 8th graders.
Literacy and Self-Education Were High Priorities
Despite the lack of centralized oversight, literacy rates in New England approached 90% by the early 1800s. Self-teaching was common, and families often owned Bibles, almanacs, and classics. The common school movement did help expand access, but even before it, education was seen as a local responsibility and a moral obligation, especially in Protestant communities.
As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in Democracy in America (1835):
"In America, it is believed that knowledge is the safest guarantee of liberty."
The Shift: From Local Autonomy to State Control
The virtues of this early education model, local control, family involvement, moral instruction, and academic rigor, began to erode under the influence of the Prussian model, urbanization, and industrial standardization after the Civil War.
By 1900, school systems were consolidating into districts. Teacher training was professionalized and bureaucratized. Curricula began to be standardized, with a focus on uniform outcomes, not community needs. Educational authority shifted away from parents and local boards to state departments and educational theorists.
A System That Lost Its Soul
Ironically, as America grew wealthier and better resourced, the quality of basic education declined.
The current system demands more funding, produces less literacy, and has lost its connection to both academic excellence and community values.
The shift from individualized, capacity-based education (individual mastery, flexible pacing) to standardized, age-based, compulsory schooling occurred gradually between the mid-19th century and early 20th century, reaching full national scope by the 1920s. This transformation reflects both ideological and industrial motivations, shaping a compliant, standardized workforce and citizenry.
From Capacity-Based Learning to Compulsory Assembly-Line Schooling
Before the late 1800s, children advanced based on mastery, not age. Attendance was voluntary and often seasonal. Learning occurred at home, in church, or within community-led one-room schoolhouses. Many students completed formal schooling by age 13 or 14 and moved on to apprenticeships or work. Leaving school early was normal, not stigmatized.
Rise of Compulsory Schooling: The Legal Shift
Massachusetts was the first state to mandate school attendance with its Compulsory Education Law of 1852, which required attendance for children aged 8 to 14, and at least 12 weeks of school per year, with 6 consecutive weeks in school. Other states soon followed.
By 1920, every state required mandatory school attendance through at least age 14. An expanding number of states raised that to 16 over the next several decades.
Standardization and Stratification
The late 19th century also saw the creation of age-grade classrooms, replacing multi-age models. Curriculum became standardized through state boards and university-influenced teacher colleges. The development of “Carnegie Units” (1906) introduced the idea that courses should be measured by hours, not learning.
This mimicked the logic of the factory assembly line, where children entered at age 5–6, moved step-by-step through 12 identical grade levels, were tested along uniform standards regardless of ability or interest, and exited, ideally, as “products” ready for industry or college.
Education reformer Ellwood P. Cubberley again expressed this vision plainly:
"Schools must be factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned... And it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down."
Rationales for Compulsion
For the public-facing narratives supporting reformation, the goals were described as literacy, equal opportunity, civic training, and child protection, a precursor to child labor laws enacted decades later. Compulsory education laws were justified at the time as a means to regulate industry practices without directly confronting powerful industrial titans. These industrialists enjoyed the benefits of child labor, much like present-day industrialists justify their need for illegal alien laborers.
Privately and institutionally, the goals of reformers included controlling child labor to regulate labor markets, assimilating immigrants, creating uniformity for industrial efficiency, and shaping values under state-approved norms, like nationalism and obedience.
In 1910, the National Education Association even described the ideal outcome as:
"The student is to be molded into a citizen who obeys the law and conforms to social expectations."
The Modern Legacy: Uniformity Without Excellence
This transformation cemented the monopoly model of education, state-funded, state-designed, and compulsory. The current debate over school choice and vouchers is, in many ways, a reckoning with this industrial past.
The rise of compulsory education, standardized schooling, and centralized control over children’s moral and intellectual development fits squarely within the broader project of the Progressive Era from roughly 1890 to 1920. This period was marked by a fundamental reordering of American life, and it was elitist in orientation, even if it wore the language of democracy.
The Progressive Era’s Hidden Curriculum: Obedience, Not Empowerment
The transformation of American education into a compulsory, centralized, and standardized system occurred alongside sweeping changes in government, finance, and society — all in the name of "progress."
Between 1890 and 1920, America saw education transformed the Progressive vision:
While Progressives framed these changes as democratizing and protective, they also transferred power from families and communities to elites and bureaucracies.
The Managerial Mindset
At the core of the Progressive movement was a belief that experts, not citizens, should guide social outcomes. This applied to education (teachers and administrators over parents), economics (central bankers over markets), democracy (commissions and agencies over legislatures), and urban life (planners and regulators over communities).
Education was redesigned to produce disciplined, manageable citizens, not independent thinkers. As education historian John Taylor Gatto wrote:
"The modern school system was not built to train the intellect or develop character, but to mold a population that would be manageable and predictable."