From Ideal to Institution: Reclaiming Public Education Through School Choice
The History of Public Education and a Proposal for Reform Part 2
Standardization as a Tool of Control
The same period of Progressive reform saw the creation of IQ testing by Alfred Binet, adapted by Lewis Terman in the U.S., to sort children by perceived potential, expansion of “normal schools” to create a trained and compliant teaching workforce, and the adoption of “Carnegie Units” to measure seat time, not understanding.
These mirrored the goals of Taylorism in industry for scientific management, where people were measured, classified, and deployed like parts in a machine.
Chico State is a product of the Normal School movement
California State University, Chico began as part of the "normal school" movement, which is crucial to the broader thesis about the standardization and ideological shaping of public education.
What Was a Normal School?
The term “normal school” comes from the French école normale, meaning a school intended to establish norms, in this case, the “norms” of teaching practice and ideology.
Normal schools in the U.S. emerged in the mid-1800s as teacher training institutions. They established and taught pedagogical methods, classroom management, and increasingly, progressive educational philosophy. Their purpose was to create a uniform teaching corps, especially as schooling became compulsory and more centralized. The key purpose was to standardize both who teachers are and what they are trained to believe, thereby ensuring ideological consistency in classrooms across the nation.
Chico Normal School: Founded in 1887
Established by the California State Legislature to serve northern California’s rural teacher needs, it is one of the original state normal schools in California, along with those in San Jose, Los Angeles, and San Diego.
Chico Normal's stated mission was to train teachers in accordance with state-approved educational methods and moral standards. This was not simply a technical training ground; it was a place where future teachers were formed according to an ideological orthodoxy aligned with Progressive values. Future teachers were trained to manage large, age-graded classrooms and were prepared to transmit state-sanctioned content to children.
From Normal School to State University
In 1921, Chico Normal became Chico State Teachers College. In 1935, it became Chico State College, reflecting a broader curriculum. In 1972, it joined the California State University system and became California State University, Chico.
This trajectory mirrors a broader national evolution. Teachers must be certified according to a state-controlled process. The college education faculty was dominated by progressive theorists. The scope of university curriculum expanded and broadened, but education departments retained ideological orthodoxy.
Today, CSU Chico, like most CSU campuses, continues to operate a College of Communication and Education, which trains future teachers largely in line with the same ideological frameworks inherited from its normal school past, albeit updated with 21st-century identity politics and DEI initiatives.
Chico State is a microcosm of how teacher training evolved from local, civic-minded efforts into state-run ideological formation centers. Its origins as a normal school place it at the heart of the project to mass-produce compliant, standardized educators. This makes it an ideal case study in how even local institutions were repurposed to serve centralized state interests under the guise of public education.
CSU Chico is a local illustration of how the machinery of standardization, from curriculum to credentialing, was institutionalized and is still operating under ideological masks, merely updated with the vocabularies and narratives created in the modern progressive era.
The Double-Edged Sword of Direct Democracy
Progressives championed initiatives and referenda to bypass corrupt legislatures, promoted by our first Progressive President, Teddy Roosevelt, and adopted in California in 1911.
Despite the publicly stated purpose at the time, to counteract the actions of corrupt politicians, the direct democracy powers of recall, initiative, and referendum also created a channel for central planners to influence local law under the guise of popular will. It allowed the well-funded interests of unions and industrial foundations to dominate policy through ballot measures. It gave the illusion of populism while consolidating control among technocrats.
Even compulsory schooling laws were framed as protecting children, but in practice, they criminalized family decisions to educate differently, disempowered parents and local culture, and standardized the content of children's minds under state supervision.
Progress for Whom?
By the 1920s, the "progressive" vision had succeeded in making school mandatory until age 16–18, nationalizing curriculum and pedagogy through colleges of education, separating children from their families for longer hours and years, and embedding a factory model of human development into the fabric of civic life.
This is the legacy of Progressivism. It is not just a perpetual agenda for government reform, but the total institutionalization of childhood under the management of state-licensed bureaucrats. In contrast, for the first 100 years of our country’s existence, the founders trusted citizens to be educated in virtue by families, churches, and communities, while Progressives trusted experts to create citizens by designing and regulating every input affecting development and maturity.
Teacher unionization is a crucial turning point in the history of public education. It represents the moment when the teacher as a local moral authority gave way to the teacher as a laborer within a centralized bureaucracy, and it fundamentally changed how education policy is made, how reform is resisted, and who ultimately wields power over children’s schooling.
The Rise of Teacher Unionization: From Moral Calling to Labor Movement
The Pre-Union Era: Teaching as a Civic and Moral Duty
For most of the 19th century, teaching was a community role, not a profession in the industrial sense. Single women often made up the majority of teachers by the late 1800s, usually underpaid but held in high moral regard. Schools were controlled by local school boards, often with tight parental oversight. The role was more akin to that of a clergy or town elder than a union member.
But as urbanization increased, and as schools grew more bureaucratic and hierarchical, teachers began organizing, seeking protections from low pay, long hours, arbitrary dismissal, and gender-based discrimination.
Early Teacher Organizations: Professional, Not Unionized
In 1857, the National Teachers Association was founded, later renamed the National Education Association (NEA). Early NEA was not a union. It was a professional association advocating for public funding and the status of teaching. It opposed strikes and collective bargaining well into the 20th century.
NEA represented administrators as well as teachers, and functioned more like the American Medical Association than a labor union. Throughout the late 1800s and early 1900s, teachers formed local and state groups but rarely engaged in labor action.
The Turning Point: The Labor Movement and Public Sector Unionism
The real shift began with the founding of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) in Chicago in 1916, affiliated with the American Federation of Labor (AFL). Led by John Dewey’s disciples and progressive labor advocates, the AFT saw teachers as workers, not just professionals.
Its goals included gaining collective bargaining rights, protection from arbitrary dismissal, higher wages, and protection from political interference in the classroom.
Early AFT locals were radical, sometimes aligned with socialist or communist movements, especially in urban centers. By the 1960s, the NEA could no longer compete with the AFT’s growing influence. After years of resisting the union label, the NEA formally adopted collective bargaining and in the 1970s began behaving like a union.
Legal Enshrinement: Collective Bargaining Laws
The explosion of teacher union power came not just from organizing but from legislative victories, especially in blue states.
In a California landmark case, the Rodda Act allowed local teacher unions to negotiate over wages, hours, and working conditions. It also required school districts to negotiate in good faith, effectively formalizing the union-district power structure.
After the Rodda Act, the California Teachers Association (CTA) rose to one of the most powerful political forces in the state, spending tens of millions annually on elections and ballot measures.
Consequences of Unionization
While unions helped improve teacher compensation and job security, they also institutionalized resistance to reform, specifically by attacking initiatives to establish charter schools, merit pay, and accountability for educational outcomes. They made it nearly impossible to dismiss ineffective teachers, thanks to tenure protections and grievance procedures. They also shifted political influence away from parents and school boards to state-level union leadership, and reframed education policy as a labor-management negotiation, not a civic or moral obligation to students.
Former AFT President Albert Shanker famously said:
"When schoolchildren start paying union dues, that’s when I’ll start representing the interests of schoolchildren."
The Monopoly Power of Modern Teacher Unions
Today, especially in states like California, teacher unions dominate education policy, from curriculum decisions to funding formulas. They are often the largest single political spenders in state elections. They resist any policy that threatens their monopoly, including vouchers, education savings accounts, charter expansions, or parental rights reforms.
Teacher unions emerged during the same historical wave that gave rise to broader labor union movements, especially in the early 20th century during the Progressive Era and the lead-up to the Great Depression. Teacher unionism followed a slightly different trajectory from industrial unionism. While undergoing a parallel development, they lagged behind private-sector labor movements.
The Broader Labor Movement: A Timeline
In the late 1800s and early 1900s, labor unions gained strength among industrial workers in mining, steel, railroads, and manufacturing. The Knights of Labor (1869) and American Federation of Labor (1886) formed amid the rising tensions of the Pullman Strike (1894) and Homestead Strike (1892).
Organized labor was often met with violence and government opposition, but it grew steadily, especially in urban centers. During the 1910s to 1920s, labor organizing accelerated. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), formed in 1905 and pushed for more radical syndicalism. Labor unrest during WWI and post-war recession led to more crackdowns and a "Red Scare" in 1919–1920.
In the 1930s, the Great Depression and the New Deal brought unprecedented legal protections for private-sector workers. The Wagner Act (1935) guaranteed collective bargaining rights and union recognition in the private sector, contributing to massive growth in unions like the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations).
Public-Sector Labor: A Delayed Rise
Teacher unionism emerged in this same progressive ferment, but it lagged behind private-sector unions for key reasons. Teachers were seen as professionals, not laborers, and public employees were excluded from the Wagner Act and its protections. Strikes by public workers were considered a threat to government authority and public services.
Still, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) was founded in 1916, during the same wave that produced other major unions. But growth was slow. By 1930, AFT had only 6,000 members. NEA, still a professional association, opposed union tactics and strikes during this era.
So while the roots of teacher unionism trace directly to the broader labor movement, especially its early 20th-century expansion, teachers did not gain full labor rights until much later, typically during the 1960s and 1970s, when states began passing public-sector collective bargaining laws.
The Great Depression’s Indirect Influence
The Great Depression (1929–1939) devastated school funding and teacher pay. This helped increase teacher interest in collective action, even if formal bargaining was still off-limits. It also contributed to radicalization in urban districts, where teachers joined general strikes in NYC and Chicago, for example.
This also set the stage for New Deal–style reforms that would later be mirrored in public-sector union legislation during the 1960s–70s.
Real Power Comes After WWII
In 1959, Wisconsin became the first state to allow collective bargaining for public employees. The 1960s and 1970s were witness to a wave of new public-sector bargaining laws, e.g., the 1975 California Rodda Act. The NEA, formerly anti-union, adopted its full union identity. By the 1980s, both NEA and AFT were politically dominant, especially in blue states.
Just as America’s factories unionized to demand better wages and conditions, so too did its classrooms, but not immediately. While industrial unions grew rapidly in the early 1900s, teacher unionization lagged behind, constrained by the profession's civic image and legal limitations. Yet the underlying impulse was the same: to transform human institutions from local and moral into centralized and transactional. By the 1970s, teachers had become not just educators, but government employees with powerful unions, able to veto reforms and dictate policy in a way that would have shocked earlier generations.
How did public education shift from producing disciplined workers to producing ideological activists, especially in light of the changing nature of work and family?
The economic rationales that once justified the structure of public education, training factory workers, and accommodating agrarian life, are now largely obsolete. Nonetheless, rather than shrinking in scope or returning authority to families, the system has expanded its influence over children’s minds, especially in the philosophical, moral, and political domains. This shift is neither accidental nor recent. It was cultivated over decades through a combination of philosophical, institutional, and political changes, deeply entangled with Progressive and postmodern thought.
From Workers to Activists: The Ideological Capture of Public Education
Public schools in the early 20th century served two primary social functions: to prepare compliant, literate workers for factories and offices, and to coordinate with the agricultural calendar by aligning school breaks with farm life.
But by the late 20th century, both pillars had collapsed. Manufacturing was largely offshored (NAFTA, China trade) or automated (robotics, AI), and family farms were replaced by agribusiness and urbanization. The justification for standardized schooling evaporated, but the system not only persisted, but worse, it sought a new purpose to justify its existence.
The Vacuum of Purpose: Education as Cultural Engineering
As the economic rationale weakened, ideological motives filled the vacuum. The philosophical shift began much earlier, especially through the development of Progressive educational philosophy, led by John Dewey, who believed schools were instruments of not just knowledge transmission, but social reconstruction.
Dewey wrote in My Pedagogic Creed (1897):
"Education is a regulation of the process of coming to share in the social consciousness."
In practice, this meant shaping attitudes, behaviors, and values, redefining truth as being socially constructed, prioritizing group dynamics over individual reason, and implementing policies derived from a branch of philosophy called Critical Theory and Postmodernism.
By the 1960s–80s, critical pedagogy (Paulo Freire, Henry Giroux) became dominant in colleges of education. Schools were reframed as arenas of power and oppression, with teachers called to be agents of liberation. This injected race, gender, and class ideology into education curricula, including identity-based thinking, power analysis through oppressor/oppressed frameworks, and activism as an educational goal.
Institutional Infiltration: Teacher Training and Curriculum Design
Most public-school teachers today are trained in State-accredited teacher colleges that embrace progressive ideological orthodoxy, curriculum development programs that embed DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion), SEL (social-emotional learning), and other activist-driven frameworks.
This produces teachers who believe they are not just neutral instructors, but co-parents or moral guides. They often view education as not merely academic, but transformational. Combined with public sector unions, like CTA and NEA, whose platforms include explicit support for LGBTQ+ curricula and gender identity policies, opposition to parental notification requirements, and alignment with the Democratic Party platform on nearly all cultural issues.
The Transgender Flashpoint: Ideology in Conflict with Biology and Family
Nowhere is this ideological transformation more apparent than in the gender identity battles unfolding in public schools. Policies allowing social transition (new names, pronouns, restroom access) without parental consent became dominant. School districts began treating parental dissent as hostile or unsafe to teachers and students. State Attorney General offices, especially in California, Maryland, and New Jersey, issued guidance opposing parental notification. In some cases, teachers and counselors coached students to hide transitions from their parents.
Parents pushed back and have begun winning lawsuits restoring parental rights. In California, courts have ruled that schools must notify parents about gender-related issues. In Mahmoud v. Taylor, decided in June 2025, the SCOTUS held that while schools have operational discretion, they cannot override fundamental parental rights without a compelling interest and due process. That opinion reiterated the supremacy of parental rights to control and direct the moral and religious upbringing of their children.
14th Amendment protections of parental liberty (e.g., Meyer v. Nebraska, Pierce v. Society of Sisters) are being revived by conservative and even moderate jurists, while activist progressive and ideology-bound judges continue to cling to and justify the power of the state to stand in for parents in all respects.
From Neutrality to Indoctrination
This shift from worker preparation to ideological activism represents a deeper philosophical departure from the traditional goals of education.
Academic outcomes for students have sharply declined while ideological content has increased. School time is used for identity politics, racial guilt, gender theory, and social justice rituals, often at the expense of reading, math, and civics. Parents are viewed as obstacles to progress, rather than partners in education.
What This Means for Reform
The public school system is no longer aligned with its original civic purpose, nor with the economic reality of modern life. It now serves as a vehicle for ideological socialization, protected by legal compulsion and political unions. Any attempt to restore local, family-aligned education must break the monopoly, and that means market competition, choice, and constitutional reform.
While parents and educational reformers can continue to fight within the system through school board elections and court battles, it is a grossly lopsided battle. Much of the public remains hypnotized by the narrative rhetoric associated with the "compassionate" ideals of Progressive victim orthodoxy.
The states have enormous resources, while individual parents, or even local groups, struggle to find the time or resources to mount costly and lengthy legal battles.
I am suggesting a more generalized attack must be mounted, one that taps into the funding stream of public schools and relies on the principles of market competition. A voucher system must be justified on this basis, evaluated by the test results of graduates on a purely academic basis, much as the old 8th grade graduation exams tested a very general education in math, history, civics, literature, reasoning, etc.
A strategic and necessary shift is called for in the context of a modern education reform movement, moving away from reactive defense within a rigged system, to a proactive structural transformation through constitutional, financial, and moral leverage.
From Defense to Offense: Breaking the Monopoly Through Market-Based Reform
Educational reformers and parents are engaged in a losing battle on tilted ground. While school board recalls and court cases are essential, they are localized, slow, and reactive. We are fighting an opponent with entrenched power, union funding, and bureaucratic control. The media and political class constantly reframe dissent as “attacks on children”, “anti-education”, or “bigotry masquerading as concern.”
Meanwhile, the system defending this ideological monopoly includes The State Superintendent of Education typically aligned with teacher unions, the Governor, dependent on public-sector union support, the State Legislature, which rewrites definitions of gender and parental rights, nullifying federal Title IX protections through semantic games, the Attorney General, who acts not as a neutral enforcer of law, but as a political weapon targeting districts and parents that dissent, and the Department of Education, which issues “non-binding” guidelines that carry de facto force because of their power to enforce through funding mechanisms.
This is not democratic education. This is ideological capture backed by legal compulsion and funded by taxpayer dollars, much of which is taken from the very families now being targeted.
The Solution: Constitutionalizing the Right to Educational Choice
To overcome this monopoly, reform must:
Redirect public funds to follow the student, not the system.
Return evaluative authority to parents and academic metrics, not ideological purity.
Re-anchor education in its core mission: cultivating knowledge and citizenship, not identity narratives.
The only viable path is to go over the heads of the unions, politicians, and agencies and appeal directly to the voters. In California and other progressive states, this means a ballot initiative to amend the state constitution, guaranteeing the right of parents to use education vouchers or education savings accounts (ESAs).
Funds currently allocated per pupil to public schools, approximately $17,000–$22,000 per year in CA, would instead be portable, usable for accredited private schools, religious schools, homeschooling, or group homeschooling, or online or hybrid academies. Proficiency and advancement can be objectively determined by standardized testing that returns to the spirit of the 1895 Salina, Kansas exam.
The Accountability Standard: Return to Classical Measures
This system is not a handout; it is a performance-based realignment. Schools receiving public funds would be required to demonstrate:
Academic proficiency across core subjects: reading, writing, mathematics, history, civics, and science.
A return to classical education standards, akin to the rigorous 8th-grade graduation exams of the early 20th century.
Transparent reporting of outcomes, not based on “social-emotional growth” or subjective identity development, but on intellectual competence.
In other words, the new question becomes:
Did the school actually educate the child in foundational knowledge and skills, or merely train them to repeat the slogans of the state?
Why This Proposal Is a Moral Imperative
The current system claims to serve compassion, but in truth, it undermines parental authority, distorts children's moral development, traps low-income families in ideological indoctrination centers, and conditions children to serve the state’s philosophical aims over individual flourishing based on personal motivation and a desire to learn.
A voucher system re-centers the child, the family, and the pursuit of truth. It allows families to align their children’s education with their values, presents real competition among schools to produce the best outcomes, and allows taxpayers to stop subsidizing cultural and political indoctrination with no recourse.
This is not just policy reform. It is the reassertion of liberty in the face of bureaucratic tyranny.
A Return to Educational Federalism and Self-Government
The public school system was built for a country that no longer exists. We are no longer a land of factories, family farms, and shared civic norms. Today, we are post-industrial, technologically agile, and religiously and ideologically diverse.
No one-size-fits-all system can serve a society like this, nor should it try. A voucher-based framework allows communities to pursue excellence on their own terms, create diverse educational ecosystems that compete for excellence, and encourage citizens to re-engage with their role as moral and intellectual stewards of the next generation.
“A major problem with the government school system is that it tries to force all children into the same mold. A voucher system would give parents the power to choose the schools their children attend. That would unleash innovation and diversity in education, allowing schools to reflect the values and needs of their communities rather than the dictates of a centralized bureaucracy.”
— Milton Friedman, “Public Schools: Make Them Private,” Washington Post, February 19, 1995