6. Public Education and the Erosion of Civic Commons
Perhaps nowhere is the theft more symbolic than in our education sys- tem. In 1994, I warned that public schools were becoming arenas for job protectionism rather than engines of opportunity. Today, they have become battlefields in a culture war that is leaving students, teachers, and commu- nities caught in the crossfire. From Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” legislation to book bans sweeping across red states, public education is being hollowed out not just in funding, but in moral purpose. School boards are now scenes of regular confrontation— between parents misled by online disinformation and educators scram- bling to defend curricula against ideological attack. Meanwhile, teacher shortages deepen, infrastructure crumbles, and mental health crises among students surge. All of this unfolds while private equity invests in charter schools and ed- tech platforms, extracting value from the very dysfunction they helped cre- ate. Again, the story is not one of scandalous corruption, but of slow-motion theft: of public trust, of civic literacy, of the very idea of school as a shared space for pluralistic learning.
7. Where Do We Go From Here?
The temptation, when confronted with the scale of these failures, is de- spair. But despair is just another form of complicity—another way of saying “nothing can be done.” That too is part of the theft: a political economy so skilled at gaslighting the public that resignation becomes the default setting. What we need instead is clarity: moral, institutional, and civic. • Moral clarity to name what is happening—not as a set of unfortu- nate side effects, but as the predictable result of systems designed without public interest at their core.
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