The banks love it. The private school industry, which has a substantial PR arm and lots of money to fund PR campaigns against public schools (that have no resources at all in this area and are barred by law from advertising or lobbying), has become a multi-billion-dollar industry and throws hundreds of millions into buying politicians every election year.
It seems baffling that Americans would allow their legislators to destroy what was once, in the era from 1940 until the 1980s, the world's best public school system.
Part of the problem is that most Americans never had a single Civics class in school and so simply don't understand these concepts. (Reagan cut federal funding for Civics education with the rationale that students should focus on science and math.)
Americans used to understand the commons. The phrase comes from the common area communities used to use for grazing and community gardens centuries ago.
In every developed country in the world except the United States both healthcare and education (all the way through college) are considered parts of the commons. Because the commons are our "common wealth," they're administered with public funds raised through taxation by government answerable to voters.
Only in the United States, among developed nations, are education and healthcare considered privileges rather than rights and only available to those who can afford them. But then the US is also the only country in the developed world that has a corrupt Supreme Court that allows racist rightwing billionaires to buy and own politicians to corrupt public policy.
Our public school system was painstakingly constructed starting in the 1880s and 1890s with Horace Mann's early efforts in the Northeast. By the 1950s, as Republican President Dwight Eisenhower and a Democratic Congress built thousands of gleaming new public schools across the nation, we were the envy of the world.
While public schools are paid for out of government tax revenues, to maintain high levels of accountability to their local communities most of the funding comes from local property taxes.
Additionally, every public school system in America is overseen by a local elected school board which has the final say on everything from hiring and firing to curriculum.
There are few systems in America that are as accountable to local public sentiment "- local, grassroots democracy "- than our public school system. They're also almost universally unionized, which, like their democratic nature, represents another strike against them in the eyes of white supremacist and neoliberal billionaires.
America's rightwing billionaires and their racist Republican politician toadies are dedicated to ending public schools and replacing them with non-union, private, for-profit education that best serves well-off children while ghettoizing poor children.
The idea of America as a true "land of opportunity" is anathema to their ideal of a nation of "classes and orders" where every person knows their place and morbidly rich white men are in charge of everything.
To salvage this part of our nation that was so beloved for almost two centuries, join your local school board or, at least, show up for the meetings, and become an activist for public education. The next few years "- as Republicans in Arizona are showing us "- may be our last chance.
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