Why Public Schools? Whose Public Schools?: What Early Communities Have To Tell Us

Are the public schools the public’s schools? And if they need to be, what is the public? Public schools today often mean little other than schools paid for by tax revenue. If that is all they are, they may mean far less in the future than they have in the past. Communities built the first schools and, in turn, the common work of establishing them "built" the communities. Yet we seldom take that into account now when we try to improve our schools.