Rethinking the Notion of Public vs. Private

By Doug Tuthill

If red and blue are to carry little political salience in the Obama White House, then public and private should prove similarly uninteresting in the new president’s Department of Education. These two adjectives, long used as hand grenades in the national education debate, are becoming increasingly irrelevant. Instead, school systems across America are forming joint ventures with private providers to give their students more options. The result is an emerging public education system that embraces customization and social entrepreneurship while defying traditional labels.

President Barack Obama already has signaled his intent to double federal funding for charter schools nationally. Charter schools come in all flavors, run by retired educators or community activists or city governments or corporate chains, and they now reach 1.2 million students in 4,300 schools in 40 states. In Arizona, one in every 11 students attends a charter school. In New Orleans, the ratio is one in two. Last year, one in every 33 public school students in America was served by a form of schooling that didn’t exist less than a generation ago.

By most standards, charter schools would be considered private. They are privately owned, run by private boards, staffed by private employees, and typically housed in private buildings. But they are tuition-free, and their money comes from taxpayers through a contract with a state government or school district. So are they public or private? As Mayor Cory Booker of Newark, N.J., likes to say, as long as they can succeed in getting students to read and write and think,...