What Happens If All Kids Must Attend Public School With Equal Funding And Uniform Expectations
I was leaning against my classroom door last Tuesday, wiping citrus-smelling hand sanitizer off my jeans after greeting 27 fourth graders, when I overheard two moms lingering by the water cooler. One was telling the other she’d just picked up an extra night shift at the hospital to pay for private dyslexia tutoring for her son, because he doesn’t qualify for an IEP (he tests just 10 points above the official cutoff) and our whole-group reading block moves too fast for him. “If we couldn’t do this,” she said, “what would happen to him?” That question got me thinking about the hypothetical circulating among education folks lately: what if public school was mandatory for every kid in America, no alternative schools or homeschooling allowed, every kid got the same base funding (with extra only for formal special needs), and everyone learned the same material with the same expectations.
I’ve been teaching in this small rural Ohio district for 12 years, and I’ve watched dozens of families leave over that time. The wealthiest families head for private schools when their kid is gifted and they don’t like our steady whole-group pace. Families who can flex their work schedules pull kids out for homeschool when their kid’s anxiety doesn’t mesh with our 25-30 kid class sizes. Charters siphon off families who want a dedicated STEM or arts focus that our district can’t afford to offer right now. That’s the current system, plain and simple: the kids whose parents have the means or flexibility to opt out do, and the kids who stay are the ones who don’t have that choice.
The first big change I see, that almost no one talks about, is who shows up to advocate. Two years ago, our elementary playground got a rotten swing set roped off after a kid got an infected splinter. The school board said there was no room in the budget to replace it, and that was that. Most of the families who have the flexible schedules and connections to show up to monthly school board meetings already moved their kids to the charter STEM school 15 minutes away. No one pushed hard enough, so the swing set still sits there, ropes around it, kids climbing on it anyway when no one’s looking. If all those kids were still in our building, their parents would be packing every meeting, calling every board member’s cell phone, and that swing set would’ve been replaced a year and a half ago.
Scale that up, and it’s systemic. Right now, high schools in low-income areas operate with leaky roofs and 10-year-old textbooks because the families with political and financial clout already left. If all families—rich, middle-class, poor—are in the same public system, wealthy parents aren’t going to accept their kid attending a school that can’t afford new math books. Funding would have to even out across districts, because there’s no opting out anymore. That’s a tangible shift that would help every kid, especially the ones who currently get stuck in underfunded schools with no one fighting for them.
But that’s not all that would change. The same uniform curriculum and expectations would create new pressures, because kids don’t all learn the same way, no matter how much we wish they would. Let’s go back to Javi, that 10-year-old whose mom is picking up extra shifts for tutoring. If there were no outside tutoring or alternative schools, Javi would be in my class full time, and we’d have to make it work. Right now, our required curriculum says every fourth grader needs to read a 10-chapter novel in three weeks and demonstrate comprehension through a written test. Javi can’t get through that much text that fast, even though he can explain the plot of any cartoon you name in detail and sketch complex character designs that show incredible attention to detail.
What do we do that’s practical, without extra funding or changing the overall curriculum? I already do small things that work. Javi can listen to the audiobook while he follows along with the physical text, which cuts his reading time in half without changing what he’s learning. Instead of a five-paragraph written test, he can draw a story map with short captions to show he understands how the main character changed. I carve out 10 extra minutes three times a week during silent reading to work with him on phonics, pulling him for a quick small-group session that fits into our existing rotation. It’s not perfect, I don’t have time for an extra 10 minutes with every kid who needs it, but it’s a concrete adjustment that works for him, even with the same overall expectations.
Same for the gifted kids who currently leave for private schools. Leo, a 10-year-old in my neighborhood, loves coding and already writes basic game scripts at home. His parents pulled him out for a private STEM school because he was bored in our public elementary class. If he was in my room, he’d still do the same required math and reading work everyone else does, but once he finishes, he can use his extra class time to work on his coding projects instead of filling out extra worksheets that don’t challenge him. It’s a small shift that doesn’t change the curriculum for anyone else, but it keeps him engaged.
Last week, I stayed after school to rearrange my reading rotation to make that 10 extra minutes a week for Javi. It meant shifting my own prep time around, and some days I run late sending kids out to recess, but it’s working so far. If all kids were in public school tomorrow, we wouldn’t suddenly fix every problem. Uniform expectations would still leave kids on the edges left out sometimes, and we’d always be playing catch-up to adjust for the fact that every kid learns differently. But what we would have is everyone at the table. Instead of parents who can afford it fixing their own kid’s problem and walking away, they’d be fighting to fix all kids’ problems. The swing set would get replaced, class sizes would shrink, and we’d have more time and space to make those small, daily adjustments that help kids like Javi feel like they belong. It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s a far different one than what we have now, where too many kids are left waiting because the people who could change things already left the building.
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