If confirmed, McMahon will likely place an even greater emphasis on two key ideas popular among Trump supporters: shifting funding from public schools to private ones, and guiding more children toward the world of work. In their view, this would align the nation’s education system more closely with the real vision of “the American Founders.”
Here’s the irony, from my perspective as a historian of American public education: The likely results really would move the country toward the educational world of the founding era, but toward the real version of that world, not the cheerful myths of the MAGA imagination. In reality, in the decades between the Revolution and the Civil War, when schools were under local control and highly vulnerable to the market, schooling was chaotic and inadequate; children were often workers first and learners second.
No one was satisfied with their educational options back then. Worst of all, enslaved Black children were often legally barred from any kind of schooling. But even free Black children in the North had trouble finding schools to attend. In 1828, for example, the Rev. Peter Williams warned that only 600 Black children were enrolled in New York City’s public schools, even though there were 2,500 children in the city who Williams thought should be in school.
White children, too, were often out of luck. Horace Mann, the crusading head of Massachusetts’ school system, warned in 1839 that there were just not enough schools. Like a lot of reformers of his time, Mann had the stats to prove it. As part of his campaign to improve Massachusetts’ public schools, Mann gathered attendance data from across his state and around the country. The numbers were not encouraging. There were 177,053 children in the state, Mann showed, but only 94,956 could find schools to go to year-round. In the rural South, things were even worse. In Georgia, for example, by 1844 there were 119,108 white children, but only 15,561 had public schools to attend.
Those numbers were stark enough, but beyond the statistics, the lack of schools made for heartbreaking individual tragedies. As one 9-year-old girl from rural Georgia wrote to her grandmother in 1831, “It is difficult to get an education heare.” She had been able to attend for only “tow yare and a half.” She was panicking because she was aware, even at her tender age, that she was “poor and shall stand in need of something to gain support.” Without public schools, she knew, she could never learn enough to become a schoolteacher herself.