The disruptions of the pandemic frayed familiar routines and fueled an appetite for more education options. As a result, more than two-thirds of people support school choice, according to recent polls, and states are expanding educational choice programs at an astounding rate.

This all seems rather innocuous and, well, predictable. Teachers union leaders, however, see in school choice the nefarious handiwork of a shadowy cabal. American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, for example, described the push for educational freedom as a “privatization movement” bent on “destroying public education.”

Given that U.S. public schools spend $17,000 per student and have added staff at many times the rate they’ve added students in recent decades, one might snarkily conclude that the privatizers are doing rather a poor job of it. But the school choice debate has featured plenty of snark. So instead, as I point out in my book, The Great School Rethink , it’s perhaps more useful to appreciate why such complaints are misguided and misleading.

Over the past century or more, public schooling has been subject to a barrage of reforms: compulsory attendance, district consolidation, larger schools, smaller schools, magnet schools, standards, test-based accountability, merit pay, and more. Some of these ideas were good. Some weren’t. But in hindsight, it’s pretty clear that they weren’t “attacks” on public education; rather, they were attempts to improve it.

Public education can encompass a lot of approaches, and it can be organized in many different ways. Rather than blindly insist that “defending public schooling” requires clinging to outdated policies from decades (or centuries) past, we would do better to clarify principles, examine particulars, and then debate proposals.

Indeed, the pandemic was a stark reminder that there are lots of ways to deliver schooling, including innovations such as learning pods, microschools, virtual tutors, and education savings accounts. While these might stretch our notions of public education, that’s mostly because the hard-and-fast lines used to denote “public” are blurrier than we pretend.

State departments of education and local school districts routinely contract with for-profit firms for books, buses, data systems, technology, and testing — and they pay to place some hard-to-serve students in private settings. Yet these systems are deemed obviously “public” because, well, mostly because we’re used to it. In truth, there’s nothing especially novel about using private partners to provide mentoring or microschools.

Choice opponents assert that public schools are “public” because they’re funded by public tax dollars. OK. Fair enough. But when states adopt charter schools, education savings accounts, or voucher programs, they’re democratically deciding to fund those services with public tax dollars. By that same “public dollars” criteria, such programs certainly qualify as public education.

Moreover, public schools also collect nonpublic funds. School systems charge fees for various extracurricular activities and accept funds from private philanthropy. Do such interactions mean those school districts should no longer be regarded as public? No one argues that. It turns out that “public education” is a pretty expansive category. And that’s fine.

More importantly, simply calling something “public” doesn’t make it a good thing. While the phrase “public schooling” is suffused with happy notions of inclusivity and fairness, “public” isn’t a magic word. Don’t take it from me: Take it from public education’s staunchest defenders. After all, many who celebrate “public education” will, in the next breath, lament that these schools are underfunded, segregated, oppressive, practicing discriminatory discipline, or obsessed with testing.

The point isn’t to play word games but to understand that things are less clear-cut than defenders of the status quo are prone to acknowledge. There are many ways to provide and serve the aims of public education.

In fact, approaches typically regarded as less “public” may, at times, better serve public ends. Take citizenship education. University of Arkansas professor Patrick Wolf has examined the evidence and found that private schools seem to do a better job at preparing citizens than their public counterparts. When it comes to tolerance, democratic participation, civic knowledge, and voluntarism, their students outperform their public school peers. Talk about complicating the narrative!

Instead of blindly obeying the diktats of outdated rules or routines, we can embrace a more expansive definition of “public” schooling that better serves students, families, communities, and educators. We best defend public education not by stubbornly clinging to every bit of the machinery as it currently exists, but by working to extend opportunity, serve communities, and meet the needs of students and families. That’s true even when the solutions look different from what Weingarten is used to.

Frederick M. Hess is the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and author of The Great School Rethink (Harvard Education Press 2023).