Catholic Schools Are ‘Public’ Schools

A mile or so from my home in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C., the county is completing work on a handsome new middle school, currently surrounded by plastic fences. Landscaping is under way, and I sympathize with the landscapers’ desire to keep the public from trampling over newly laid sod. Moreover, there are still construction crews present and it obviously won’t do to have the curious getting too near backhoes and tractors as they move large rocks. But I was caught short when I noticed that the perimeter fence is marked by signs that read private property: no trespassing: property of mcps (i.e., Montgomery County Public Schools).

The obvious question is, Why is a school funded entirely by tax dollars being described as “private property”? Surely the new school is the property of Montgomery County, which means the property of the county’s citizens. There’s a deeper question here, though, and it bears on a longtime problem in the debate over governmental funding of elementary and secondary education. The problem is the shorthand that unthinkingly divides elementary and secondary schools into “public schools” and “private schools.” Even the Supreme Court majority in the recently decided case of Espinoza v. Montana used that language while effectively burying the anti-Catholic Blaine amendments that had marred dozens of state constitutions for well over a century.