What Decades in Education Taught Me About Schools and Social Inequality

Decades of school reform have left Larry Cuban with a narrower, more grounded view of what public education can accomplish. Schools can help individual students grow intellectually, socially, and behaviorally. But his experience as a teacher, administrator, superintendent, professor, and researcher led him to doubt that schools can reverse entrenched social inequality.

From Dewey’s promise to classroom practice

Cuban began teaching high school in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1955. He entered the classroom with a firm belief that teaching history could help young people find their place in the world and contribute to a better society. John Dewey’s 1897 “Pedagogic Creed” gave that belief a clear expression: “education is the fundamental method of social progress and reform.”

He tried to put that ideal into practice through the early 1960s, while teaching, starting a family, and taking evening university classes toward a master’s degree in history. Looking back, Cuban refuses to dismiss his early confidence as simply naïve. The conviction that education could improve society gave purpose to long days of work. It sustained him even before he understood how complicated schooling’s role could be in a democratic society shaped by the market and by conflicting interests.

That conviction also drew him to Washington, D.C. In 1963, he arrived on the day of the civil rights March on Washington to teach former Peace Corps volunteers preparing for work as teachers at Cardozo High School. He spent nearly a decade in the district, teaching history in two high schools and taking on school and district leadership roles.

Reform efforts in Washington

Cuban worked on programs designed to improve schools in a predominantly Black city marked by severe inequality. Those efforts included training young teachers for low-performing schools, organizing residents in impoverished neighborhoods, creating alternative schools, and developing professional learning programs for teachers and administrators.

Federal and local officials were trying to address years of neglect in D.C. schools, but Cuban saw reform programs adopted without enough attention to how they would work in classrooms. Many were introduced haphazardly. When local or federal administrations changed, programs often disappeared with them.

He still takes pride in the teachers and students who took part. Some were rescued from dangerous, poorly managed schools and classrooms where they were not being taught well. Yet by the early 1970s, with a few exceptions, most of the reforms Cuban and his colleagues had supported had faded. He describes them as “no more than graffiti written in snow.” The inequalities those programs aimed to reduce remained.

That experience shaped his later view of reform. A program’s goals and the energy of its supporters weren’t enough to make it last. Policies that failed to account for implementation, local conditions, and changes in leadership could vanish before they had a durable effect.

A hierarchy that reform rarely unsettled

After leaving Washington, Cuban’s work as a superintendent, professor, and researcher led him to see public education as part of a more tangled social structure than he had once imagined. He came to describe U.S. schools as a three-tier system associated with both academic performance and students’ socioeconomic circumstances.

In his account, roughly 10 percent of schools sit at the top. These include selective urban high schools in New York, Boston, and San Francisco, along with schools in affluent, mostly white suburbs such as New Trier High School in Illinois, San Ramon Valley in California, and Montgomery County in Maryland. They meet or exceed state and national curriculum standards, rank among their states’ highest-scoring districts, and send nearly all graduates to four-year colleges and universities.

About half of schools fall into the second tier. Often located in inner-ring suburbs, examples Cuban names include T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Virginia, and Menlo-Atherton High School in Menlo Park, California. These schools often meet state standards and send nearly all graduating students to college, though they sometimes fall out of compliance with accountability requirements, face reprimands, and then continue operating much as before.

The third tier includes schools in large cities such as Washington, Philadelphia, Detroit, St. Louis, and Atlanta, as well as schools in rural areas where many poor and minority families live. Cuban describes many of these schools as low-performing and at risk of closure because they appear on federal or state lists of failing schools. Strong principals and staff can sometimes lift a school into the second tier, but remaining there is uncommon.

What schools can change

For Cuban, this hierarchy explains why school reform has so often fallen short of its broadest promises. Schools operate within economic, social, and political inequalities that they cannot erase on their own. He concluded that public schools have generally helped maintain social stability—and the inequalities embedded in society—rather than leading a sweeping social transformation.

That judgment doesn’t make schools or teachers irrelevant. Cuban draws a sharp distinction between changing a student’s life and curing society’s ills. Even in the lowest tier, capable teachers and schools can support meaningful intellectual, behavioral, and social growth for many children and young people.

He sees a continuing disconnect between that evidence and the language used by policymakers. Presidents, superintendents, and school board members still invoke Dewey’s belief in education as a means of social progress. Cuban points to former President Barack Obama’s 2010 State of the Union address, where Obama called “a world-class education” the best anti-poverty program of the 21st century.

After nearly half a century of work in schools, supported by research in classrooms, Cuban says he has become allergic to utopian claims about education. He is skeptical of arguments that place schools at the forefront of social reform because they overstate what institutions can do within a deeply unequal society.

Still, his skepticism has a clear limit. Teachers who know their subjects, understand classroom practice, and know their students can make a lasting difference in those students’ lives. Schools may not dissolve inequality, but the quality of teaching still matters to the young people who experience it. For Cuban, that remains a reason to value good schools without asking them to solve problems beyond their reach.