The Outsourced High School: Revisiting Conant's Vision in a Moment of Polarity

• In Event: Reckoning with the Impact of Policy to Understand the Present

Abstract

This paper revisits James B. Conant’s vision of the American high school as a civic institution and examines how that vision has unraveled. Drawing on historical analysis and contemporary policy research, I argue that the high school has shifted from a shared democratic space to an “outsourced” model defined by privatization, digital fragmentation, and credential competition. Using frameworks from Rury, Labaree, and boyd, I analyze how political standardization, cultural atomization, and economic stratification have displaced the civic mission of secondary education. This conceptual paper contributes to scholarship on democracy and education by historicizing the comprehensive high school’s decline and calling for renewed investment in schools as public spaces of civic belonging, engagement, and democratic preparation.

Author

• Dustin Hornbeck, University of Memphis