A few days ago, I wrote a blog entry taking umbrage at, among other things, Kevin Carey’s failure to acknowledge the distinction between public schooling and public education. Yesterday, the Atlanta Journal Constitution ran an op-ed by Allene Magill, executive director of the Professional Association of Georgia Educators, complaining that some Georgia lawmakers are abandoning public education by supporting vouchers and other public-school alternatives. Like Carey’s, her assumption that “public education” means government providing schools, not just enabling people to pursue education, is both dangerously imprecise and pervasive. It’s time we clearly make the distinction between public education and public schooling.

If one looks at the term “public education,” nothing about it implies that government must provide schools. What it implies is that government will make education accessible to the public while saying nothing about how that will be done. (It could also just refer to educating the public without any government involvement, but let’s assume it doesn’t.) In other words, vouchers, tax-based choice mechanisms, and other forms of government-funded school choice are totally compatible with “public education.” Suggesting that they aren’t simply cannot be supported by the term being used.

Fortunately, there is a term that does strongly imply a system in which government provides the public not just with the means to obtain an education, but schools themselves. It’s called “public schooling,” a term I use repeatedly—and intentionally—in my piece attacked by Carey, and a system that, as I wrote, is very much at odds with basic American values.

I hope that this clarifies the difference between “public education” and “public schooling” and will help to end the mistaken assumption that the terms are synonymous. They aren’t, and school choice is fully compatible with public education. Of course, that might be exactly why some people try so hard to blot out distinctions between the terms.