Start with the claim Mann actually made, because this piece is about whether it's still true. "The school was built to make the people" traces Horace Mann's 1848 line -- education as "the great equalizer of the conditions of men... the balance-wheel of the social machinery" -- as the founding promise of American public education: not just literacy, but the mechanism that keeps a republic of strangers, with no shared bloodline, functioning as one people. That promise only holds if the public system actually does the equalizing. This piece checks that claim against two of the best-resourced public school systems in the country, and finds it doesn't hold even there.

Fairfax County, Virginia isn't an underfunded district by any real measure. Fairfax County Public Schools spends roughly $17,700-$19,700 per pupil, more than double Virginia's statewide average, with a student-teacher ratio around 14:1 -- a well-regarded, well-resourced system by any national standard.^[1] Palo Alto Unified, at the center of Silicon Valley, runs a similar profile: roughly 17:1, ranked 39th of California's 1,565 districts, with Gunn High School ranked 226th nationally.^[2] Neither is a district failing its students. And in both, families with money still buy a different, materially better version of the same service.

The reason isn't a funding failure -- it's a structural ceiling no amount of public money, at any real-world scale, has closed. National data shows public schools average roughly 14.7 students per teacher (with actual class sizes running 20-30 in practice) against a private-school average closer to 11.4:1.^[3] That gap holds even in Fairfax and Palo Alto, both of which sit near the best end of what public funding can realistically deliver at population scale. Getting every public-school student to a private-school-grade ratio isn't a matter of spending more within the current model -- it would mean rebuilding the entire economics of how a public system serves an entire population at once, not a budget line item away.

And this isn't a fringe or a partisan pattern -- it's real, documented, and concentrated specifically among the wealthiest. Economist Joshua Goodman's research, published via Education Next, found that during COVID, public school enrollment fell 5.7% in the wealthiest 20% of American school districts -- more than five times the roughly 1% decline everywhere else -- driven disproportionately by higher-income, white and Asian families exiting for private options.^[4] That's not one ideological tribe. Fairfax and Palo Alto are both politically blue, high-turnout, well-educated electorates -- exactly the kind of place that would, on paper, be expected to champion the public system Mann was defending. They defect from it anyway, at documented, elevated rates, right alongside every other kind of elite community in the country. The pattern is genuinely democratic, in the small-d sense: practiced across the political spectrum, not owned by one side of it.

There's a second, sharper version of the same mechanism, and it isn't about ratio at all -- it's about the product itself. Steve Jobs, in a 2010 conversation later reported by the New York Times, was asked if his kids must love the iPad. His answer: "They haven't used it. We limit how much technology our kids use at home."^[5] Bill Gates barred his children from cellphones until age 14.^[6] Peter Thiel reportedly caps his children's screen time at roughly 90 minutes a week, and TikTok's own CEO, Shou Zi Chew, doesn't let his children use TikTok.^[6] Three-quarters of the students at the Waldorf School of the Peninsula -- a Silicon Valley school that uses no computers or screens at all, teaching with pens, paper, knitting needles, and mud instead -- have a parent with a significant tech-industry connection: Google, Apple, Yahoo, Hewlett-Packard, eBay.^[7] Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, whose 2024 book "The Anxious Generation" links the rise of smartphones and social media to a real, documented surge in teen anxiety and depression, names this pattern directly: "The people who made this technology do not let their kids use it... They know what their products do to kids."^[8] Money doesn't just buy a better version of the shared system here. It buys advance, insider knowledge of what the system everyone else's kids are using is actually doing to them -- and the ability to opt your own kids out of it before that knowledge becomes common enough for anyone else to act on it.

The most direct version of "money buys access" isn't ratio or knowledge at all -- it's outright refounding the institution. Walter Annenberg, a 1927 graduate of Peddie School in Hightstown, New Jersey, gave the school $100 million in 1993 -- at the time, the largest single gift ever made to a US independent school.^[9] The Madeira School, a girls' boarding school in McLean, Virginia -- inside Fairfax County itself -- received a $60 million anonymous gift in January 2025, the largest ever made to an independent girls' school.^[10] Neither gift bought one family a better ratio at an existing school. Each one permanently changed what the institution itself could offer, for as long as it exists, in a way no amount of public tax revenue aimed at a public school down the road could replicate at the same speed.

And the people this pattern removes from the common system aren't a random cross-section -- they're disproportionately the same people who will go on to lead the system they were never actually inside of. Research compiled by sociologist G. William Domhoff's "Who Rules America" project found that twelve prestigious private colleges alone account for more than 10% of Fortune 500 CEOs, a quarter of US Senators, half of all Rhodes Scholars, and three-quarters of Supreme Court justices appointed over the last half-century -- fed by a K-12 pipeline that starts well before college, at exactly the elite private schools and elite-ratio public enclaves this piece has been tracing.^[11] Fewer than half of one percent of Americans attend those twelve colleges. Every sitting Supreme Court justice, as of this writing, holds a law degree from Harvard or Yale.^[11] A country whose future judges, senators, and CEOs are drawn this disproportionately from the smallest, best-funded slice of its own schooling isn't just producing an access gap. It's removing its own future leadership from the common experience of the people they will eventually govern -- the exact shared, checkable, personally-verifiable citizenship "Who actually holds these truths" already traces to the Declaration's own choice of the word "hold."

Put all four mechanisms together and the finding is direct: this is a real, structural betrayal of the specifically American version of the promise, not a universal problem with schooling everywhere. "Who actually holds these truths" and "The school was built to make the people" both make the same underlying claim: American identity isn't inherited, it's a faith that has to be actively held and imprinted, generation after generation, through the one common institution built to do it. If money can buy a meaningfully different, better version of that institution -- a lower ratio, insider knowledge the rest of the public doesn't have yet, outright refounding the school itself, or a head start into the leadership class before anyone else's kids even reach it -- then the "great equalizer" isn't equalizing the thing it was actually built to equalize. The pattern itself is practiced democratically, in the small-d sense: across the entire political spectrum, in blue counties and red ones alike, by no single faction alone. That's exactly what makes its effect anti-democratic rather than partisan -- it lets money buy a private exemption from the one common experience self-government was supposed to depend on everyone actually sharing, including the people who will someday hold the pen.