In a time when both American democracy and U.S. public schools appear to be in crisis, Derek Black argues that the best way forward is to look to the past at the ideals that the founding fathers espoused in the early years of the nation. Although early U.S. leaders placed a priority on expanding public education, Black explains that these ideals have not always been perfectly put into practice. But education has lived alongside the right to vote as a defining feature of the American democracy, so much so that it was one of the principal aims of newly freed slaves during and after the U.S. Civil War. Yet recent efforts in some states to privatize schools show that democracy's advances are not irreversible and that the nation must continually return to the founding principles that have guided the nation thus far.