To see why this is so, and what can be done about it, a short stroll through the history of Central Park is in order. In the mid-1800s, a large swath of the 843 acres where the park now sits in some sense resembled the archetypal commons. When the poor immigrants and free African Americans who raised hogs and grew vegetables there needed firewood, they simply cut down trees, according to The Park and the People.

After a circle of elite New Yorkers conceptualized a park to rival those of Europe, a decade was spent acquiring, emptying, and reshaping the land to produce Frederick Law Olmsted’s masterwork of landscape architecture. Olmsted’s vision of a democratizing space, where people of all classes could gather, flourished for a time. But failure to offset use with investment soon yielded the scene described by the historian Robert Caro in The Power Broker:

The park’s lawns ... became dust holes in dry weather and mud holes in wet. Its walks were broken and potholed…. Benches lay on their backs, their legs jabbing at the sky .… The concrete had been stripped of drinking fountains so completely that only their rusting iron pipes remained.

Using New Deal relief workers and other federal funding, the renowned city planner Robert Moses refurbished and enhanced the park. But by the 1970s, Central Park was once again “in a chronic state of decay,” according to its official website: “[T]he Park bred a careless, even abusive attitude … evidenced by unchecked amounts of garbage, graffiti, and vandalism. Positive use had increasingly been displaced by illicit and illegal activity.”

Pedro Noguera, a preeminent education expert who recently moved from New York University to the University of California, Los Angeles, sees many American schools in a similar light: “With almost every urban public-school system,” he says, “we’ve seen [civic leaders] allow it to just continue to deteriorate.” In some impoverished areas, classrooms are brimming with more than 40 kids each, students have to share textbooks, and a focus on protecting oneself—when the crumbling walls scream that no one else cares—displaces learning. Yet Noguera thinks public schools in the United States can thrive, in part by following the park’s lead.

In 1980, New York City’s upper class reentered the picture. After about 30 citizens began working with Mayor Ed Koch’s administration, a private nonprofit called the Central Park Conservancy resulted. To date it has poured more than $875 million into the park.

The city didn’t simply turn Central Park over to the wealthy, however. The conservancy’s 52 board members focus primarily on fundraising, while Douglas Blonsky, a licensed landscape architect with a background in horticulture, serves both as head of the conservancy and as NYC Parks’ Central Park administrator. The parks commissioner, he says, “sets all big-picture policies,” but when it comes to maintenance and operations the city “pretty much delegates” authority to the conservancy, which Blonsky then passes down by dividing the park, his staff, and “300 very active volunteers” into 49 autonomously managed zones.

This model breaks a scholarly mold in both economics and education. When seeking to avoid a tragedy of the commons, two solutions were traditionally cited: privatization (controlling behavior using market disincentives, like my car rental costing more if I ding it) and regulation (“To [limit] use of parking space we introduce parking meters for short periods, and traffic fines for longer ones,” Hardin wrote). These same two choices—market and state—dominate education-policy proposals. (Vouchers, for example, represent an attempt to unleash the forces of supply and demand on pedagogy, while the Common Core standards stem from governors banding together to standardize it.) The conservancy exemplifies a third option for which Elinor Ostrom won a 2009 Nobel Prize: self-regulation.