Comparison of public and private schooling systems

Education (Public & Private)

In the book, Rereading America, there is a chapter called "Learning Power: The Myth of Education and Empowerment" and in that chapter there are several interesting essays pointing out the differences (the good and the bad) between public and private schools. In the introduction to the chapter, prior to the essays, the authors assert that "...the American dream can work for anyone," and it all begins with the opportunity for learning - going to school and getting an education. And though the "dream" possibility may be true, there is a "myth" associated with the dream, the authors say. The myth is that education can do for us what "blind luck" can't do; and the truth is that education can help us, but also it "shapes us" in ways that do not necessarily fit all our lifestyles in America. The opening essay points out how education was shaped through the years to fit more perfectly the American ideals and American dreams.

People like Thomas Jefferson believed that education was a "training ground for democratic citizenship," the authors write on page 494. And Horace Mann believed in "universal education" which he added would be "the great equalizer of the conditions of men" and also education would cure poverty, Mann explained. John Dewey is considered by many the "Father of Public Education," and he believed that education goes well beyond what it can do for the individual. Education, in Dewey's opinion, "...is the fundamental method of social progress and reform." One thing that John Dewey believed in which makes a tremendous amount of good sense (whether practiced in public or private schools) is that schools should work hard to produce "thinking citizens" rather than "obedient workers.

Obedient workers would be the same as robots, but thinking people can always adjust to situations and are better at solving problems than people who just learn statistics, dates, names, and events from history.

What High School Is" by Theodore Sizer: this is an essay that presents a few of the boring and unpleasant aspects of the typical public high school. Students (many of them anyway) view high school as place where "clock is king" (students rush from one class to another) and for the most part kids go there out of "a dogged necessity" (Sizer 503). High school is a good deal for parents because it "takes young people off parents' hands and out of the labor market during prime-time work hours." One of the down sides of high school is that students don't actually get much time to interact with teachers, and for most schools, life is a "...systemized, conveyor-belt" kind of experience. it's a ritual that is "not pretty," but everybody understands it because everybody has to go through it.

From Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work" by Jean Anyon: This was written by a person who visited five different elementary schools and determined that because of the difference between schools in wealthy communities and those in poorer communities, the quality of education is dramatically different. But more than that, Jean Anyon found out through her hands-on research that in fact, fifth-graders (of different backgrounds) "are already being prepared to occupy particular rungs on the school ladder." This doesn't sound like what the great educational philosopher John Dewey had in mind, which is that schools should teach children to think and solve problems, not just prepare them for specific professional roles in their adult life.

Anyon visited two "working-class" school, a "middle-class school," a "affluent professional school" and a "executive elite school" in her year's research of schools. What she discovered in her working class school experience was that about 15% of the fathers of these children were not employed; the jobs that mothers did not have jobs and fathers who did have work included "pipe welders, and boilermakers; semiskilled and unskilled assembly-line operatives; gas station attendants, auto mechanics, maintenance workers and security guards" (Anyon 525).

There are specific daily steps that students in these working class schools must take, and in math, for example, the teacher "told them what the procedure was for each problem, rarely asking them to conceptualize or explain it themselves" (Anyon 528). And so the emphasis was on memorizing the steps, not on understanding how or why they are taken. Language arts class was much the same (copy the teacher's notes from the board). In the middle-class school, it was all about "getting the right answers." In social studies, it was the old-fashioned routine of reading the chapter and answering questions, and the same was true in language arts. "Creativity is not often requested in social studies and science projects..." Anyon writes (532).

Things were different in the affluent professional school and fathers' careers included corporate lawyer, cardiologist, engineer; difficult assignments required specific projects like film-making and script-writing; children wrote essays about the lives of people in history; in social studies the emphasis was on creative writing. The executive elite school featured a child developing his or her "analytical intellectual powers." The classes in this school emphasized literature, history, the classics, and advanced science and math. Students were "sometimes flippant, boisterous, and occasionally rude," Anyon explains on 538. That could be because children of wealthy families sometimes tend to be spoiled. In any event, what the reader gets out of reading this essay is more than just the socioeconomic differences in different parts of a city; in fact, the quality of teaching is so dramatically different, it is obvious that higher-paid teachers are to be found in wealthy communities, and that in a sense is cheating the lower-income students out of decent educations.

An article in MSNBC.com called "Public vs. Private School - which is best for my kids?" (Clayton 2005) points out that "many of us believe that private schools are better than public schools." However, writer Victoria Clayton goes on, recent research by scholars from the University of Illinois-Champaign determined that (while making adjustments for a family's socioeconomic background) "...public-school kids slightly outperformed private-school kids." Clayton goes on to mention that in order to come up with that conclusion, the researchers utilized data from the 2000 National Assessment of Educational Progress - including scores from a federally designed math exam for 28,000 4th and 8th graders. That assessment lends credibility to the thought that "overall public-school education should not necessarily be seen as second-rate compared to private schools."