Effectiveness and safety of private versus public school education

Private vs. Public Schools

Many parents find themselves caught in a dilemma when trying to decide on which choice of education to take for their children. They ask themselves whether to take their children to private schools or public schools. For a parent to choose the ideal school for their children they always have to take into consideration all the available options. They consider things like the cost of the school, how much time they will invest as a parent, the social impact that the school have on their children based on the specific need of their children as well as the family.

Private schools offer the best option for the parent who is in need of better and quality education for their children. Private schools have a nearly perfect graduation rates which market them a great deal. Their performance is better as compared to the public schools. This is evident in SAT scores used by CAPE in 2003 in demonstrating the positive impact that the private schools have. The average for private schools SAT verbal nationally was 507, and math was 519, while for public schools the average verbal was 504 and math 516. When it was broken down further, private schools which are religious affiliated have average SAT verbal of 535 and math 530. Among these, independent private schools were the ones who boasted the highest averages with verbal at 550 and math 573. This was affirmed by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in standardized writing exams when it showed that 4th graders within private schools had a higher average of 13 points as compared to the one enrolled in public schools, reaching 8th grade their scores become 18 points higher as compared to public school students. At 12th grade the grade of the private school become 22 points higher as compared to the public schools.

Private schools always do not admit high number of students and that makes the ratio of teachers to students to be ideal and thus they can vest their interest in seeing their students succeed and the one which require special need become easily identified earlier not as in public school where due to the larger number of students, the few available teachers cannot identify and provide for every student that require more attention and need. U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) indicated that 132,656 schools served the American student body in the 2007-2008 academic year. Out of these, only 33,740 formed the private institutions while the remaining 98,916 were public. Also according to the Council for American Private Education (CAPE), 11% of all American students, on average, do attend private schools, meaning that the rest of the 88% of the students attend public schools, (The Council for American Private Education, 2003). This is to show how public harbors huge capacity that cannot be effectively catered fro by the available teachers or lecturers.

The private schools tend to have the required and enough facilities and the staff to facilitate remedial programs, tutorials as well as peer monitoring which is an advantage that is generally not seen in public schools since many of them find themselves in a tight budget to be able to offer these. Public school depends on the fundraising from the parents for it to use in developing its facilities which will always not meet the high standards that are the same as the ones in private schools since private schools do not depend on a single source but from various unknown sources, Mary Elizabeth (2012). Due to environment that has all the required facilities to aid in learning, the children get opportunity to nurture new talents out of the many co-curriculum activities that they participate in. This develops a child or a student across all fields of life. However because of the scarce resources in public schools, the children or students will fail to participate in co-curriculum activities therefore they will not be nurtured in all the fields and even the child may not identify and build his or her talent further.

Since private schools pay their teachers well as the added advantage of different kinds of learning materials that are available, the teachers deliver to their maximum hence the performance of the child will be much realized at the end. On the other hand apart from public schools having few teachers, their payment is always low as compared to private school teachers thus demoralizing the teachers and it is seen in the end result when the performance becomes generally low as compared to the private schools hence giving the private schools the moral authority to comment on the best education system fro the kids.

Some parents will look at private schools as having high tuition costs; however this has been countered by numerous available scholarships that the children who come from the low family background are given, (Parents for Better Education America, 2011). For example the public schools officials in Washington, DC sided with private education through offering a voucher system to private education. Even though the House vote was close (205-203), the bill was passed offering 2000 low income DC students up to an amount of $7,500 for tuition as well as fees to private schools, (CAPE Net, 2010). There are several other legislations that move towards school vouchers that allow families to take the tax dollars that would be directed towards a public school education to be used in private school tuition.

Private schools always offer parental involvement. They actively solicit parental involvement within the learning process as compared to public schools. For a school to be much successful they have to always offer a high level of school involvement, like in volunteer work and other supports. This always result to grade monitoring, higher degree of teacher-parent communication as well as faster intervention where there is need, however the public do not give much room for this resulting to very limited relationship between the teachers and the parent. The limited monitoring of children's performance results in poor performance among the kids in public schools in a general sense.