The case for abolishing private schools

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/aug/24/the-only-way-to-end-the-class-divide-the-case-for-abolishing-private-schools

by rapnie • 8 years ago

32 66 8 years ago

theguardian.com

user3359• 8 years ago

There's a lot of valid arguments for a single school system - better teachers from private, people with private wealth and influence pushing the public sector forward, etc.

But the title is naive. This will do nothing for the class divide. Wealthy parents will still hire private tutors for their children for 1 on 1 time and expose them to a wider variety of extra curricular activities.

It's the concept of schooling itself that's the problem. You can't absentmindedly send your kids off to school to be taught how to be a drone. IMO the parents attitude and nurturing at home is 2x as important, and this is especially problematic for either too-young parent or low income families that don't have the time to nurture their kids because they're working 12 hour days with 3 hours of commuting.

api• 8 years ago

It will also do nothing for the elite university system, which is a major system of noble title and privilege networks.

rm_-rf_slash• 8 years ago

Doubly right. Parents who read to children and nurture a love of learning are multitudes more effective than expecting the best teachers and tutors that money can buy to encourage kids of any socioeconomic status to care about their education.

trukterious3• 8 years ago

IMO the parents attitude and nurturing at home is 2x as important

Agreed. And since education is inseparable from a child's well-being and general development, it remains the responsibility of parents. They must choose according to their children's interests, wishes and aptitudes, and according to the family situation. Try to take that away and you're putting the State in loco parentis -- a role beyond its bureaucratic capacity to manage.

rbanffy6• 8 years ago

It doesn't remove it completely, but it goes a long way towards removing incentives to deplete the public schooling system from resources.

As more and more people in position to support campaign donations have no (perceived) stake in public school, there is less incentive to adequately fund it. What you create is schools for a minority of the poor that are left with whatever is left when everything the people politicians hear care about is funded.

nerpderp83• 8 years ago

We can start by making funding per child the same across the US and not tied to local property taxes.

Long term classist ideologies are incompatible with Democracy.

ghaff• 8 years ago

Per-student funding actually tends to be higher in urban school systems that have lower performance as measured by test scores. Suburbs with "good" schools don't necessarily have especially high per-student public school spend.

Added: Equalizing spending might transfer some money to poor rural communities but it would also shift money from lower-income households in most cities to relatively tony suburbs.

brightball• 8 years ago

This is naive, in my opinion.

Even in the public school system there is a class divide system, it's just based in real estate instead of private school enrollment.

At the same time, you can't abolish private schools without abolishing home schooling, which literally becomes forcing all children to be educated by government institutions...which is bad.

Public schooling alone would be much better off if it were more decentralized, with less federal involvement. Most of the federal programs that the teachers I've spoken with deem to be necessary could be addressed without being tied into the school system directly (like free and reduced lunches) - in much the same way that health care doesn't need to be tied to your employer.

The issue is that people don't take ownership in their public schools because they don't feel they have ownership in their public schools.

Just as an example, remember the school system blow up in North Carolina over the "bathroom bill" stuff? Parents were losing their minds - in some cases without good reason but in other cases with perfectly good reason. They didn't get a say in what happened. They didn't get to decide how to handle things in a manner they were comfortable with.

Instead, they watched the threat of having federal funding yanked from their schools if they didn't comply. Stuff like that is why public schools don't get as much support as people wish they would.

I'll go ahead and tell you, I had no intention of sending my kids to private school as I was ideologically opposed to it...yet when all of the common core stuff started happening and I saw the stories coming from my friends from college as their A students were coming home in tears for getting correct answers the wrong way...it made me want the politics out of my kids education.

The school they go to actually teaches the common core approaches to things as well. The difference is that instead of rushing to implement it based on mandates, they researched options, all of the teachers at the school who are...as it turns out...qualified to decide these things, made a decision on what they wanted to do and rolled it out slowly over a period of years. Parents were kept in the loop the entire way and they did it with zero disruptions.

You can't do that in today's public school system.

There are a lot of other factors, but for me it boiled down to wanting a stable and consistent environment for my children - at least when they are in early developmental ages.

I'm strongly considering moving back to public for middle/high school though.

And for consistency sake, I want to be absolutely clear here...I realize I'm lucky to be able to afford it. That's EXACTLY why I advocate for school choice programs because I want to be able to tell other parents about this great school and know that they can decide to send their kids there if they want to, regardless of their financial background.

I get all of the terrible stuff that gets written about people's "devilish" intentions behind vouchers or choice or whatever else. For me it simply boils down to knowing that my kids go to a great school and I want everybody to have the same true freedom of choice. Nothing more, nothing less. In our current system, the only people with all the options are the people who can afford those options (be it via houses zoned for specific schools, private or home schooling groups).

leetcrew2• 8 years ago

literally becomes forcing all children to be educated by government institutions...which is bad

this may be a very US perspective, but i'm totally with you here. it is certainly in the interest of a free society for tomorrow's citizens to at least have comparable standards of education (far from today's reality), but to have literally 100% of education administered by the government seems like a dangerous level of control to me. there's gotta be some independent system keeping them honest.

anecdotally, i went to a private high school and had several friends at well-funded public schools in the county. though we all received high quality educations, they reported that their curriculum contained a lot less of the dirtier aspects of US history, which i was gleefully exposed to in class by some of the more subversive instructors at my school.

rhacker4• 8 years ago

I think that may be a teacher by teacher type thing. I went to a public school. I definitely remember something that stood out:

The teacher instructed everyone to move all the desks to the perimeter of the classroom. Then had everyone lie down and pretend their hands and legs were bound together. Pictures of boats like this were also in the text books. Similar classes where we discussed in detail the wars against native americans... now, that all being said, this was in the Silicon Valley (before it was called that collectively). So I can't exactly describe public schools in say, Kansas.

BadassFractal2• 8 years ago

Not trying to sound woke, BUT it seems analogous to how the elite couldn't care less about kids being drafted for Vietnam until they started pulling WASP students out of college and sending them straight into the jungle. Then you suddenly saw the anti-war movement gain steam outside of the black community, which was hit the hardest until then.

Seems reminiscent of the principle, which I'm sure has a name, exemplified by the "cut the cake however you want, but you don't get to choose which slice you get in the end, so it's in your interest to make it fair".

If rich parents couldn't choose which type of school their kids end up with, would public school still suck?

leetcrew2• 8 years ago

If rich parents couldn't choose which type of school their kids end up with, would public school still suck?

though my parents aren't rich, i did attend a private school, so i am likely biased here. this strategy amounts to holding people's kids hostage until they do what you want, not sure i can get behind it.

random aside: one of the great pleasures of my high school experience was having the opportunity to take several years of ancient greek. i know of only a couple other private schools in my state that offered this at all, and i don't know of any public schools that do. obviously it is unfair that only a few students can have this, but it would make me very sad if no one could at all.

BadassFractal2• 8 years ago

Reminds me of arguments against affirmative action, which I can relate to. Underprivileged Asian families in the US will save on everything, sometimes go as far as skipping meals, only to be able to afford tutoring for their kids so that they end up in a good school. If someone has sacrificed so much to get their kids there, should they be denied that right just based on their race?

coreyp_1• 8 years ago

"If rich parents couldn't choose which type of school their kids end up with, would public school still suck?"

And if there's no choice (ie., no capitalism), then everything will be great! (Please ignore every attempt at communism/socialism that has failed.... surely it will work the next time!)

</s>

tomohawk3• 8 years ago

Given the dismal record of the government in running schools and improving schools with poor records, the answer should be instead to privatize all the schools.

Most private schools have lower per pupil spending that government run schools.

megiddo• 8 years ago

No, no. Let's double down on the existing system.

Also, we should eliminate fancy restaurants, because that's where rich people meet other rich people.

And nice houses! Housing advantage is a clear indicator of classism.

Now that I think of it, pretty much everyone in the US does better than rural Somalis. We should equalize the class divide by reducing the US standard of living until we're all equal.

rhacker4• 8 years ago

Yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking everyone 1000 years from now, after we've decided how everyone should be will live in a 10x10x10 box with a screen that shows a beautiful mountain.

acangiano• 8 years ago

This is a great concept that will resonate with many young people. We could divide the resources equally among the population and no one would receive less than anybody else. I bet it will work out just fine and in no way lead to the death of millions of people.

wwweston3• 8 years ago

If the point is that it'd be difficult and absurd to try and equalize all outcomes, that's reasonable enough.

If the point is that any attempt to equalize an opportunities is conceptually the same, though, that's much less reasonable.

Education is often one specific focus because it's in the overlap of (1) a common and early place where inequality of opportunity presents itself (2) early maximization of individual potential has potentially cascading effects (3) baseline tractable social projects (raising the ceiling on outcomes for everyone may be hard, but providing a reasonable floor more most is one thing it already does) (4) seems plausible that everyone benefits the more educated the population is (especially in a representative democracy).

And while eliminating fancy restaurants may be absurd, if you're thinking about the question of when/why it might be important for poor people to meet rich people, then it may well be entirely worth trying to address that problem. To pick one issue near and dear to the heart of HN folks, access to capital is key for many entrepreneurial folks.

btilly4• 8 years ago

Private schools also have the luxury of being able to reject expensive to teach students, and generally do.

Of four children in my household, one costs over twice what any other does to teach. Guess which one stayed in public school?

chillaxtian• 8 years ago

Why do they cost twice as much to teach?

tomohawk3• 8 years ago

Yes, that is a good point.

However, to balance it out, private schools generally do not take on children with IEPs because it subjects them to all kinds of overbearing regulation from the government. They don't have much freedom in acting differently than what the bureaucrats want. So, it is unlikely your child would be allowed to get a better education at the private school, as it would be dictated by the same people running the government schools.

Source: my mother had a career as a teacher of learning disabled children

wwweston3• 8 years ago

Assuming your premise is correct (I don't know if it is or isn't), I'd guess that running a good private school is a pretty different prospect than successfully privatizing public education.

Do private schools do better because The Problem With Education™ is essentially who is administering/teaching and private schools are more effective at that? Or do (some) private schools do better because they select a demographic of students (directly by admissions or indirectly via who applies for various reasons) that's effectively less expensive to bring to positive outcomes?

From what I've heard about charters (which seems to be one good place to evaluate this) it seems that while some students who switch have better outcomes, as a whole, it's a wash at best, which suggests to me the problem is less a question of public vs private and more like student selection (maybe a question of scarcity of educator talent).

tomohawk3• 8 years ago

If you think about it, all US universities are essentially competing with one another as charter schools.

You have to wonder what would happen if college education was made mandatory and the Department of Education took over all of the universities and created a common university core curriculum.

notacoward5• 8 years ago

the answer should be instead to privatize all the schools.

Do you mean "privatize" in the honest sense that would leave many people with no school at all, or in the other sense that would privatize only the profits while the funding still comes from taxpayer dollars? Usually when I hear about "privatizing" schools people mean the latter, with a side effect of shedding regulation and liability as well.

Most private schools have lower per pupil spending that government run schools.

Citation needed, particularly a citation that accounts for factors like cherry-picking students, relying on a large private endowment from a more exclusive era, or failing to meet various standards - e.g. certification, curriculum, health and safety - that are applied to public schools.

monochromatic• 8 years ago

Alternative: school vouchers.

newnewpdro• 8 years ago

To abolish the class divide you must abolish inheritance of wealth. When people die, their assets should become redistributed across the population.

Good luck implementing it; the wealthy would just find ways to put their assets in shell companies or trusts where their descendants may access them.

Practical issues aside, I do believe inheritance is a major barrier of progress towards equality.

djrogers• 8 years ago

Let’s set aside the fact that 80% of US millionaires are first generation, which somewhat subverts your underlying assumptions, and address your idea on its merits.

By doing this, you would remove the single greatest biological imperative humans have to excel - to leave your offspring better off than you.

rhacker4• 8 years ago

Let's also realize that to abolish inheritance would mean abolishing inheritance for the other 99%. Many people in the 99% have saved their home or otherwise kept their dignity because of inheritance. It's not just a 1% concept.

rbanffy6• 8 years ago

to leave your offspring better off than you.

You can still do that. What the article proposes is that you shouldn't confuse that with leaving your offspring better off than everyone else.

Life is not a zero-sum game.

rbanffy6• 8 years ago

Even if we can't solve the problem completely (assuming, that it, it's really a problem we want to solve completely), there is a fair amount of motivation to reduce the perceived unfairness of outcomes.

btilly4• 8 years ago

I call BS.

It is absolutely true that children who go to private schools do better than children who go to public schools. However when you control for parental socioeconomic status, this reverses. Public schools on average do better for the children of rich parents than private schools do. (Specific schools can vary widely.)

mataug2• 8 years ago

I agree, This seems like arbitrary opinion than an actual solution.

Private schools pioneer new learning techniques, they offer unique opportunities that the public schooling systems cannot offer. Example Montessori schools are mostly private and they can be extremely beneficial.

Yes private schools are expensive, but there are ways to fix the expensive part.

Suggesting that we should eliminate private schools because they are expensive and cater only to the rich is like suggesting that we should eliminate expensive cars because they cost too much.

We need schools which range the spectrum, We need public schools to be like a Prius for example, Efficient, affordable, reliable and checks all the basic requirements of a car. While there's always room for the ferrari or the Rolls Royce for people who can afford and want that experience.|

Also there's rarely, if ever, a single solution to a complex problem like schooling.

rhacker4• 8 years ago

Essentially recommending teaching your own kids something... illegal? I'm definitely left-leaning, but this is kinda Left times 4000?

rbanffy6• 8 years ago

I agree it's a radical idea. A more palatable approach would be to just adequately fund public schools in a way they'd out-compete the lower end of the private school spectrum. Remember that when they deal with poor students, they'll need to invest a lot more in the student to reach the same outcome.

Also, an increase in minimum wage, and curbing flexible work schedules and other factors that prevents parents from giving their children adequate attention would do wonders.

Then, as another step, removing all tax breaks for for-profit schools should free additional resources for public schools and further drive up the lowest range private ones (by killing off the low end, again). Rinse and repeat.

Another neat thing would be for public schools that receive donations to share those with either all schools in the region or with a "buddy" school in a less wealthy area. This is specially important in systems that tie one geographically to a specific school according to their area of residence.

The wealthy will always be able to afford private tutors and to secure advantages for their offspring, and I'm not discussing whether they are or not "fair", but the large majority of the population deserve a more equal society.

Disclaimer: I grew up in Brazil, where there is a huge gap between the poor and the middle-class and I moved to Ireland, where the gap is much, much smaller, a couple years ago and I can tell you this is a much better way to structure a thriving society.

40acres• 8 years ago

There's lots you could do w/o abolishing private schools:

- Pay public school teachers more & hire more teachers (reduce class sizes)

- Free lunch for all kids in the public school system up until senior year of high school

- Widespread access to tutors for specialized tests

- More funding for extracurricular activities (academic and non-academic)

- Pay public school teachers more.

- Desegregation bussing

mataug2• 8 years ago

Free Lunch for all kids has actually been shown to be quite effective at keeping kids in school, especially in poorer parts of a country.

An example is the Mid Day meal scheme in India https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midday_Meal_Scheme#Evaluation_...

yellowapple4• 8 years ago

Don't forget paying public school teachers more and hiring more of them.

That alone would be a significant equalizer, and far less extreme (and I'd argue far more effective) than just banning private schools outright.

Of course, I'm coming at this with an American background, and it seems like the article is about British education, so maybe there are different factors at play here.

danieltillett4• 8 years ago

Isn't this assuming ending the class divide is something we should be aiming to achieve? Where is the case that the cost of doing this is less than the benefit?

sintaxi• 8 years ago

That's a great point. This article assumes that eliminating class divide is a worthwhile pursuit without first evaluating the costs of such an endeavor.

jacknews2• 8 years ago

define benefit.

It's a bit like saying "It's too expensive to have 12-man juries, etc, so we should just stick with mob justice" or "This democracy thing is all a big hassle, we'll stick with divinely instituted monarchy"

danieltillett4• 8 years ago

No it is more like why have 12 person juries when 8 might be just as good and cost less. What is the argument that 12 person juries are better than 8?

As an aside I was called in for jury duty on a civil case where the jury was only 4 people. Of course because the legal system doesn't care about wasting everyone's time there were 50 of us there hanging around all day while the lawyers argued with each other. At 3.30pm the 4 jurors were chosen and the rest of us finally sent home.

ilove_banh_mi3• 8 years ago

I have friends who send their children to Montessori schools (private). Other friends send their kids to Waldorf schools (private, too). Others have been homeschooling (the ultimate private).

They would consider it deeply unjust to seek to abolish their schooling alternatives. I consider it driven by a nasty, Platonic impulse. Leave parents to make decisions about the education of their kids. Give schools more flexibility, encourage local innovation, and we'd see a variety of interesting outcomes. For example Marva Collins [1] had an amazing impact on the students she was allowed to work with.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marva_Collins

trukterious3• 8 years ago

I consider it driven by a nasty, Platonic impulse

I wouldn't say it's necessarily nasty. There's always been a wish (possibly romantic) for children to be raised in common.

e.g. "It takes a village to raise a child".

e.g. from Assemblywomen by Aristophanes, as summarised in Wikipedia:

She proposes banning all ownership of private wealth and establishing equal pay for all and a unified standard of living. She further explains that people will no longer have a need for personal wealth as all basic needs will be met by the common fund. She further adds that men and women will be free to sleep with anyone they want, so long as they first sleep with the uglier members of the opposite sex. Parental responsibilities will be shared by the community as children will no longer know their fathers

There's also the fact that we made it through the Stone Age and other prehistoric times in small roving bands with presumably no formal education. Yet the scraps of knowledge of how to hunt and survive were passed down effectively.

People lived more intuitively then and in some sense there was more equality.

Yet that isn't the alternative that's being proposed. What is being proposed is a top-down bureaucratically-controlled system applied to all children regardless of their or their families' wishes. It would inevitably be the most expensive option quite apart from being a giant zombie factory and propaganda machine for the future powers-that-be.

ilove_banh_mi3• 8 years ago

You seem to misunderstand the collectivism in Assemblywomen -- it is used as an absurdist foil to criticize contemporary Athens, not as some kind of ideal.

notacoward5• 8 years ago

They would consider it deeply unjust to seek to abolish their schooling alternatives.

There's plenty of deep injustice to go around. Other parents might consider it deeply unjust that the only schools they can afford are hellholes where no real teaching occurs and the classrooms aren't even adequately cleaned/heated/ventilated. Does that injustice not matter too?

yellowapple4• 8 years ago

So instead of actually fixing the hellholes, let's abolish the non-hellholes. Yep, totally just.

ilove_banh_mi3• 8 years ago

Yes, the low quality and outcomes of public education are very bad, and a political system that insists on dooming a majority of kids to that hellhole is very bad.

The positive solution is not to seek to destroy what decent educational systems may still exist. Have you considered that it is public schools that need radical change, to be more like private schools? or even to become private schools?

loco5niner• 8 years ago

Does that injustice not matter too?

Yes, but just because A is broken, does it really make sense to abolish B? Instead, we should fix A.

asdf1234tx• 8 years ago

LMAO. This will go over like a shit hamburger with my friends of the middle class, middle aged, nuclear family persuasion. Which at least half of them are democrats, and I predict this type of thing would temporarily unify democrats and republicans, of the voting kind, to shoot this down. I'd have a hard time finding a non-laughable, scientifically backed, argument to press them with.

scarface74• 8 years ago

Let’s not forget that desegregation started a boom in private schools in the south.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/segregation-is-still-alive-at-...

berbec• 8 years ago

Another actually possible idea is to separate school funding from the local tax base. This leads to the nice public schools in rich areas and underfunded wastelands in poor urban areas.

I went to such an underfunded school. Teachers were buying classroom supplies, the ones who could afford it (usually because their So had a good job) and cared.

rbanffy6• 8 years ago

Public education is an important issue and I don't believe a coherent (if wild) argument for improving it should be flagged. If it generates heated arguments, those should be dealt with one by one.

We'll need to have this discussion at some point.

The case for abolishing private schools

Related Stories