By Daniel Buck
Monday, March 22, 2021
The latest cover of The Atlantic features a golden
desk and the bold title “Private Schools Are Indefensible.” In the article,
Caitlin Flanagan details her experience working at a premier private school in
Los Angeles and the opulence within the building’s walls — billion-dollar
endowments, theater prosceniums, and an archeologist in residence. Such
extravagance, she argues, would not exist “in a just society.”
I’ve taught in both public and private schools, and I do
not recognize the caricature of private education that Flanagan furnishes. The
private-school classroom where I currently spend my time has a few broken
desks, a whiteboard donated with charming dents, and drafty windows. In
reality, the per-pupil budget of private schooling is a few thousand dollars
cheaper than that of public schooling. The same disparity goes for teacher
salaries.
In her article she employs anecdotes from a select few
schools to then slander private education in general. It’s a singular, personal
narrative through which she attempts to delegitimize an entire system.
I feel no particular warmth for elitist institutions such
as the Dalton School, which Flanagan decries. It peddles progressive politics to sanctimonious elites.
A select few private schools truly are bastions of privilege and wealth —
elites walling themselves off into elite institutions for their elite lives —
but most are not, and it’s disingenuous to base an analysis of the education
system on those few outliers.
In reality, there are countless reasons that a family
might choose to send their child to a private school. In my experience, I’ve
seen children move to escape bullying. I’ve seen others seek out religious
devotion or even just sports programs. Some, with ADHD and dyslexia, seek out
more-personalized classrooms.
The second thrust of her essay is a criticism of the
power dynamics in private education. According to Flanagan, budgets and
outspoken parents, not necessarily childhood needs, dictate what happens within
the school walls.
Even if we accept her premise, she ignores any comparison
to the public system, where unions have had the power to close schools for
months now despite a near consensus among medical experts who
maintain that opening would be safe. The dichotomy isn’t between private
schools that are beholden to money and public schools that put students’
interests first, and that gets to the true weakness of Flanagan’s argument.
She forgoes reckoning with the state of public education.
According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, nicknamed
the Nation’s Report Card, only 44 percent of fourth-graders scored at or above
the proficient level in reading. The achievement gap between black and white
students remains almost as stark as it was in the 1960s. Tales of teachers
suffering physical abuse and of schools teetering on the edge of chaos regularly circulate though the education
world. I have restrained a student after he got his eye blackened in a fight,
and I’ve talked another down from a vise-grip headlock. A colleague admitted
herself to a psychiatric hospital thanks to the abuse she suffered.
Public schools guarantee no equity. Where I grew up,
schools only a few miles apart featured either brand-new, Astroturf fields or
gang fights, depending on the side of town. Any public school that requires a
$900,000 home to attend in-district can hardly be a purveyor of equity, despite
its status as “public.”
I admit that these anecdotes and statistics are not
representative of public education as a whole. They are a few outliers that do
as much to offer an accurate picture of public education as Flanagan’s essay
does of private education.
She has detailed the top end of a bell curve and called
it unjust. However, the appropriate response to disparities isn’t to simply cut
off the top of the bell curve; rather, it should be policies that shift the median
higher. There are policies that disproportionately benefit low-income students
without robbing families of their right to private education.
Charter schools, publicly funded but locally run
institutions, reflect one such policy. A study from Stanford found that charter schools in
suburban neighborhoods performed no better than their traditional public-school
counterparts, as the suburban districts were well funded and well run. However,
for students of color and students in poverty, charter schools outperformed
public schools. Charter schools work to shrink disparities without limiting any
family’s right to secure the education they desire for their children.
The results needn’t remain merely in data.
High-performing charter schools, such as Uncommon in New York and Michaela in
London, serve disproportionately underprivileged students and still outperform
even the most affluent districts. Moreover, the teachers and administrators of
these schools write best-selling books such as Teach Like a Champion or The
Power of Culture to spread the keys to their success — high behavioral
standards, traditional curricula, and teacher quality.
A second and related policy is school choice, whereby
students select the school they would like to attend and then funding follows
them there. In the current model, students are assigned to a school, which is
funded by property taxes. Students in poor neighborhoods are locked into
underfunded schools. If Flanagan wants to address injustice in the system, here
is a prime target.
Many segregationists in the Jim Crow era opposed school choice and supported
school zoning laws as a means to achieve their racist agenda. School zoning
laws are not unlike redlining, whereby African-American families were barred
from mortgages in desirable neighborhoods while the government subsidized loans
for many whites. African Americans were thereby prevented from acquiring
capital across generations through homeownership. The difference now is that
the capital in question isn’t property but education.
Notably, studies find
that school choice, like the charter-school system, disproportionately benefits
students of color. Students are able to attend schools that better fit their
needs, and the influx and outflow of students from successful or failing
systems applies local pressure to improve them and foster grassroots change.
Taken together, school choice and charter-school policies
would raise the quality of education for the entirety of the American school
system, lifting up the bottom without infringing on the rights of others.
Instead of having to rely on public schools that offer a mixed bag of
educational theories and qualities, students could pick from charter schools,
private schools, religious schools, art schools, vocational schools, and a host
of other institutions that best fit their needs.
In sum, Flanagan begins with an incorrect understanding
of private education. She proceeds from her own personal experience and
concludes with a policy recommendation that would do little to help the poor
for whom she has so much concern. She draws attention to a ludicrous disparity
between the most affluent and the poorest schools in America but recommends
that we push down those who, even through hard work, not
just corruption, have reached the top.
Caitlin Flanagan has penned some of the more thoughtful
essays that I’ve read in recent years. While she does attempt a level of nuance
in her article, clarifying that she’s discussing only the most elite of private
schools, she buries the clarification in the body of the essay, while the title
declares in bold words that private schools are indefensible, and in her
conclusion she gestures at universal public education. She has cherry-picked
qualitative effects from a few limited cases, in a seeming attempt to discredit
the very existence of private schools, a bold argument poorly defended.
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