The False Promise of Private Schools

Eliot Bicknell

August 31, 2024

Private education is fundamentally unfair. Education is the greatest resource we can offer to our youth, and yet it is distributed according to wealth. Private schools exacerbate inequality, segregate children based on race and economic class, and serve as a symbol of liberal hypocrisy. Not only do the tax breaks and vouchers on private schools take funding away from other, less privileged children, but they also hurt the rich kids in private schools, who are stripped away from the diversity and perspective they so desperately need.

The moral issues with private education seem almost too obvious. How could we have missed such clear-cut inequities? The truth is, we haven’t. We’ve just turned a blind eye. On the left, we pride ourselves on an agenda of progression and equality. And yet many of us send our children to private schools, a direct contradiction with our liberal ideals. 

Of course, there are some children who really are better served in a private school setting. Children with learning disabilities may need the extra help a private school can provide. But for the majority of children, private school is class-based segregation, widening the gap between the kids who can afford it and kids who can’t. In other words, the rich get richer. And while racist and elitist ideas often play a part in the decision to send children to a private school, can parents really be blamed for wanting the best for their children academically? 

In a way, these parents are right; elite private schools can be better for collecting accolades and connections, and a more effective gateway to a well-paying corporate job. But this is an entirely narrow-minded view of what education should be. According to Jack Schneider, author of The Education Wars and historian at UMass Amherst, providing economic opportunity is only a slice of what education should accomplish. When I got the chance to talk to him, he mentioned two other educational goals: communal advancement and gaining perspective. These are areas in which private education is certainly lacking. For the most part, affluent white kids are surrounded by other affluent white kids. While there are some diversity and financial aid efforts made at private schools, especially in the northeast, it is not nearly enough to offset the significant economic and racial gap between public and private schools. While minority enrollment is about 53 percent nationally in public schools, that number drops to 35 percent for private schools, not to mention the wide economic disparity between them. 

Public school students are generally surrounded by kids who are different from them, in terms of upbringing, race, and economic class, whereas private school students are generally around those who are similar to them within the previously mentioned criteria. In this way, public school provides a more effective social education for children. 

This conversation is an especially important one considering the war many right-leaning figures are currently waging on public education, the war being the rhetoric that “our public school system is failing.” When parents were asked about their satisfaction with the nation’s education system as a whole, they generally said they were dissatisfied. However, when asked about their own child’s school they were usually pretty content. This contradiction clearly illustrates the gap between the perceived failures of public schools at large, generally pushed by conservatives, and the pretty high level of approval most have, personally, with their own children’s schools. According to Dr. Schneider, “The flames of culture war are being fanned by people who are using it as a way of prying people’s sympathies away from public schools, and towards vouchers and a privatized education system.”     

Some Republicans want to push education into a free market system, where all children have to attend private schools, whether they can afford it or not, and they are doing so through the spreading of misinformation surrounding the quality of our public schools. This would effectively turn education in America from an unalienable right to a privilege, and the process is already well underway. 

With the recent introduction of school vouchers in 14 states, education tax dollars are going toward private schools. If parents decide not to send their children to private school, they can receive 7,000 dollars of taxpayer money for private school tuition. While said to be intended to give poorer children the choice to go to private schools, vouchers are mainly being used by parents who could already afford private schools. They are thus an active subsidization of private schools, taking public education money away from kids who truly need it, and redistributing it to already wealthy families. Not to mention that 7,000 dollars is not nearly enough to help cover private tuition for most families. 

While it’s hard to fault parents, with their children’s best interests at heart, for sending their kids to private schools, these parents are often heavily misinformed. Public education is a genuinely great option for most children, and too many families have been swayed by the conservative agenda to end public education. As Americans, we need to rally around our public schools, protecting the millions of children who benefit so greatly from them.