The Nation’s Private Public Schools – Part of the Achievement Gap Problem?

March 17th, 2010 By: Diane Trim in Articles, School Turnaround, Teachers' Corner

I read a study recently from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute called America’s Private Public Schools. According to the study, our public school system is supporting schools that are public in name, but are more exclusive than most private schools, teach no poor children, and have few minority students. In fact, according to the report, 1.7 million American children attend these private public schools.

• 17 percent of school-age students are African-American, but in private public schools, just three percent are.
• Hispanic students make up 21 percent of the nation’s students, but only 12 percent go to private public schools.
• Asians are over-represented in private public schools. They account for 5 percent of American students, but 10 percent of students who attend private public schools.
• Forty percent of the nation’s students are qualify for free or reduced lunch, but few if any of these kids attend the private public schools.

Why is this a problem? It’s not like the private public schools have forbidden any poor students to attend. The schools’ surrounding communities don’t have low-income families in their population. The study’s authors argue that even though school district policy doesn’t exclude low-income families, the communities’ zoning and regulations effectively keep the poor out.

“Call us naïve if you like, but we find it difficult to countenance why someone would support spending taxpayer dollars on such “public schools” for their own kids while opposing “private” school choice for other people’s children,” the report’s authors wrote. “Feels to us like a double standard – and just plain unfair.”
The authors wrote that no one in the state or national legislatures are complaining about the exclusivity of some schools; although, these schools are off-limits to over a quarter of the nation’s school children.

The achievement gap. It’s not a stretch to take the authors’ study one step further to the achievement gap. Schools with high percentages of low-income families and students have a higher number of minorities. These schools don’t have the working budgets that private public schools do.

The authors found that urban areas are more likely to have public private schools than rural areas. In those urban areas, one quarter of the white students attend a public private school; whereas, about 80 percent of minorities attended public schools with low-income students.

You’re teachers. You get it. You know that the demographics are stacked against these low-income families. You also know that bussing is unpopular.

I worked in one of these low-income schools. Some of our building’s windows were broken and stayed broken. It rained in my classroom. Not all of my tenth graders had literature textbooks. We ran out of copy paper in April. We ran out of stamps in January.

These aren’t the conditions at the private public schools. I know this, too. I’ve taught in one. Teachers complained when the copy service didn’t collate their photocopies correctly. Students said their new school looked like a prison warden designed it. Parents didn’t like the color of the carpeting.
Me, I marveled at it all. New textbooks, lockers without dents, working toilets and a sound roof. A new building with new computers that all worked.

Believe me: we communicate to our students their worth in more than just teaching techniques. The conditions of our schools, the materials we have for them, and the mix of students all communicate what society thinks the students are worth. We have an achievement gap, but we also have a societal gap. I doubt that we can solve one without making changes to the other.

Reference:
Petrilli, M.J and Scull, J. (2010.) America’s Private Public Schools. Thomas B. Fordham Institute. http://www.edexcellence.net/index.cfm/news_private-public-schools Accessed February 25, 2010.

Tags: achievement, achievement gap