Private school, personal choices and social impact

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July 25, 2:01 PM

by Caroline Grannan, S.F. Education Examiner

 

 

It's not as simple as it used to be.

Parents of a 2-year-old haven't had reason to think about these complexities, and my neighbors were receptive. It wasn’t a situation where I was guilt-tripping someone over their done-deal choices. But it's still hard to impart The Social Impact of Private School 101 in a brief conversation. Here’s a better effort.

Private schools had neutral impact on public education until some recent time, perhaps 15 or 20 years ago. Back then, public education was not under attack; schools and teachers were respected; the populace still assumed that it was worth paying taxes to provide the services that maintain a civilized society; privatization was not on the radar.

No one — and certainly not the reigning political philosophy — was trying to eliminate public school, as many forces of the right are now. Since then, a perfect storm has come howling in and battered public education. It's based in the privatization movement combined with the anti-tax, "you're on your own," anti-public-spirited attitude that has settled like an icy fog over our culture.

(Actually, veteran education commentator Gerald Bracey disagrees with me here. Bracey says public school has been under attack at least since the 1950s, when the Soviets famously launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite to orbit Earth. The bashers apparently failed to notice which country put a man on the moon.).

During the period when our public instutitions were losing respect, we Baby Boomers meanwhile started a trend toward the middle class's adopting lifestyles that were formerly reserved for a lofty elite. (I have happily participated in this trend, I admit, when it involved world travel and good restaurants.) No longer was private school reserved for the aristocracy.

Today we make demands on public schools that were unheard of a few decades ago, and no one can argue with most of them. Disabled students should have full rights (a concept that began in the '70s). Low-income and nonwhite kids should achieve equal success in school (no one in power cared about this 60 years ago). All kids should graduate from high school (it used to be the unquestioned norm for many working-class kids and most poor kids to drop out).

(On the other hand, I personally don't agree that it's realistic to turn all kids into college material, though that's a demand put on public school nowadays too.)

And in diverse communities, schools are expected to diversify even when neighborhoods are segregated, and are attacked when they don't manage it perfectly (though no diverse urban school district has ever achieved ideal success with this).

No wonder it's hard for public school to measure up to expectations. Teachers are bashed incessantly over these issues and untold others.

Despite all this, many (most?) public schools are giving students good educations in safe, nurturing, stimulating environments. The others are those that face a critical mass of challenges.

In this climate, public schools need all the support they can get. They especially need to enroll the students who bring with them resources, preparation for schoolwork, supportive and involved parents, and other benefits of the privileged.In encouraging advantaged families to leave public school, "you take out all the people with the power to bring change,” a former headmaster of elite Marin Country Day School declared in Diana Kapp's outstanding October 2007 article in San Francisco Magazine, "Schools Gone Wild."

That article explored the "more-is-better" frenzy to scale up already-posh Bay Area private schools into Xanadu-like palaces of excess. Kapp described "an educational arms race that’s almost certainly not in the best interests of the kids whose best interests we’re all trying to serve."

Of course parents should choose private school if they feel that's the best thing for their kids. All this doesn't mean it's wrong.  It's also not wrong to drive a large sport-utility vehicle or live in a gated community if you feel that serves your family's needs. I have friends who do all those things. But mindful people are aware of the social impact of those choices, and consider that in making the decision.It’s sometimes hard to get that point across, because while the negative social impact of driving a Hummer is evident to anyone well informed, the social impact of private school doesn't get much public illumination,

Another oddity: In San Francisco, parents regularly criticize aspects of our school district — often as justification for choosing private — when private is no better in those aspects. You'd think the expectations would be higher for private when it costs $15-$25K a year and up, but oddly, parents often don't seem to see that. They seem to expect more from the free public school.

•   Everyone wants a neighborhood public school they can walk to. The notion of a neighborhood private school you can walk to doesn't exist, except possibly with some parish schools.
•   The private-school enrollment process, with its playdates and tests and interviews and screenings, is enormously more onerous and labor-intensive than SFUSD's.
•   The private-school process is no more certain than SFUSD's, depending (in both cases) on what schools you apply to. If your child is not desirable to private schools, it's far less certain than SFUSD's — you may be shut out of private school entirely.
•   If your child doesn't get your chosen SFUSD school (initially), it was as a faceless number in a lottery, bad luck of the draw. If a private school rejects your child, it was a thought-out personal rejection based on a close assessment of your child and family; a decision that your child and your family were less appealing, less worthy and less value-adding than other applicants.

The student in this unit of The Social Impact of Private School 101 may now ask: But aren't private schools better? And that's another post, or many of them. There is not a clear-cut yes or no. Whether you get it for free (of course, for your tax dollars) or for $300,000 per kid, the overall product is the same thing when you get to the heart of it -- a K-12 education.

For the basics on public school in SFUSD and guidance on the enrollment process, join Parents for Public Schools, http://www.ppssf.org/ .

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