It sickens me that I live in a time when the very concept, the ideal of public education, must be vigorously and vocally defended. Yet here we are. For decades, we have chipped away at the concept of public education through measures both good and ill, almost all well-intentioned, but none of which fully delivered on that “transformational” change that we were promised. Change we can no longer believe in. Sadly, politicians of both parties without personal or professional experience in public education have devised much of our education policy and continue to do so.
This attitude, couched in paternalism, elitism and arrogance, must change.
Private education, particularly the elite kind, unwittingly creates social blindness among the very people who are often selected (and elected) to lead. I have been fortunate to experience the best of public education and the best of private education. I can say with confidence that, all other things held equal, a public education is superior to a private one. I base this assertion not only on my own experiences but also on works such as The Public School Advantage: Why Public Schools Outperform Private Schools by Christopher and Sarah Lubienski.
Growing up in a place where “the other side of the tracks” referred to an actual railroad, I confronted race and class in my earliest memories. Public education, when it works well, forces otherwise segregated children to integrate at a very young age. As a kindergartner in Johnston County, North Carolina, an adult asked me why I didn’t play more “with my own kind.” This interaction led to questions that continue to haunt me. What was my own kind, I wondered? Why were some children called “black” when they were clearly brown? Why did I live in a one-story house, while some lived in trailers and others lived in three-story houses? Had I been at a private school, I doubt I would have had such an interaction - nor gone on to become a public school teacher.
So when I arrived at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, discussions of white privilege were old news to me. The same was not true for my privately-educated classmates. I had been thinking about these issues since kindergarten, while many of wealthier students had no such frame of reference. At UNC, I also encountered students from deep Appalachian poverty. I couldn’t understand why one of my fellow future teachers wanted to rush through college in three years, until she finally explained to me, gently, that she had five younger siblings. Her family desperately needed another paycheck; becoming a teacher a year earlier would be a financial boon.
By the time I reached Harvard and sat through mandatory classes on anti-racism, I was floored by some of my classmates’ lack of knowledge. Had they been living under a rock? It turns out, they had - gilded rocks with names like Newton and Wellesley and Westchester and Evanston. Many had never set foot in a public school, and those who had spoke of attending all-white classes. Yet we were all to become “urban” teachers.
It was only at Harvard that I was made to feel as though my education prior had somehow been inadequate, that it was unusual not to know any Latin or Greek. Everything about me was somehow wrong, not least my accent, which began subconsciously to fade. It was only at Harvard that I learned about the elite network of private secondary schools that feed into these places, even as others from Johnston County were breaking into the Ivy League.
But it might seem hypocritical to you that someone pursuing a Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania should criticize private education. I won’t deny this contradiction, though the current state of funding for public higher education was certainly one of my considerations in deciding where to study. I do know this: my K-16 public education prepared me for my current work because it gave me exposure to different kinds of economic, religious and racial diversity and forced me to confront my own advantages and disadvantages. I rarely see this level of awareness among privately-educated citizens. The inability of my friends and colleagues to comprehend the election of Donald Trump has brought this fact into sharper relief for me than ever before.
Too many educational elites are placed into positions of extreme power and influence without knowledge of “the other half.” This blindness knows no ideology - liberals can be blind to the needs of rural America just as conservatives can be blind to the needs of oppressed minorities. Both blind spots stem from an apartheid education that has insulated them from wide swaths of American society.
This insulation is dangerous and growing. Expanding access to private education requires an assumption that private education is superior. It’s not. The products of private education are its biggest champions, oblivious to what was lacking in their own education. I would take firsthand knowledge of poverty and prejudice over Latin and Greek any day.
Though we still have too many dysfunctional public schools, enormous progress has been made, and the blanket rhetoric of failure and decline must be rejected. To bypass the ideal of public education as the great equalizer, to stop working towards this goal, would be to reject the founding principles of the republic. These principles have never been more at risk.