In a recent guest essay for the New York Times, Sophie Callcott, herself a graduate of an elite Bay Area private school, claims that private schools are pernicious because of the significantly better education they provide to those able to afford them. This idea—that private schools are much more effective than public schools, but are normatively bad because of their exclusivity and the inequality it drives—is frequently repeated in left-wing circles. Fortunately, it is also false. Private schools do not provide a significant academic boost to their students. Rather, it is their exclusivity itself that provides them with any supposed advantages.

To be clear, many private schools do have higher graduation rates and standardized test scores than their public counterparts. However, the greatest advantage they provide may lie in their investments in gaming the college admissions system. Many provide niche sports like fencing or squash, sports that are practiced by very few (and of those, mostly the top 10%) but which provide ample recruiting opportunities at Ivy+ and other elite colleges. The same is true of club funding; university admissions officers do seem to jump at the idea of students involved in social justice work, regardless of their backgrounds or where the resources for that work come from. Finally, private schools often spend enormous sums of money on high-quality (read: well-networked) guidance counselors, who directly meddle in the process. However, none of these traits are issues with private schools themselves, but rather with the extraordinarily exploitable “holistic” admissions system. The solutions to those problems lie with the bureaucrats at elite universities, not with private schools.

Much more germane is the fact that private schools do not appear to provide significant educational boosts; higher test scores and graduation rates are misleading. A study of Washington D.C.’s voucher program found that students’ math and reading performance were negatively impacted compared to peer results when attending participating private schools (Figure 1 shows declines for students who were offered or used scholarships compared to a control group), while a 2014 study found that the score differences between private and public school students were negligible after accounting for underlying demographic differences. However, this has not discredited private schools in the eyes of their customers because it is exactly those underlying demographic differences that they are paying for. Outright racism is a factor in some cases, as in the explicit “segregation academies” founded in the 20th century, but it is not the only one. Unlike public and charter schools, private schools are allowed to be highly selective over their student bodies, with many administering standardized tests as early as pre-K. This sorting explains the vast majority of the success of private school students: it’s no surprise that a child who performed well on the SSAT would do similarly well on the SAT. Callcott is confusing correlation with causation when she notes that many of her classmates scored well on standardized tests, as are the parents fighting for admission at these schools.

By selecting easy students—many, like Callcott, Ivy+ bound—private schools give themselves ample marketing material with which to court wealthy customers. Elite schools often charge over $50,000 per year, ensuring socioeconomic near-uniformity. Some schools do provide aid for promising students, but at the same time, like universities, it is not uncommon for them to admit prospective failsons in the interest of juicing endowments. And, as with the other students, private schools generally fail to change those failsons’ trajectories, as demonstrated by the Varsity Blues scandal. Still, many wealthy parents prefer their children to be insulated from children outside of their socioeconomic class, regardless of educational benefits.

If a parent’s end goal is exclusivity itself, then extensive screening makes sense. Private school teachers accept lower salaries than public school teachers, on average, because their manicured classes are smaller, better behaved, and better able to grasp materials presented to them. However, exclusivity by definition cannot be applied as a mass reform, and the policy changes implied by a reading of private schools as expensive education accelerators rather than sites of exclusion are dangerous and ill-informed. If every student were to attend elite private schools, those schools would lose every benefit school privatizers attribute to them, in just the same way that a Harvard degree would lose all of its prestige if every student could get one. To the extent that private schools drive inequality, they do it through facilitating networking between the rich, not by making them smarter.

As such, privatizing and voucherizing our public schools to chase the illusory gains publicized by private schools would benefit nobody beyond those same schools. Unfortunately, very few education reforms show drastic promise either. As shown in Figure 2, only six reforms studied in a meta-analysis showed statistically meaningful impacts on standardized test performance, and of those, only three had effects greater than .2 of a standard deviation. Small group tutoring is certainly promising, but greatly expanding tutoring would be incredibly labor-intensive and expensive (though worthwhile!) The most important reforms that the federal and state governments could implement would not deal with “school quality”, but rather factors that exist outside of the classroom, like lead exposure, hunger, and underweight and premature birth. There may be a few things that private schools could teach their public counterparts, but those things (outside of excluding unpromising students) would almost certainly lead to merely marginal improvements.

College admissions are certainly gamed by private schools. However, that is the fault of the admissions process itself: private schools are just playing the game that university bureaucrats have created. Ending this game does not involve making exclusive sports available to all public school students (nor banning them), but rather removing them as a factor entirely. Universities’ sole consideration should be a student's ability to complete the work required of them, not the number of nonprofits they’ve founded nor their counselor’s relationship with the admissions office. An example has already been laid out by the University of Texas, which guarantees admission to state schools for the top ten percent of any graduating Texas high school. This could be universalized if schools set a standardized test and GPA floor and used a lottery system to choose between qualified students. Of course, universities won’t make these changes: they know that the ability to select lacrosse players, world travelers, and legacies is essential for their bottom lines. As it stands, though, blame assigned to private schools rather than universities is largely misplaced.

It’s unsurprising that Callcott would assert that private schools, not university bureaucrats, provide unfair advantages. She attended a private school herself, and nobody wants to see that narrative pushed more than the private school industry. The idea that scholastic ability is a commodity that can be bought is not damning but highly appealing to well-off parents. Reality is marginally less dystopian: as long as parents can provide sufficient food and a stable, non-traumatic, lead-free environment, there are few other interventions that they can use to drastically alter their child’s performance. Policy reforms in education should be focused on ensuring that every child receives those guarantees, while reforms targeting inequality should target inequality directly, through material redistribution, and should not pin their hopes on schooling. The college admissions process is rotten, but that fact must be addressed by colleges themselves, not their tributaries.

There’s nothing that private schools enjoy more than navel-gazing about their role in stratifying society. Ultimately, though, they effect that stratification through segregation, not acceleration. The sorting, not the learning, is the point.

References

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