In the UK, what we call private schools are called “public schools,” and they cost many thousands to attend. In the US, a private education can cost four times what a public college education costs, even more than Harvard costs, in tuition and fees. When people complain about failing public schools, it’s well to consider that you get what you pay for. It’s well to look at what wealthy people have tried to convince the rest of us about public education. The insistence over the past fifty years that public education is failing is a self-fulfilling prophecy promoted by wealthy people who feel have no stake in quality education for other people’s children. The rest of us do have a stake, because we care about our children, and maybe we should care about all children as future citizens. I won’t pretend the issues are simple.

The other alternative is home-schooling.

Without the glue of shared schooling or the sense of unity engendered by a common source of information, it’s no wonder that people pull away—or are pulled away—from one another.—Alex Kotlowitz in The Atlantic

Gary and I attended the second best public school system in Washington State, Gary for grades 8-12 and me for grades 1-12. [Lots of people I know claim to have had “poor childhoods”; I mostly did, though not as poor as Gary’s which included actual hunger.] We both graduated from a great public university, The University of Washington, while working to support ourselves and pay tuition, Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa. We each received a great public education. Our former school district went downhill a few years after I graduated. The levy that funded schools at a slightly higher level failed. Yes, it makes a difference. Yes, you can buy quality. Yes, you can.

Sir Ken Robinson explains why Finland has a zero percent dropout rate. Education is valued. Teachers are valued. Reading is valued. Compared to the United States, public education is respected for its ability to make their nation better.

A comment was: “The biggest problem in America is that the government doesn’t care about ALL students performing well in school unfortunately. It’s just expected that some will not make it. There’s also a culture of “pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps.” Sprinkle in the prison-industrial complex and a dash of racism and it becomes clear that the powers that be have no interest in EVERY child succeeding. For now, I can only dream of how safe and pleasant America would be if the population were better educated.”

[My grandfather left school, a “public” school in the UK at age 13 to go to work. His son, my father, graduated from a public high school in Los Angeles, joined the Army, came home to earn a degree in History at Berkley, and finally earned a Masters degree in Library Science at USC. I complete four university degrees.]

Over the years, I’ve taught in urban public schools, a private elite girls-only academy, subbed K-12 throughout a rural county, and taught in a poor rural public high school and for the local community college. (Twice I was offered jobs in community colleges—in Bellevue, Washington, to teach art before we moved back to Oregon, and Astoria, Oregon to teach writing.) In Seaside, among my students were a few who had previously been home schooled but who, as teens, insisted on an actual diploma and entered my Junior English classroom as their first experience of actual school. My own children attended the local public schools, and they occasionally suffered under bad teachers but mostly thrived under excellent ones.

I will share an observation about parental support of schools. When I taught at an elite private prep school, Forest Ridge in Bellevue, Washington, one hundred percent involvement by parents was taken for granted. Mostly it was mothers, educated women who could afford to stay home with their children, who helped out in classrooms, organized events, and turned out for everything. Teachers there were the second-worse paid in the state, but there was money—lots of money—and serious parental involvement to support the girls who attended that grade 6-12 prep school. Admission standards were high. Academic standards were exceptionally high. All those girls went on to college—100%. Misbehavior was addressed instantly. Parents were everywhere. Problem students, the unmotivated, the disabled… they went elsewhere. Those students who were accepted and attended were given enormous support by affluent parents.

Public schools enjoy none of those advantages in America. Everyone may attend regardless of ability or special needs. A small percentage go on to attend college. Misbehavior is sometimes overwhelming. The majority of parents are always working because they must.

Even at the time I taught in that elite school, I recognized how the existence of active parental support made the difference. Problems in the private school with students were promptly addressed, students could count on being held to account by an overall culture of reliable and willing adults with time and energy to administer to their needs.

When I was in grad school—the private Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon—the U.S. President put his children into private schools. I commented to a friend that had he used a public system, as President Carter had, that entire district would have benefited. When the President’s daughter is in a classroom, security and scholarship rise, the school attracts better teachers, attention to each child’s needs rises, while costing taxpayers in the district ten or fourteen thousand. Instead, most Presidents send their children to private schools that charge several times that.

At Seaside High School, I looked forward to seeing a student I knew socially in my classroom, but his French mother moved to Portland in order for him to attend a private academy. I taught other children who had previously attended various private schools from Catlin Gabel to Star of the Sea. A local tiny private grade school with a teacher for perhaps eight students did an excellent job preparing their students academically. They also encouraged an [unfortunate] attitude of superiority and entitlement that followed those children throughout their lives. I taught previously home-schooled children whose parents recognized they could not provide their teenagers with an adequate education and moved them to my school. They suddenly had a peer group, and for some that was both challenge and gift. They often struggled at first, but sometimes the transition was smooth and easy. [One such child had been raised quite literally in the middle of nowhere four miles off the nearest paved road. She was a gifted student and after going off to college on scholarship cut off her parents entirely. A peer thought this a brutal choice, and I can’t argue with that, but I’m certain there is more to this story.]

I often think about what would have happened if a parent who could spare the time and energy to provide a private home education, instead offered their services to a local under-funded public school. How might public schools make use of such a resource? Their own child certainly would have benefited, but so would every child in that classroom. For professional or working-class families where both parents work, this isn’t possible. But that is another issue. In a nation willing to throw away children, it doesn’t have to work at all. Sir Ken Robinson explains how we might do a better job for everyone and our nation.

I’ve experienced public education at its best and worst.

THREE STORIES:

Our sons both struggled in grade school. They were slow to read, and each was identified by a classroom teacher as having a learning disability, each was tested, and in each case was found to be “gifted” in math, abstract reasoning, etc. But reading and rote learning were the markers used by grade school teachers to judge progress so it was only later that their skills served them success. Alan had such a hard time in First Grade, I took steps to ensure his brother had a different teacher when his turn came. (I’d subbed and observed classrooms all over the district.) That helped. I should have advocated for them beyond that intervention, but that was awkward for me as I hoped to be hired (until 1990, when I was) and later as a co-worker. I took steps when I saw the necessity, finding an alternative scorer for a critical graduation requirement, and an achievement test when counseling insisted we would need to drive to Portland for a class. (Coaches were sometimes grossly unfair—I was coaching—and classroom teachers rarely appreciated students who were smarter than they were—I did.) I did better for my students than I was able to do for our sons because I learned from them and because I then could do better. (My failures supporting our boys is one of my greatest regrets.)

In the early 1990s, a fellow Portland State University grad student, when I told her I’d taught at Forest Ridge, shared her own story of private schooling. (I’d said it was a wonderful school and if I had a daughter, I would be grateful to send her there, but wouldn’t since I considered private education un-American.) Her perspective on public versus private education was based on her sons. One of her twin boys was learning disabled who attended and graduated from local public schools in Seattle, K-12. The family’s preferred private prep school had no program or services for him, nor for anyone with special needs. The other boy graduated from Seattle Prep—essentially the “brother” school to where I’d taught. Both, at the time she told me her story, were successfully employed adults. The prep-school educated son earned more money, but despite that, she regretted his “better” education. In retrospect, she insisted the public education of her “disabled” son had contributed to his character as a compassionate adult, while the private education of the other had contributed to his sense of entitlement. With regret, she admitted that she while she loved them both, she liked the one son much better than the other.

More recently, Finland became one of the most academically successful public school systems in the world after dramatic changes. Improving their education had not actually been the nation’s goal. They only wanted to ensure every Finnish child had an equal chance at a good education. Among the first things the nation did was close all private schools and end home schooling. Their system supported parents staying home with young children, and work schedules were highly adapted to this. Children are eligible for free preschool (infancy through age five), preschool (age 6), and began academic schooling at age 7. The academic school day was short and interrupted by breaks. Teachers were responsible for fewer children than in the United States, and the profession is regarded with great respect. When the first PISA* scores placed Finnish children right at the top of school systems worldwide (not counting a couple of school systems that only accept top students to begin with), the Finns expressed surprise. The scores were consistently high among rural and urban populations, among poor and wealthy, among native Finns, minority groups, and across faiths. How did that happen? They weren’t striving for academic superiority, merely equity. Equity in Finland meant great support for working parents, small class/teacher ratios, and instead of pushing kids to learn earlier, learning better. Finland is a nation of readers, and that helped. They’ve had their problems, but while Finland is not a rich or powerful nation, their schools continue to excel.

My most popular blog post is WHY YOU DON’T WANT TO BECOME A TEACHER. It has over twelve thousand views—far more than any other post I’ve shared. To my knowledge, the post has been assigned reading in more than one teacher-education program. [I identified and emailed one of the instructors to ask.] The lack of respect for teachers and education in general is a huge factor in the struggle of US schools to keep up internationally. The United States once had among the finest educational systems in the world. That’s not true anymore. There is a follow-up post that few people read about why you should BECOME A TEACHER despite challenges. Both posts are quite old, but still relevant, and the second one shows Ursula K. Le Guin with a former student, now a tenured prof at Oregon State in Corvallis, Oregon, where I was born.

Teachers deserve respect, and so does every single child living in the United States. Appreciating that our industrial society demands formal education is a step in the right direction. An educated populace is necessary to a Constitutional republic. We can and must do better. I wish we would stop pretending that is too much to ask, and find a way to do the right thing. It is a challenge we should rise to for the sake of our country.

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• note: I place limited faith in test results, especially multiple choice tests, which are ridiculously easy for me, and unreliable, imo, as a way of designing education programs or assessing their worth.
• PISA tests, or the Programme for International Student Assessment, are international assessments that since 2000 measure the reading, mathematics, and science literacy of 15-year-old students. Conducted every three years by the OECD, these tests aim to evaluate how well students can apply their knowledge to real-life challenges. To fulfill OECD requirements, each country must pay for the testing and draw a sample of at least 5,000 students.
• “Each student takes a two-hour computer based test. Part of the test is multiple-choice and part involves [more complete] answers. There are six and a half hours of assessment material, but each student is not tested on all the parts. Following the cognitive test, participating students spend nearly one more hour answering a questionnaire on their background including learning habits, motivation, and family. School directors fill in a questionnaire describing school demographics, funding, etc. In 2012 the participants were, for the first time in the history of large-scale testing and assessments, offered a new type of problem, i.e. interactive (complex) problems requiring exploration of a novel virtual device.”—Wikipedia
• note: Singapore continues to rank at the top, #1, of all three tests, but their school system does not allow all students to participate, as do systems in other nations. By contrast, Finnish schools rank #20/9/14 and the United States ranks #34/16/9 on mathematics, science, and reading in the 2022 rankings, the most recent scores available as of this publication.