Conscious Choice: The Importance of the Public in Public Schools

September 1995

The Importance of the Public in Public Schools

by Gary Goldman

In metropolitan areas such as Chicago where private schools offer a real alternative to public schools, there is a widely held perception that private schools are better. Perhaps this perception emerged when a high ranking federal official declared the Chicago public school system the worst in the nation. Perhaps it was created or reinforced by an occasional announcement by a researcher that findings of a new study show that private school students perform better on tests than students in public schools. Then, too, there is the widespread belief that virtually anything private is inherently better than anything public.

At any rate the general impression is that caring parents make every possible effort to enroll their children in private schools. And if family income cannot support enrolling in a private school, complaining about, if not grieving over, both the level of family income and the state of the public schools becomes a way of life for the next nine to thirteen years. It follows that taxpayers without children in school should advocate support of private, not public, schools.

What Some Research Says
These perceptions are generally supported by educational research comparing "performance" or "productivity" of public and private elementary and secondary schools. These studies include a study focusing on eighth graders, published by the National Catholic Education Association. This study used a sample based on data from the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 and reported that "with respect to achievement, urban Catholic students clearly outperformed their public school counterparts.

Another, less ambitious, study reported similar findings. Miami Dade Community College conducted a study of college enrollees who had graduated from high school in 1988-89 who were found to have basic skills deficiencies. Among other findings, the study reports that public school graduates experienced a higher failure rate than those from private schools.

Although studies of general performance of public and private schools typically find higher performance among private schools, some more narrowly focused studies report findings contradicting this general pattern.

"Comparing Public and Private High Schools Using Three SAT Data Sets" reports on a study concerning whether private high schools have higher completion and college enrollment rates than public high schools. The study finds "a consistent advantage for public high schools with respect to SAT math attainment."

Another study reports that when relative student performance on advanced placement tests was examined, students in Catholic schools were outperformed by their public school counterparts who, in turn, were outperformed by students attending other private schools. The research concludes that the sector the school occupies has no significant influence on this aspect of student performance.

Research Appears Inconclusive
This debate is likely to continue with public school advocates presenting statistics from test results showing public schools outperform or are just as good as private schools. And private school advocates doing the same. Albert Shanker, President of the American Teacher Federation, serves as an example when he points out that math achievement of high school seniors in public and private schools does not differ significantly when the level of parents’ education is taken into account. And the participants in these debates will likely continue to end up in methodological muddles.

Whatever the significance of these studies and whatever one’s opinion of using standardized tests as a means of measuring school performance, consciously choosing a school involves more than curriculum-based learning. It also involves deciding what we want education to do for our children.

Education: An Individual Matter?
Generally we have come to see education as a process that centers in the individual child and the child’s welfare. We test the individual child and then aggregate the performances of the individual children to arrive at a school performance index. This centering on the individual child — a very American, very Protestant perspective — persists in spite of increasing evidence that adult Americans work together in mostly teams or groups. Even major corporations now develop compensation plans based on the performance of the individual alone and in his or her group.

Education As Commodity
Indeed, the increasing emphasis on assessment and accountability over the past ten years has resulted in supporting the habit of thought that regards the school as a sort of factory and education as a commodity. Conceived of as learning discrete facts and identifiable and distinct skills, getting an education becomes a rather simple economic transaction in which parents can choose among vendors who provide these facts and skills for their children. Providing critical thinking skills for a child becomes like buying new sneakers. Both products are offered by competing vendors, and the quality is correlated with the amount of money paid. At least one Chicago private school is offering "guarantees" of a successful freshman year in high school; perhaps vendors eventually will extend the metaphor and offer future job contracts in the same way one buys futures for grain or coffee.

The Public Nature of Public Education
The education of children is a matter of deep public significance because whether children successfully mature and achieve adulthood is critically intertwined with the future not only of the individual children but of the community in which they are reared and live as adults. In this view, schooling represents a social and cultural process with a clear aim.

This view of education flies in the face not only of a deeply held American value preferring geographical mobility, but more importantly, the success of professional educators and researchers in persuading us that education is a technical matter that can be approached solely from an economic perspective. Certainly education is less messy and less controversial when matters of objectives, skills, percentiles, and stanines or matters like return-on-investment dominate our thinking and talk about education. But these have little to do with individuals and their communities surviving and developing in decent and humane ways. To deal with those issues, we need to talk about messier topics such as community, responsibility, and educated action.

The Price of a Real Education
But for many of us, it is only intellectual entertainment and of no real significance to think about or harp on some sort of ideal for education when we are aware of the real faults and problems occurring in a significant portion of public schools, particularly those located in poor areas. We must be willing to work with and contribute to our public schools in addition to paying taxes. These contributions are required not so that schools can cheapen up the costs through volunteer labor but to connect the schools in a real and authentic way to the neighborhood or community in which the school lies.

Our goal must be to blur the boundaries of "school" and "neighborhoods" until they become seamless and all our children become competent adults. The significance of outscoring other schools on some sort of test must fade into irrelevance as our concern with the education of our society grows.

Creating Communities in Our Schools
We can avoid mere jawboning by modeling for children how a community might look, by assisting them in actively and significantly contributing to creation of a learning community.

The research and experience of Quality Improvement Associates, a group that focuses on student-led community development in schools, demonstrate the following:

• Students need to have more ownership in their schools and communities as active partners in school and community improvement.
• Being real partners with attendant responsibilities results in attitude and behavior changes that contribute to creating a positive school culture and community.
• All schools, public or private, each have a unique culture that can be felt when entering the school.
• Schools can identify their culture through creating shared visions and action plans and learning how to follow through on these action plans.
• Schools — even the worst ones — can change positively and dramatically as they create a community in which the goal is not to do something to students but in which students become productive workers and leaders.

When such a cultural change is systematically undertaken, research indicates that not only do the usual measures of school performance — test scores, attendance, etc. — improve markedly, but the school becomes a significant force in moving the community to higher levels of decency and humaneness.

Obviously this order of change is not simply a technical matter that can be carried out only by teachers, administrators, and other educational experts. Nor is it an economic one which can be solved by buying something. Such a change can be secured only if we put the public back into "public schools" and thereby make them authentic and real community institutions. When a significant portion of parents and others in our neighborhoods and communities consciously and deliberately choose to go public, then — and only then — will our schools becomes a significant force in moving our children to the competence of adulthood.

Resources
Belcher, Marcia J.; Downing, Sherry. Who’s Prepared for College? "Results of a Five-Year Study of Recent High School Graduates Taking Miami-Dade’s Basic Skills Placement Tests." Research Report No. 90-04R.; 1990, ED328317
Sebring, Penny A,; Camburn, Eric M. A Profile of Eighth Graders in Catholic Schools. Based on the National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1988. 1992 ED349367

Gibbins, Neil; Bickel, Rober. Urban Review; v23 n2 p101-15 Jun 1991

Bodenhausen, Judith. "Do Public and Private Schools Differ in the Performance of Their Students on Advanced Placement Tests?" 1989 ED312279

New York Times, "Sob Stories; The Selling of Private School Choice," 12/8/1991, p.E7; "What’s the Real Score, Achievement in Public and Private Schools." The New York Times, 9/8/91, p. E7.

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