On Private Vs Public Schooling: A Response

Shelby asked: "Which would be the more effective route to take for educational reformation: more alternative, private schools, or revamping public schools?"

As I have mentioned numerous times before, I am a product of private education (parochial school for K-8, Catholic prep school for 9-12). My parents insisted on sending me to private schools because of the sorry state of our town's public schools (the public high school in my hometown lost its accreditation when I was applying to private high schools). I have never been in a public school, so my only experience with the public education system is indirect, through articles and books describing it.

Despite this, I am a firm believer that effective education reform must make revamping our public schools a key facet. As Shelby pointed out in her post, not all (or even most) people can afford a private education for their children. Indeed, I am convinced that one of the key factors in the success of private over public education is that private schools tend to have far better resources than public schools. As I view education as a public good, our education reform efforts must necessarily rely strongly on public schools.

I was originally going to blog about the article that Shelby linked (I'll provide the link here, as well, since I will draw that in). Our teachers are, without a doubt, woefully underpaid and underprepared for the challenges that they are faced with, especially considering the growing hostility that state and local governments seem to be showing towards them. We do not pay our teachers enough to make a living, we don't give them enough resources to properly teach, we stick them with far too many children to teach, and then demonize them as "bad teachers" when their students fail.

However, this emphasis on schools may be missing the elephant in the room. In a letter to the editor to the NY Times, one teacher asks "what am I to do with the one [student] who spent two weeks in a mental hospital, the two who have run away, the one with no ride to school, the three who have been suspended for drugs and the countless others who attend class only one or two days a week?"

School is an important place to try to improve. But investment in to schools will be inadequate unless we couple it with a renewed War on Poverty and work to provide a better home life for our nation's poorest and most vulnerable citizens.

To end with a question: Can education alone counter the deleterious affects of poverty?