Eliminate Private Schools

In fifth grade, by virtue of a pamphlet sent home with me for my parents, I learned about a program called Prep for Prep, and on that day my life changed. I am a first-generation immigrant from Bangladesh, but since my family moved to New York City when I was 2, life in America has been the only life I’ve ever really known. I grew up going to a local kindergarten and then a magnet elementary school, but Prep for Prep offered something entirely different; the organization describes its mission as “[developing] future leaders by creating access for young people of color to first-rate educational, leadership development and professional advancement opportunities.” Simplified in the minds of a recently immigrated family, if everything worked out, Prep for Prep would be my golden ticket to my very own chocolate factory—a prestigious private school, after which I might attend an Ivy League institution that propels me to the top of the earning brackets.

The plan has gone all right so far. After 14 months of attending Prep for Prep, during which we often joked about the types of snobby, wealthy white students we might encounter in our respective private schools, I got into the Dalton School and then Columbia University. At Dalton, I was surprised to find that instead of Veruca Salts, I encountered a cast of intelligent, driven and friendly peers. My time in high school was characterized mostly by the strength of the friendships I was able to form. To be sure, there was snobbery and elitism that was often subtle and intrinsic to social dynamics, but the large, diverse friend group I was in served as my rock throughout school. The best years of my life so far were at Dalton; there, I made my closest friends, found my most coveted interests and passions, and engaged with truly brilliant teachers that cared deeply about their students. So why am I advocating for the abolition of private schools?

My reasoning has a lot to do with one particular statistic: 31 percent of Dalton students go on to attend an Ivy League institution. According to the Department of Education, 10 years after enrolling in their Ivy League institutions, that 31 percent will earn twice as much money as the average college graduate from a non-Ivy college after the same duration. In fact, the average Harvard or Columbia University graduate will earn more than the top 10 percent of graduates from other colleges. These numbers are not simply a result of rich students remaining rich after college; students from low-income families tend to have the same or similar economic outcomes as those from high-income families after college. Thus, Ivy Leagues are verifiable and consistent tools for economic mobility.

It is no accident, however, that students from Dalton or other prestigious independent schools are so eagerly welcomed by the Ivies. Something that I discovered only toward the end of my high school career was that Dalton felt so different from my public school experience, not only because of the abundance of resources and the content being taught (although these certainly don’t hurt), but because of a deep and intrinsic set of values and lessons being taught to its students entirely subconsciously, termed “the hidden curriculum.”

These specific values and lessons are often relevant to the concept of cultural capital, or characteristics or assets of an individual that allow them to gain power and authority within society. These can include a means of communication and presentation as well as prestige from the very act of graduating from a prestigious private school (although many of them “earned” their entry into such schools as early as kindergarten). As an example of the differences in communication and presentation, consider the fact, for example, that students from private schools are more likely to reach out to professors or other support systems within colleges for additional help, as they are taught self-advocacy as a crucial component of their school’s values. At Dalton, this was manifested through the lab portion of the Dalton Plan, where students would be encouraged and even prodded to meet with their teachers outside class time during designated lab periods or breaks from classes to converse, whether about work or something else, and build relationships. This was simply not a luxury I had when I attended public school, nor in most public high schools in the city that didn’t have student-teacher ratios comparable to the seven-to-one ratio Dalton boasts. Even beyond this, the hidden curriculum of private schools can prompt higher levels of civic engagement.

Perhaps most troublingly, though, researchers have found that hidden curricula in public and private schools prepare their students for their expected roles in society; in poor public schools, working-class students are prepared for life in working-class roles. Latent in their schoolwork are lessons about following procedure. In Jean Anyon’s Learning Power, she describes the type of work she observed in her study of poor, well-off and wealthy schools:

In the two working-class schools, work is following the steps of a procedure. The procedure is usually mechanical, involving rote behavior and very little decision making or choice. The teachers rarely explain why the work is being assigned, how it might connect to other assignments, or what the idea is that lies behind the procedure or gives it coherence and perhaps meaning or significance. Available textbooks are not always used, and the teachers often prepare their own dittos or put work examples on the board. Most of the rules regarding work are designations of what the children are to do; the rules are steps to follow. These steps are told to the children by the teachers and are often written on the board. The children are usually told to copy the steps as notes. These notes are to be studied. Work is often evaluated not according to whether it is right or wrong but according to whether the children followed the right steps.

In contrast to this, the middle-class schools encouraged a level of creativity and decision making to allow students to reach the right answers without rote memorization or repetition. In the most elite and prestigious schools, however, students were consistently asked to develop their analytical skills and powers of reasoning. They identified patterns and themes and conceptualized how rules fit into and created systems in every subject. Being correct or reaching the exact right answer was often left up to the students to discover through their analysis, rather than being given. The differences here are stark and may start to reveal just how differently students are taught to think in elite independent schools.

It is no wonder, then, that Ivy Leagues are so drawn to these students. Top-tier colleges are meant to produce leaders and visionaries, and students from independent schools have been educated, thanks to the hidden curriculum, in using creativity and vision to lead. There is nothing particularly unique in the students that attended private schools, save for their status as the children of the 1 percent, or a few fortunate minority students who were lucky enough to be admitted into the school through a program like Prep for Prep (although in recent years diversity has increased in many schools through concerted efforts on their parts, though an increase in the number of minority students does not always result in the mollification of feelings of being an outsider). They were simply molded by the forces of the hidden curriculum; they are not better or smarter than the students I went to class alongside in public school.

Private schools, at the end of the day, are tools of stratification. Public school students, more often than not, are denied a chance to compete due to the radically different environments and types of schooling that they receive. Removing this crucial tool that is taken advantage of by so many one-percenters undoubtedly is one step that brings us closer to educational equality for all American children.