Private Schools and the Limits of Elite Education
By Colman McCarthy
Like all caring and careful parents, Barak and Michelle Obama seek the best education for their children--or to be accurate, what they believe and hope is the best education. In a well and perhaps over reported decision, the Obamas chose Sidwell Friends for their daughters, ages 7 and 10. By most measures, Sidwell Friends, which has lower and upper schools on separate campuses, offers an elite education: low teacher-to-student ratios, well-equipped classes, kempt athletic fields, mannered teachers and staff well aware of the school’s ties to the Society of Friends. A large-lettered banner hangs over the entrance to the main administration building: “There is no way to peace, peace is the way.”
Sidwell Friends is a selective and expensive private school in northwest Washington, in a neighborhood with a half dozen others: St. Albans, National Cathedral, Beauvoir, Maret, Edmund Burke and Georgetown Day. Parents who choose those schools for their children, and have the incomes, connections or credentials to win admission, are like the Obamas: they are buying quality.
I’m not so sure. My doubts are grounded in 27 years teaching in both public and private schools. I began in 1982 at School Without Walls, five blocks from the White House. A few years later, I added Wilson High School and Bethesda-Chevy Chase High school. At each, I was a volunteer. At intervals and varied durations, I’ve taught at private schools: Landon School for Boys, Stone Ridge School for Girls, Georgetown Day and Maret. For three years, I taught at the Oak Hill youth detention center, a prison for juveniles in Laurel, Md.
By rough estimate I’ve had had more than 3,000 students, not counting another 3,000 in my classes at Georgetown University Law Center, American University, the University of Maryland and the Washington Center for Internships. At all, the courses ranged from “The Literature of Peace” to “Alternatives to Violence.”
I’m not in the camp of those on the Right who mock liberal parents like the Obamas with the jibe: their hearts are in the public schools but not their children. Nor do I bond with parents on the Left who claim moral superiority for having the money for a private school but chose a pubic one, i.e., using their children to take a political stand. The only side I’m on is the one that respects all the choices as sincere, while knowing experientially from years of teaching children from families of wealth and poverty--children from all bents, races and graces, dysfunctions and abilities--that private schools have their share of negatives, however much they are overshadowed by the ever bemoaned failures of public schools.
Let me start with a story about Stone Ridge where I taught a consortium class at 7:15 am that included students from four other private schools: Holton Arms, St. Andrews, Holy Child and Landon. The students, mostly seniors, were studious, open-minded and motivated. But they were sheltered. And knew it. To explore the unknown world beyond Potomac and Bethesda, I arranged a field trip to Garrison Elementary School in the Shaw neighborhood of Washington, there to spend the day helping teachers in the crowded classrooms. Most of Garrison’s 400-plus African-American children were on the free breakfast and lunch program. Many were from single-parent homes.
The day after, I asked my class for their reflections. A Stone Ridge girl, who lamented coming from a grade school with “an almost completely white Catholic atmosphere,” wrote: “ I must admit that when we set out on the field trip I was concerned that in a nearly all African-American school, where there aren’t many Caucasian teachers, that, putting it simply, the children and teachers might not like me.” The concern was unfounded: “Coming from my background and my thought processes, the gift of being able to walk into a classroom and make friends with everyone, with no questions asked and no issue made of anyone’s race, was such a joy to me…The field trip was such a positive experience.”
Several students asked about going back. They were starved for experiential knowledge that had nothing to do with home work, tests, AP exams, competition, grade-mongering and private school get-aheadism. I told the class, regretfully, that we were lucky to be freed for that one day at Garrison, so nervous were administrators about missed class time for courses that increase the students’ chances of admission to elite colleges. It’s undeniable that parents who coop their young in private schools are greatly reducing the possibility that their children will be as enriched with experiential learning as they are with theoretical learning. The children will leave school idea-rich but experience-poor. Community service programs requiring a few hours a month dabbling at the soup kitchen don’t do it.
At School Without Walls, which had no gym, no cafeteria, no lockers, no auditorium, no athletic fields and for a time no clean drinking water--possibly the poorest school in America was also the closest to the White House-- it was the opposite. Experiential learning was routine. I’d walk into class and say, “let’s go somewhere.” To learn a bit about politics, we’d take in a Congressional hearing. For law, it was a day observing trials at D.C. Superior Court. Blocks away was the Peace Corps headquarters. For journalism, let’s bother people in the newsroom of The Washington Post. Down G Street was Miriam’s Kitchen where we would have meals with homeless people.
The mini-park across the street from Walls was a resting place for both students and the homeless. One of my students, a girl who had been booted out of National Cathedral School for swigging booze in the bathroom between classes and a child I found to be delightfully rebellious, befriended some of the street people. With my encouragement, she’d cut school sometimes to talk with men who slept on heat grates. They’ll teach you plenty, I said. Apparently they did, starting with lessons on creative housing. In the back of Walls was an empty tool shed, dubbed Smoke House by the students who needed a few drags at lunch time. My student--about to become my star student--broke into Smoke House one winter night. She brought in some mattresses, blankets, chairs and spread word to her homeless pals that they now had squatter’s rights to Smoke House. Within a week, five men and one women were the guests of honor. Empowered by the experience, my student came back from the edge, laid off the booze and threw herself into her studies. She went to college, then law school at Berkeley and continues to be a totally other-centered person.
Faculties at elite schools are aware that they are paid to water flowers in educational hothouses, readying them to bloom in the future soils of quality colleges and graduate schools. The children are well-programmed to accept large amounts of homework, tests and exams. Their progress, or lack of it, is closely monitored. One private school that has broken away by seeking the benefits of experiential learning is the Madeira School for Girls in McLean. On Wednesdays, juniors and seniors are freed all day for internships and community service. For the past six years, following a talk I gave at a student assembly and visiting classes, I’ve had Madeira girls helping me teach at Wilson High, a school that has metal detectors, six police in the cacophonic halls armed with weapons and wearing bullet proof vests. All that, plus a police truancy wagon patrolling the streets for layabouts.
It’s hard to imagine a school as dissimilar from Madeira--the gentility, the classroom order, the rarely raised voices, quietness, the spacious acres, its stables for students’ horses--as Wilson. Hungry to escape the isolation of their excellent but culturally moated school, and equally famished for the excitement of non-academic learning that can happen in Wilson with its diverse and rough diamond student body, my Madeira interns flourish. They taste and feel life.
Unlike the rarefied climate found a short walk down Wisconsin Avenue at Sidwell Friends, NCS or St. Albans, Wilson, which has an equally gifted and committed faculty, oozes with diversity: students bound for the Ivies and Little Ivies and ones well below grade level, ones whose parents have it all and ones whose parents have little, ones who ace test after test and Calvin’s children predestined for D’s and F’s, ones who are sure- shots to succeed and ones who are long shots, ones who live among the political and corporate hustlers of Northwest Washington and ones who live among the street hustlers of Northeast and Southeast. In other words, Wilson could be called Reality High. Or better, Real World Prep. It’s all there, a pot into which is melted much of what’s the sweetest and sourest of American life. Teaching there is not rocket science. It’s harder than that.
With many hours of class discussions about education over the years--including how to get away from fear-based learning that homework and tests create and move to desire-based learning that teachers like Socrates, Maria Montessori and Rudolph Steiner practiced--I’ve never had a public school student express a yen to attend a private school. What for?, they would ask. Knowingly, many of my students at Wilson, Walls and B-CC have friends at elite schools, seeing them as overstressed academic captives--the underprivileged privileged.
I tend to agree. As much as I admire private school students who earn high grades, I wonder what else in life are they missing out on as they grind away for 4.0 nirvana. Too often--and I’ve lectured at Exeter, Choate and Kent in New England--the students are being processed as if they are slabs of cheese going to Velveeta Prep on the way to Cheddar U and Mozzarella grad school.
Reversing, I’ve had plenty of private school students voice their wishes to be in a public school. Some did manage to transfer, if not totally at least creatively. I recall a boy at Georgetown Day, and whose father was a headmaster of a private school, who would slip out whenever possible and come up the hill to join my class at Wilson.
Do I have preference for public or private school teaching? It’s the same question that parents are asked, do you love one child more than another? No, you love them the same, except some children make it easier to love than others. Some students make it easier to teach than others.
Occasionally well-off parents ask me if they should they go private or public with their children? Ask them, I suggest. Stay calm. Trust their bents. Remember, too, that for ill or good, parents are the prime teachers, as are peers and the media, along with life’s inclemencies when the weather turns. All I can answer is, educate your children well, more by example than words--and I, along with all the other teachers of modest nerve who I’ve known, will try for the same in the fleeting time we have them in school. Whether the halls are hallowed or chaotic, whether the children of a president or a prisoner.
Colman McCarthy, a former Washington Post columnist, directs the Center for Teaching Peace, a Washington non-profit that helps schools begin or expand peace studies programs.