Public vs. Private Schools -- Lessons Beyond Sidwell

By Colman McCarthy

Like all caring 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. The Obama daughters are now at Sidwell Friends, a Washington school that offers sterling education: small classes, kempt athletic fields and mannered teachers aware of the school’s ties to the Society of Friends.

Sidwell is in a neighborhood with other selective and expensive schools: St. Albans, National Cathedral, Maret and Georgetown Day. Parents who enroll their children, and have the incomes and 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, starting in 1982 at School Without Walls and a few years later at Wilson High and Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School. At each, I’ve been a volunteer. At intervals and varied durations, I’ve had classes at four private schools: Landon, Stone Ridge, Georgetown Day and Maret. By rough estimate I’ve had more than 3,000 students, not counting a similar number in local universities.

I’m not among 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 am I with parents on the Left who claim moral superiority for having the money for a private school but choose a pubic one, i.e., using their children to take a political stand. The 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, and all bents and backgrounds, that private schools have their share of negatives, however much they are overshadowed by the ever bemoaned failures of public schools.

Faculties at elite schools know that they are paid to water flowers in educational hothouses. One school that tries to have its children bloom in soils beyond the campus is the Madeira School in McLean, Va. For the past six years, I’ve had Madeira girls helping me teach at Wilson High. They and their schoolmates are released every Wednesday for community service internships. At Wilson, they pass through metal detectors, walk through cacophonic halls where at least six police armed with weapons and wearing bullet-proof vests are keeping order--all that plus a truancy wagon out front shuttling in layabouts.

It’s hard to imagine a school as dissimilar from Madeira--its gentility, the classroom serenity, its stables for students’ horses, the order--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 at Wilson, my Madeira interns flourish. They taste and feel life.

Unlike the rarefied climate at the nearby private schools, Wilson, which has an equally gifted and committed faculty, oozes with diversity: students bound for the Ivies and ones well below grade level, ones whose parents have it all and ones who have little, students who live among political and corporate hustlers of Northwest Washington and those stuck with the street hustlers of Northeast and Southeast. Wilson could be called Reality High. Or better, Real World Prep.

With many hours of class discussions about education over the years, I’ve never had a public school student express a yen to attend a private school. What for?, they would ask. Many of my students at Wilson, Walls and B-CC have friends at elite schools but, knowingly, see them as overstressed academic captives--the underprivileged privileged.

Reversing, I’ve had plenty of private school students voice wishes to be in a public school. Some managed a transfer, to their relief.

As much as I admire private school students who earn high grades, I wonder what they are missing out on while grinding for 4.0 bliss. Often enough the students are being processed as if they are hunks of cheese at Velveeta Prep on the way to Cheddar U and Mozzarella grad school.

Do I have a preference for public or private school teaching? It’s like the question parents are asked, do you love one child over another? No, you love them the same, except some children make it easier to love than others. Some students make it easier to love than others.

Occasionally well-off parents ask me if they should go private or public with their children. Ask them, maybe, I suggest. Trust their leanings. Remember, too, that for ill or good, parents are the prime educators, as are peers and the media, as are life’s bumps and bruises. All I can answer is, teach your children well--and I along with all teachers of modest nerve will try for the same in the fleeting time we have them in school, whether the halls are hallowed or chaotic, whether the child of a president or a prisoner.