5.6 Private Schools
Approximately 8% of California’s students in grades K-12 attend private schools, over two-thirds of them affiliated with a church or religion. Many private schools (particularly those without a religious affiliation) refer to themselves as “independent schools” or “nonprofit schools.” Statistics about class sizes, hours of instruction, staffing and the like are not systematically collected from private schools. Private schools generally use different tests than public schools do, so it is difficult to compare student achievement results between public and private schools.
In California, as in most states, private school tuition is paid by parents, without significant government support or subsidy. Parents’ private school tuition expenses are not generally tax-deductible. Non-tuition donations to private school scholarship funds are generally deductible, however, as private schools are almost universally non-profit organizations. (Some private schools refer to themselves as “non-profit schools” to emphasize the point.) Private schools depend heavily on donations to support their capital requirements.
In several states and Washington, DC, the lines between private and public schooling have been blurred through the use of “voucher” programs. In these programs, parents receive tax-funded vouchers for use toward payment of tuition costs at a private school. Because the majority of American private schools have a religious affiliation, debate about school vouchers frequently overlaps with arguments about separation of church and state. The debate goes back to at least 1875, the administration of Ulysses S Grant, when James G. Blaine proposed a constitutional ban on public funding of private schools. The Blain Amendment narrowly failed to become a part of the US constitution, but most state constitutions adopted equivalent policies. The matter is not settled. In 2002 the Sixth Circuit Court approved the use of tax-funded vouchers for tuition in selective religious schools in Cleveland. In 2011 Republican leaders in several states including Indiana advanced state legislation to permit use of tax-funded vouchers at religious schools.
Arguments in favor of school vouchers are well articulated by Greg Forster of the Foundation for Educational Choice here. Arguments against vouchers are succinctly stated by the Anti-Defamation League. Rebuttals are summarized here by BalancedPolitics.org. An excellent statistical comparison of different types of private schools (Independent, Catholic, Hebrew, etc. is available here from the blog schoolfinance101.
The next post explores ideas about improving education through health by incorporating health services directly into schools.
Next: 5.7 Health Services in Schools
It’s worth noting that students who attend private schools may also receive services from a public school as well. For example students with special educational needs, say help with speech therapy, might receive those services through a local public school. Similarly home schooled students may also use some public school services.
Because private schools have fewer students they oftentimes do not have the demand or resources to meet the wide variety of needs served by public schools. On the other hand, private schools, and increasingly online schools, may be able to offer services not available in public.
Would the individual experience for students improve if specific services like these were made more readily available across school boundaries? One could imagine students enjoying a combination of services from charter, public, and private providers each addressing different needs to create the best possible experience for a student.
I’m not sure how often private school students access public school services in California and most people would probably agree that this type of ‘service oriented education’ would be a non-starter from a policy level. Nevertheless if we really adopt a student-centric perspective it seems that this approach should be part of the conversation. Online schools in particular will require us to find some ways of integrating different learning services.