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The Trouble with Private Schools
Let me first establish my bona fides in order for you, the Ricochetti, to understand that this is a cri de coeur. I was homeschooled K-12, am a proud alumna of Hillsdale College, and for many years taught in private classical schools (I now have a position that supports school choice and excellent curriculum and teachers). I loved the kids and I loved my subject. It was a privilege to open up the virtues and vices of the classical world to my students and to challenge their minds to understand the thoughts of Cicero and Plato.
Here is why I left teaching: I began to despair that real K-12 education was possible in the 21st century. Was it because a) the children were glued to their screens? b) too much testing? c) the Common Core standards? d) administrative burdens? e) uninvolved parents?
None of the above. It was because of helicopter parents. Their fear of failure was crippling children’s ability to learn. There were often excuses for low grades and frequently explicit pressure to change them. These were parents at conservative, Christian, private schools. We teachers were not strangers to the end-of-the-year conference in which an administrator would sit down with the teacher and parents and facilitate a “compromise” in which the teacher would raise the student’s grade in exchange for getting to continue their employment. Over time, many teachers learned not to give Fs (or even Cs) to any students lest they be subjected to vitriol in their inboxes or in person, and vicious gossip about them to other parents.
That’s the trouble with private schools in the 21st century. The parents pay the school and expect grades in return. They assume that low grades mean the school is not doing its job, when, in reality, it’s just as likely that their child isn’t as bright and/or hard-working as they imagine. Grades are just information — not judgments on the inherent dignity of a human being. You see, as Charles Murray once pointed out in Real Education, half of the children are below average. You wouldn’t know that from the nosebleed GPAs at many private (and elite public) schools. The numbers of National Merit Scholars are not proportionate to the number of valedictorians or honors graduates.
It extended to the realm of behavior, as well. Teachers were discouraged from sending outrageous cases to the principal because it was understood that teachers only got to have so many parent complaints before they were not invited back.
But this problem of parental malfeasance goes beyond the K-12 space — ask university professors about the increasing number of students who demand good grades because they “showed up” or even get their parents involved in trying to force grade changes. This shift of responsibility has been going on for at least 20 years now, and it is threatening the very foundations of a once-free society. Entitlement is not a disease that afflicts only the welfare classes; it can and does infect the well-to-do.
If children spend their formative years knowing that mom and dad will always smooth the path for them — prevent them from failing, experiencing unhappiness or even discomfort, are we surprised that “safe spaces” now exist on university campuses?
A few possible objections:
“Administrators and boards should hold the line.” Correct — in theory. In practice, their continued existence depends on getting x number of posteriors in the seats. This is impossible if they don’t deliver the goods to their customers.
“Leadership should set the expectation that the school will be rigorous.” Correct — in theory. In practice, “rigor” is defined down until it is practically meaningless. The word “classical,” for example, can mean almost anything now.
“Parents who want real education will send their kids to schools where they can get it.” Correct — in theory. But, again, it’s about numbers and critical mass — whether you’re blessed to live in a location with enough parents who share that vision.
“Couldn’t this be said of progressive private and some public schools?” Yes, it could. I’m writing about the world I know best. Parents at private Christian and/or classical schools should want more for their children than a mere credential.
“Online education will allow parents to seek out real education.” I’ll believe that when I see it. Online, multi-choice quizzes are not going to be able to measure understanding of complex, non-quantitative subjects (e.g., literary analysis, translation of Latin and Greek, historical essays, persuasive writing).
This is an open plea to well-meaning parents: are you a stumbling block? Do you view the school as your partner (in loco parentis) or as your servant? Virtue is hard to imbue; do not undermine your child’s progress towards self-governance by removing all obstacles or by providing ready excuses for failure.
Published in General
I completely agree. I’m hoping to generate conversation about the business models of private schools, with the understanding that I completely support school choice, both professionally and privately.
I have a feeling that this spills over into other areas as well. As you said, there’s simply not enough time to “helicopter parent” — even if they wanted to — when you have 4 kids.
I’d imagine that the kids in larger families are less “sheltered” and pampered as well.
Any thoughts?
The problem isn’t the business model. The problem is, as you put it, helicopter parents. Your complaints of school administration acquiescing to the helicopter parent applies equally to both public AND private school.
The outcome as alluded to earlier is that schools can be in the business of providing an education or a credential. In the vast majority of our inner city schools the credential is the actual product and it is delivered spottily at best.
So there is the differentiator when it comes to looking for either a job in education or deciding where to place your kids – ask the principal if they are in the education or credential business. Then ask them to prove it.
I see this at our Charter school as well, but not about grades. Parents feel like they should have control. They feel entitled to know how the administration spends money. They feel that teachers MUST listen to them about curriculum. If their child is picked on, the ‘bully’ MUST be expelled. All other parents MUST stop sending their kids in with peanut butter. Those are a few examples.
Helicopter parenting is about control. It manifests is all sorts of ways with various targets ranging from teachers and administrators, to other parents. It harms the children but it also harms the parent community and drives people out of/away from teaching.
I feel like I am a partner with my child’s school. I am listened to by administration and teachers because I respect their authority and let them do their jobs. I don’t always expect to get my way and I teach my kids that they wont always get theirs either.
I don’t speak for Annefy, but that certainly has been my experience. There are exceptions, of course.
Our independent school stands out in other ways, too. I was reminded this morning when we got an IM from a staff member asking for volunteers to join a staff team. The admin. organizes an annual dodgeball tournament for the high school students.
It is a problem across the spectrum of schools. I am the very first to expect excellence from teachers and administration. But the trouble now is that we have a population that does not understand that essential difference between education and credentials. Are the incentives messed up? Sure. And I think there are market solutions. But the real problem is that some significant portion of citizens are raising their children to expect a trophy for showing up.
The relationships between parents and their children’s teachers are fraught with tension.
I think if I were a teacher, I would keep a copy of the latest SATs and Achievement Tests on my desk whenever I had conferences with parents. “This is where your child needs to be at this point in his learning.” I’d keep the discussion as impersonal as possible, knowing how highly anxious the parents are about their children.
Bad grades introduce enormous uncertainty into family life. Parents are bound to feel a certain amount of anxiety.
My five children have experienced the gamut, from public school to private school to homeschooling. We are a Navy family who moved every couple of years, so their education depended upon where we lived and what was available.
When we moved to Southern Maryland 11 yrs ago the kids went back into public school after 4 yrs of homeschooling in Texas and Oklahoma. I was pretty astonished at the amount of work my fellow parents put into their children’s school. They bemoaned science and history fair time because it meant they would be staying up late with their kids to finish projects.
What?! My reaction was to say, “It’s not my homework, it’s yours! If you need assistance in some way, please ask and I will provide it within reason, but that’s it. If you have to stay up all night to finish because you managed your time poorly, you will stay up alone because I need my sleep.”
They request certain teachers for their children, and if they are volunteers and friendly with the staff, their requests are often honored. My philosophy was that my kids needed to learn how to get along with difficult supervisors and, although difficult, it was an important part of the maturing process. A parent’s job is to prepare their child for life apart from them.
In short, it’s not just private schools. And yes, I think having a large family keeps this nonsense to a minimum.
I haven’t read all the comments so perhaps this has been raised, but the same problem applies to college admissions. Parents are waaaaay too involved with this, and there is a whole industry dedicated to getting your kid into the right school. It’s a kind of sickness.
“half of the children are below average.”
Sorry to nit pick but this is incorrect. Half of the children are below the median, if we are talking about grades.
Good — thanks!
And I will nit pick your nit pick. :)
The original statement is true assuming a normal distribution which is often (approximately) the case when dealing with grades.
Here is the quote from Murray’s Real Education, p. 31:
“We do not live in Lake Wobegon. For each of the seven abilities [sometimes called ‘intelligences,’ though Murray pushes back on this term], half of the children are below average.”
The rest of the chapter goes on to explain what he means by this, but his point is simply that we all experience areas in which we are below average (colloquially understood). We are not as willing to recognize that this is true of linguistic, logical, spacial, or mathematical abilities.
Like Annefy, I’m in SoCal. The public schools here are good-to-very good, no complaints. The neighborhood’s leading private school for girls costs $30,000 a year and is known for the number of promiscuous airheads they graduate. (Harsh but true.) So the word “private” has no magic for me.
Back in the prehistoric days of my antediluvian youth, I went from parochial to public to parochial again. New York City, as is well known, is split between two large religious groups (the only white Protestant was Archie Bunker, and that only because Norman Lear chickened out of calling Archie what he obviously was, a Catholic like the rest of us) and I was and still am amused by both sides’ delusions of utter superiority. Catholic school was vastly more academically rigorous than the other side ever realized; on the other hand, robust and constant physical punishment didn’t equal the kind of teaching that the other side had.
Back to the original context of the post:
I would remind those criticizing private schools, their incentive structure and the attributes of “helicopter” parents that the public alternative is often far, far worse. Much of this discussion reminds of when farmers talk about rain: it’s always a drought right up to the point there’s a flood. So it is with parental involvement. Parents are lazy right up to the point where they’re being helicopters.
I think that Montessori schools may have an advantage in this area, both from their core philosophy and from attracting parents who wish to raise independent children. The head of my child’s Montessori school likes to say “If you are not failing every so often, the things you are trying aren’t hard enough.”
Grade-changing is hardly limited to private schools. There’s a scandal in the Houston ISD over grade-changing directives: http://www.click2houston.com/news/hisd-westbury-high-school-principal-asked-to-change-failing-grades-for-26-students/32827418
Not to mention the recent scandal over standardized testing in Atlanta. The pressure and incentives may come from different places, but the outcome’s the same.
I wholeheartedly agree. I’m speaking from the world I know best, pointing out that the stated mission of classical private schools tend to be loftier than public. My concern is that these schools should be setting the example, but they are often undermined by parents who do not really support the mission. If we want real educational reform, it helps to have models of success as well as virtue.
As a teacher, I’ve always said that I can handle just about any kid – it’s the parents that drive me nuts. In elite schools (I worked at Princeton Latin Academy, and also a Montessori school out here in CA), the parents feel like they can tell you how to do your job. In poor schools, the parents want special education benefits for their kids. Since the latter is my world now, I will rant about that:
Parents in lower income schools, at least where I work now, want their kids to have academic exceptions: more time on tests, preferential seating, modified homework assignments. Schools waste a lot of money on special education for kids that really just need to toe the line. They encourage their children to view themselves as ‘disabled’ in some way. It’s sick. Then, when their kid fails, they blame the school for not doing enough to accommodate their child.
The role of a parent vis-a-vis the schools is tough too.
I plead for understanding.
Parents want their kids to do well. In truth, no one wants it otherwise. I’ve heard teachers complain about the absent parents as vociferously as about the helicopter parents. I mentioned this to a friend of mine, a fifth-grade science teacher, and he took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes and said, “You’re right. We are inconsistent.”
Few children are equally motivated in all subjects. Some kids don’t know yet who they are and what they want to do.
I remember my mother saying to me as I was choosing my courses for ninth grade, “Okay, you don’t have to take ancient history in school, but you’ll have to study it on your own.” Nah. Wasn’t going to do it in my spare time.
It turned out to be my all-time favorite course.
We, parents and teachers, are all dealing with immature organisms. It’s not easy.
Sometimes we are trying to push ropes.
The idea is to keep the kids going until something clicks. They need success.
Kids are so easily put off by difficulty. It is the hardest thing in the world to teach a kid to keep trying.
None of the above helps the teachers deal with the pressure to inflate grades.
But in the end, it’s probably good for kids to have people on both sides in their lives.
Well, in our parochial school, they did away with class rankings. Instead, they will only provide a GPA for transcripts and university applications. Their stated reason is that they attract so many smart, accomplished, driven students from well functioning families that a class ranking is not meaningful. Even the lower third of the class is better than many in the upper third of the class at the local public school.
Because of this, the only way we can tell how our kids are really doing is with standardized tests like AP classes, PLAN, ACT, and PSAT.
I would be interested to know how college admissions deal with this phenomenon. It seems like high schools are making it very difficult to get an objective understanding of how well students are really doing.
To my surprise, when I worked in a low-income district, the parents really did care about their kids there, too. When you call a parent and say, ‘Hey, you’re kid is really struggling in my class, I’d love to see them get more of their work done and stay out of trouble,” almost all of the parents I have ever encountered are supportive. I also found, to my surprise, that when I called parents of black kids and told them their child was saying n-word all the time and listening to their headphones, every single parent was supportive. I was expecting blow-back, and there was none. All parents care about their kids.
We teachers want middle ground. Helicopter parents, those that email you every day about their kid’s grade, are bad. So are parents who never come to back to school and don’t answer their phones. Just check in every now and then.
sophrosyne, you will be pleased to know that at Hillsdale I have never been pressured in the slightest with regard to the grades I give . . . not by parents, not by students, not by the administration.
It is a joy to teach here. The students are engaged; they always show up for class; they do most of the work; and, when they fall short, they blame themselves.
The parents of freshmen worry in the Fall about their progress. By the Spring they are mainly interested in the reading their children are doing . . . and sometimes I detect a hint of envy.
Professor Rahe, I would expect no less. It is a special place that adheres to its motto, virtus tentamine gaudet. My only lament is that there are not thousands more with the same courage to teach and learn. I know that the Barney Charter Initiative is working to make that happen, which is most heartening.
Years ago we decided to adopt an educational model that was primarily designed to crank out compliant but competent Prussian soldiers largely because clever American industrialists saw the applicability of the same model to cranking out compliant but competent industrial workers. It didn’t hurt that progressives also saw its usefulness in establishing their “moral equivalent of war” mass movement campaigns for various causes. Far beyond private versus public questions, I wonder whether the whole form of education we now have has outlived its usefulness.
Americans are demanding consumers, and if they pay good money for something, they expect results. Ask anyone involved in running a business that requires them to meet the expectations of customers; they can be tough and unreasonably demanding! School is not likely to be different, particularly when parents are paying for education directly and the stakes are so high for the eventual success of the child in terms of getting into good universities and later into good jobs in a very competitive environment. They feel (rightly or wrongly) that they’re paying for a product.
Good point but only in the socialist education system and bell curve grading approach :)
I teach at a community college, supported by property taxes from the college district. There’s tuition, but most of the students have financial aid. I’ve wondered if it would be better if the college were a private enterprise. Certainly, there is a lot of bureaucracy to deal with. There is a considerable amount of fraud in financial aid (that could be true at a private school too, I think).
The main justification I can think of for having school provided by the government is that since professors are not just teaching students, but also judging them, and it might not make sense to have judges be paid by the people they are judging. I suspect there are probably better solutions to this problem than having the government in charge of education.
If as in many countries there were important tests offered outside of the schools, then the grades offered by the schools would matter less than the adequacy of preparation for the tests. This would probably create problems of its own, but it would solve the problem of the judges being paid by the people they are judging.
Sophrosyne,
Love this post but am frustrated that I don’t have time to fully engage until summer vacation starts in June – aargh!! Have “followed” you in the hopes that I’ll catch other conversations you start.
I’m on the same page as Marcie N and Solon JFlei. I spearheaded a successful grassroots parent movement to bring advanced academics to a rural, low income public school district, and after a decade of advocacy/collaboration with the school system think I am more sympathetic to helicopter parents than many educators are.
Sometimes the system is so broken that the voices of vigilant, well-informed parents are needed to influence bureaucrats set in their (outdated) ways. One key to our success has been to help direct the energies of those hyper-caring parents to better serve the big picture.
Realize you are talking about private schools in this post and I’m talking about almost-the-only-game-in-town public schools, but would love to chat more once school is out!! Could you PM me if similar topics come up? We’re focusing on getting some new initiatives started this month so it will be the second week in June before I can jump in and wallow happily in a discussion but hope to see you all around then!