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| Framing Our Children's Future |
Public or Private?
05/03/2004
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When comparing private versus public school options, we
rarely choose between two extremes—between, say, The Spence School on the Upper
East Side of Manhattan and one of the anonymous public schools a few blocks
north in East Harlem. At Spence, the K-12 single-sex alma mater of Gwyneth
Paltrow, classes for reading and math range between eight and 12 students. In
East Harlem, children still struggle to be heard in classes that, according to
local activist group Class Size Matters, can have as many as 40
students.
Nevertheless, class size and test scores differ even between
first-rate public or charter schools and solid public schools in a good suburban neighborhoods: Greenwich Country Day versus Greenwich High in Connecticut; The
Haverford School versus Haverford High in Pennsylvania or, in California, La
Jolla Country Day versus La Jolla Elementary.
“There are wonderful public
schools in every part of the country,” says Lisa Rosenthal, senior editor at
GreatSchools.net, a nonprofit online guide to public schools. “Often, parents
have the perception that if you pay for a school, it must be better, but that’s
not necessarily true.” Certainly, private just for the sake of private is a
mistake, especially if the local public school offers a wider range of subjects,
including advanced placement classes, and more and better extracurricular
programs. (In competitive sports, for example, the good suburban public schools
frequently surpass smaller private schools).
Still, the classes at
independent schools, in general, remain significantly smaller than their public
counterparts in even the best neighborhoods. According to the latest survey by
the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS), of its 1,200 member
schools, most report between 16-22 students per class, often with an additional
teacher or assistant at the lower grades. At the high school level, where
students change classrooms each period, as few as eight students sometimes
occupy a single classroom.
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