[HPFGU-OTChatter] High School in US

[Jennifer Boggess Ramon]

At 2:45 AM +1300 11/28/03, Vinnia wrote:
>Hi everyone!
>
>I'm wondering, is there much difference between public
>school and private school in America? Aside from the
>fact that you have to pay to attend private school, of
>course. Would there be much difference in the
>curriculum?

(Disclaimer: I teach at a public high school, so I'm not entirely 
objective on the subject.)

It depends on which state the public school is in and what sort of 
private school it is.

Many states have set curricula that every public school has to 
follow.  Below are a few examples by state:

Texas: http://www.tea.state.tx.us/teks/index.html
New York: http://www.emsc.nysed.gov/ciai/ls.html
California: http://www.cde.ca.gov/standards/
North Carolina: http://www.ncpublicschools.org/curriculum/

The state then adopts textbooks that contain, at a minimum, all the 
topics contained in the state curriculum.  If your child is in a 
public school, you can be pretty well assured that your child has at 
least had lessons on every topic contained in your state's 
curriculum.  (Whether they were particularly good lessons, or course, 
depends upon the teacher, the textbook, and the individual school; 
whether your child remembers anything about the topics depends upon 
the quality of the teaching and the effort your child put into it.)

Private schools, on the other hand, are not held to the state 
curriculum, and thus their curricula are generally set by (a) what 
the faculty of the school thinks is important for the children to 
learn at each grade level, and (b) what the topics in the textbook 
chosen by the school's directors are.  (These two feed into each 
other - if the faculty thinks genetics is important in eighth grade, 
the school will purchase eighth grade science textbooks that have 
genetics in them, and then the teachers will teach genetics in eighth 
grade for the next ten years until they buy new textbooks, at which 
point they will probably recommend textbooks with genetics because 
"that's what we teach in wighth grade science.")

In addition, public schools are required by the No Child Sinister 
Buttock Act, oops, I mean the No Child Left Behind Act, to test their 
students in reading, writing, and mathematics at certain grade 
levels.  Many states also test in social studies and science, either 
at the same grade levels or at higher ones (I think NCLB is 
eventually going to require the science testing as well).  Many 
states already had pervasive testing systems; here's some information 
on Texas's:

http://www.tea.state.tx.us/student.assessment/about/overview.html

I'm not a fan of pervasive and constant testing, myself.  It takes 
away from instructional time, and (especially in the middle grades) 
encourages administrators (who are graded pretty much solely on their 
school's test scores) to push teachers to overemphasis the topics 
covered by the test, often to the exclusion of any topics that are 
not covered by the test (even if they're in the state curriculum). 
Moreover, they're all reading tests first, and topic tests only 
secondarily; any student who has difficult reading is going to have 
difficulty passing the science, social studies, and mathematics 
tests, too, even if they know and understand the content in those 
subject areas.

Private schools are not required to take the NCLB tests, and are 
usually not required to take the state tests, either.  Thus, they 
don't have the pressure of "teaching to the test."  On the other 
hand, for most private schools there are no accountability measures 
whatsoever - if the school is doing a very poor job of, for example, 
teaching 5th grade math, the only way to tell is for the kids to get 
to 6th grade math and not do well.

Private schools are immediately responsible to the parents - they're 
paying for this, after all.  This has positive and negative 
repercussions.  On the one hand, a teacher who is demonstrably not 
very good will not last very long at a private school under the 
barrage of complaints from parents.  On the other hand,  this can 
also happen to a very good teacher who happens to upset a parent or a 
group of parents somehow - by participating in a protest, by teaching 
evolution in biology, by being gay, etc.  Moreover, children of 
particularly rich parents who not only pay tuition but make donations 
of time or money to the school can often get away with slacking in 
class or behaving badly - the school is loathe to discipline them for 
fear of losing their parents' support.

Finally, there are failure rates.  A public school is under extreme 
pressure to have low failure rates, for several reasons.  A student 
who is retained more than once in the lower grades often becomes 
disruptive simply because they're older and larger than the other 
students.  Students who fail a grade, or several classes, in the 
upper grades often become discouraged and drop out instead of 
finishing.  On the one hand, this encourages teachers to try and 
reach every child; on the other hand, it often means a kid can get 
away with slacking all year - s/he know s/he'll be promoted whether 
s/he actually does any work or not.  Whether a private school has to 
worry about failure rates depends on the demand for slots at the 
school.  A private school that has a waiting list has little reason 
to engage in social promotion - better to give the kid the failing 
grade s/he earned, let the parents leave, and take the next kid on 
the waiting list, who might benefit more from the experience.  On the 
other hand, a private school that needs every student it has to stay 
financially sound is even less likely to keep a failing kid back a 
grade than a public school is.

In my experience, private schools that are founded for the purpose of 
being preparatory schools - that is, schools designed with the intent 
of sending every graduate on to a good college - tend to have more 
rigorous curricula than the public schools.  Religious private 
schools that are not prep schools tend to have curricula that are 
about the same as public schools or slightly weaker, especially at 
the middle grades.  Private schools that are neither religious nor 
prep schools are unpredictable.
-- 

  - Boggles, aka J. C. B. Ramon			boggles(at)earthlink.net
"It is not knowledge, but the act of learning, not possession but the 
act of getting there, which grants the greatest enjoyment. "
	- Gauss, in a Letter to Bolyai, 1808.