Craig Warga/Bloomberg via Getty Images
We have been at a critical juncture in the re-assessment of many institutions central to our daily life in the United States, from the pandemic's stresses on our health care system to this summer’s protests against police brutality. Among these institutions being re-considered should be our education system, and, in particular, private schools, which have historically had an outsized influence in our culture, helping to ultimately maintain the institutional status quo across segments of our society. That’s why we don’t need them.
Private schools have educated, globally, many of those who wield great power; congresspeople are twice as likely to have attended a private high school than their non-legislating counterparts. Similarly, while only about 10% of US students attend private high schools, 4 out of the 9 Supreme Court Justices on the 2019 court went to private high school. Notably, every single one of those justices attended an Ivy League Law School.
While private schools appeal to potential applicants on the basis of having a higher quality of education, they are destructive institutions. As a graduate of a private high school and a student currently enrolled in one of the most famous private universities in the world, it is my experience that private schools operate to cement the power of the owning class at the cost of marginalized students. I saw this when wealthy kids used their connections to get better internships. I saw this when wealthy students helped one another get into universities. With two brown parents, this world of entitlement was foreign to me. My queerness and my brownness have led me to be aware that admission to private schools isn’t necessarily an admission to a certain kind of life. You have to look and act a certain way to really fit in.
In the 20th century, the “private” nature of private schools became a way to maintain certain kinds of socio-economic power by segregating students during a mass desegregation movement. Following Supreme Court rulings banning segregation in graduate and professional schools in the South, the region saw private school enrollment soar by roughly 43% in the 1940s. Reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones notes that after Brown v. Board of Education, “state legislatures decided to shut down public schools altogether and pay vouchers for white students to go to private segregation academies.” I didn’t grow up in the South, but the relationship between power and private schooling is one I saw echoed in my own experience in New York City.
My mother was a product of the Queens public school system. Proud of her own upbringing, she wanted me to be part of this lineage. As a child, I was sent to a public school in New York. I remember playing with cockroaches in the cafeteria and eating semi-frozen peanut butter and jelly uncrustables for lunch. I remember the smell of rot, the broken toilets, the broken windows. I remember seeing a school in disrepair, which I wouldn’t describe as such until later in my life. I remember not getting the resources I needed when I needed them, at times at a cost to my health.
One day, I was playing tag in the courtyard, and I hit my head and fainted. I only remember being shaken awake by the recess director before waking up again in the principal’s office. I don’t remember being brought to a doctor, nurse, or anyone else with medical experience. When my mother brought me to our doctor later that week, I knew that for many of my peers, the school was the only place they could have afforded to receive medical attention. And I feared that it just wasn’t there.
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