Ask Americans if they support “public schools,” and you will get a resounding “yes.” At the heart of our abiding commitment to the idea of public education is Horace Mann’s ideal of the “common school”: a place whose doors are open to everybody, and where all children, regardless of social class, race or ethnic heritage, can come to learn and play and grow up together. This is a genuinely compelling vision.
Not surprisingly, opponents of charter schools and school choice cleverly tap into this romantic notion of public schooling when arguing that taxpayer dollars shouldn’t support schools that are “exclusive” or “privatized” or “balkanized” or guilty of “creaming.”
But let’s turn the tables: just how “public” are America’s public schools?
In a new Fordham analysis, America’s Private Public Schools, we identify more than 2,800 public schools nationwide whose doors are effectively barred to poor children. These schools serve about four percent of the U.S. public-school population--considerably more than charter schools do. Generally found in wealthy urban enclaves or well-heeled suburbs, they educate children of America’s elite in exclusive settings while proudly waving the “public school” flag. Yet they hardly embody the “common school” ideal.
In fact, by serving only well-off children, they are arguably more private--certainly more exclusive--than many elite private schools, which, after all, generally offer at least some scholarships to low-income students. And they are certainly more exclusive than most charter schools, which typically serve more than their share of poor and minority children.
These “private public schools” do not arise by accident. In a country where more than 40 percent of K-12 pupils are poor enough to qualify for a free or reduced-price lunch from the federal government, it is not exactly random when a school serves few or none of those kids. That is not to say that these schools openly refuse to educate needy girls and boys. But their demographics generally are products of public policies and community decisions. Some schools are located in areas once ruled by neighborhood covenants that kept minorities out. Many more are in communities where zoning restrictions block affordable housing. And precious few opt to participate in public school choice programs that assist poor children to cross school (or even district) boundaries to take advantage of what they have to offer. On the contrary, some are located in districts that hire “border guards” to ensure that only those who pay property taxes there are permitted to enter their schools.
These schools are “public” in that they are funded by taxpayers and accountable to elected officials. But they scarcely serve the larger “public” of American society. If a child’s parents cannot afford a home in their attendance zones, that child simply cannot attend them. Call us naïve if you wish, but we find it hypocritical (or worse) when someone supports spending taxpayer dollars on such “public” schools for their own kids but opposed school-choice options for other people’s children. Feels to us like a double standard--and just plain unfair.
To find these “private public schools,” we dove into the federal government’s Common Core of Data for 2007-2008. At the elementary level, we defined “private public schools” as those where low-income students (i.e., those eligible for a free or reduced-price lunch) make up less than 5 percent of the pupil population. Because these data are less reliable at the middle and high school levels (where many self-conscious adolescents choose not to participate in the program), we used an even tougher threshold for those schools: to qualify, fewer than 3 percent of their students were reported to be poor. We were also sensitive to the fact that a non-trivial number of schools themselves choose not to participate in the federal free-lunch program, and thus do not provide reliable data on the number of eligible youngsters attending them. So we excluded these schools from our calculations.
So what did we find? As of 2007-2008, there were at least 2,817 “private public schools” (i.e., schools that serve virtually no poor students). This includes 2,194 elementary, 304 middle, and 319 high schools. Altogether, these schools serve approximately 1.7 million students. Had we been less persnickety with our criteria, there’d have been many more.
Perhaps not surprisingly, few black students attend these schools. While 17 percent of public school pupils nationwide are African-American, just 3 percent of the students in “private public schools” are. Furthermore, the percentage of Hispanic students in these schools (12 percent) is just half that of public schools as a whole.
These national findings mask large differences among states. While 4 percent of public school pupils nationally attend “private public schools,” in a handful of states the proportion is much greater: Connecticut (18 percent), New Jersey (17 percent), South Dakota (16 percent), Arizona (14 percent), and Massachusetts (12 percent). A comparison of major metropolitan areas reveals even starker disparities. The Boston and New York City metropolitan areas top the list with the greatest proportions of public school students attending “private public schools” (16 and 13 percent, respectively). And an astonishing 27 percent of white students in the New York City metro area, 21 percent of white students in the San Francisco metro area, and 20 percent of white students in the Boston metro area attend these exclusive public schools.
We suspect that many white parents in these “progressive” communities voice opposition to school voucher or tax credit programs because they object to public funds supporting “exclusive” private schools. Would these same folks oppose public funding for America’s 2,800 “private public schools”—funding that runs in the tens of billions of dollars?
Consider this: When Ohio enacted a school voucher program in Cleveland in the 1990s, it explicitly allowed low-income students to use their scholarships at suburban public schools as well as private and religious ones. Yet not a single district bordering Cleveland would allow these poor (mostly black) students to enroll in their schools, though scores of Catholic schools and other private schools did.
So which schools are public, and which are private? Which come closer to Horace Mann’s ideal of the common school? From the point of view of the “public” that our schools are meant to serve, it is not a difficult question.