Are Private Schools “Obscene”?

I’ve been letting Caitlin Flanagan’s piece in The Atlantic, “Private Schools Have Become Truly Obscene,” marinate in my brain for a couple of days, thinking about the response I want to write. I’ve felt an urge to debate her points, defend the honor of independent schools, offer comparisons to the public school system, and so forth. But the truth is: She is right about all of it.

Mind you, the entitled behavior that she describes from the most badly-behaved prep school parents only represents a small slice of our universe. The $200 million-plus capital campaigns are only happening at the handful of ultra-elite schools that Flanagan describes in her article. And most independent high schools can only look on with jealousy at the pipeline-to-the-Ivies statistics that she shares.

I have worried recently that the type of parenting that we are used to calling “helicopter parents” has become the norm in the past decade, such that we expect that behavior from everyone. The new, more extreme, flavor is called “snowplow parenting,” and you can just let your mind visualize the metaphor to understand what it means. This generation of highly anxious students seems to feed the anxieties of their parents, or maybe it’s the other way around, or maybe it is a co-dependent embrace, or maybe it is a chicken-or-the-egg situation in which the root cause of the anxiety is metaphysical. I don’t want to point fingers on this topic. I’m a parent of two young kids myself, and I swore that I would never let myself display any of these behaviors. Yet I am immediately gripped by anxiety whenever I ponder safety issues for my kids that my parents never worried about forty years ago. Things have changed.

There are some topics in the Atlantic piece that make me want to ask if the public schools are not the more obscene option. Flanagan reports that the ugly behavior of some parents at Sidwell Friends in 2019 caused two out of their three college counselors to quit. That means that Sidwell has three college counselors to serve its upper school student body of 500 students. That’s pretty typical for independent schools. A public high school of that size is likely to have one, single guidance counselor who wears college counseling as merely one of their hats. Flanagan asks her reader to simply accept that America’s public school system is a failure, but talking about what all that money pays for in the independent school world without talking about the missing money in the underfunded public school systems makes it feel unfair to refer to prep schools as “obscene.”

In Pennsylvania where I live, our public schools are spending about $16,400 per annum per child. This ranks ninth in the country, which is respectable. Flanagan has lots of criticism for how badly independent schools are doing as vehicles for racial equality, and some of that criticism hits its mark. (Though I wish she would talk about all of the non-elite prep schools that look nothing like the ones she describes.) But how can our public schools be doing any better on this issue if they are offering so little counseling to high school juniors and seniors about their post-secondary school options? I just read Ron Lieber’s new book, The Price You Pay for College, and he nearly convinced me that I’ll want to pay for a financial advisor with expertise in financial aid to help me when my kids hit twelfth grade, and I’m surely already in the top 5% of Americans when it comes to knowledge on this topic.

The schools where I have worked have spent multiples of that $16,400 figure to educate each child each year, and yes, they spend more per child per year than they take in via tuition dollars. Yes, that creates the gap that Flanagan discusses, and yes, the whole independent school world is constantly working to feed that beast. I guess my question is: Is it more obscene to overfund education or underfund it? Flanagan doesn’t offer solutions, but she hints that it is unjust for the super elite schools to operate free from taxation. If someone wanted to argue that private school endowments should be taxed on capital above the amount needed to cover some multiple of what the local public schools are spending per kid per year, I could get on board. (Especially if those tax dollars went directly to the local school system to close the spending disparity.)

Because I work as a dean of students at an independent school, I would certainly like to see a reduction in entitled behavior from . . . everyone. But one picks one’s poisons. If I worked in the public school system, what percentage of the parents with whom I came into contact would believe some or all of what QAnon is putting out there? (Answer: roughly 20% in the area where I live.)

I’m glad that Flanagan’s piece is generating conversation. Too many parts of America’s education system are broken, from preschool through higher ed. Singling out elite independent schools is a useful exercise and tweaks The Atlantic’s audience just so, but those schools are only serving less than one percent of high school students. Let’s keep our eyes on the broader problems, too.