Across the Great Divide?

Harry: “Suppose that you see the divide between private and state schools as the major institutional instantiation of educational inequality”

In the light of reported research at the University of Warwick, I have a problem with that premise for starters:

“The UK’s most expensive private schools are producing pupils who achieve the worst grades at university, according to research. An eight-year study of graduates’ results by researchers at the University of Warwick suggests that the more parents pay in school fees, the less chance their children have of getting a good degree.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/2552523.stm

Private school pupils account for only 7% of children at school in Britain. A far more serious problem creating inequality of outcomes in terms of the numbers of children affected is this:

“Almost a quarter of secondary schools are failing, with less than 30 per cent of their pupils achieving five good GCSEs including English and maths, the Government admitted last night.

“Lord Adonis, the Schools Minister, said that 800 state secondary schools in Britain were not reaching expected standards. ‘The waste of talent and potential this represents simply isn’t acceptable for the future,’ he said.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/education/article2577874.ece

Btw my school days were long ago but it happens I went to one of the selective maintained schools – which is the official jargon for the non-fee paying schools with selective entry. Within walking distance of where I write now are two of the best selective maintained boys schools in Britain in terms of attainment in the school-leaving exams – the schools feature near the top of the first page of this:
http://extras.timesonline.co.uk/pdfs/alevels2007.pdf

Many of these state schools regularly achieve better exam results than most of the fee-paying, non-maintained schools. We really do need to worry more about the failing maintained schools than about the relatively small non-maintained (private) sector schools.

This are some very interesting points in Harry’s entry but as someone in the UK who is in the Labour party one point grabs my attention. If this is the policy of the current government, how can I know? They would deny that it is & do use the language of markets and choice. There is never even a nod and a wink that this is what is going on. Must I be an expert in these things in order to judge aright what is going on?

It is not only that justice must be seen to be done; it is the practical point that the Labour government needs the support of its members & the support of lots of voters who are not keen on choice, markets etc. In implementing a good education policy stealthily (if that is what it is doing) it may end up alienating enough of its support so that it does not get the chance to finish the changes and, as a result, leaves an education system that can be altered ever so slightly to serve Tory ends.

I would so dearly like to believe that Harry’s analysis is correct but I don’t see that there is sufficient reason to.

Of course, another way of bridging the inequality problem is abolishing *public* schools by law and going over to a competitive voucher system like Mill advocates in On Liberty. It would eliminate the inequality between the two sectors in a similar way.

Although, one is bound to worry about the inequalities within the private scheme being larger than those within the public scheme. My own inclination is to think that while inequality would be higher, the general quality of education would be higher due to competition.

If we must have egalitarian (and not merely sufficientarian) considerations at play here, then the state can always redistribute vouchers in such a way that everyone has an equal ability to buy into whatever school. What I’m after primarily is the competitive effects of such a system.

Let’s be clear, there are only 164 (selective) grammar schools left in England and none in Wales and Scotland.

“The government has been put on the spot by the news that the greater gains in top A-level grades in recent years have been in private and grammar schools.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/6949555.stm

If anyone thinks the presence of any of the 164 grammar schools in their locality is especially “unfair” then they need to explain why it is that the London borough where I live, which has a collection of outstanding selective maintained schools, has consistently rated at or near the top of the league table for local education authorities based on AVERAGE attainment in the school leaving exams. The manifest and observable effect of the presence of the local selective maintained schools has been to raise average standards across the borough:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/6250433.stm

They also need to consider whether it would be more or less “fair” to have grammar schools in their locality or some of the 345 schools specialising in sports:

“There are currently 345 Sports Colleges in England operating as part of the Specialist Schools Programme. In addition, a further 12 schools have been designated in combined specialisms which include sport and 14 schools have Sport as a second specialism.”
http://www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/specialistschools/what_are/sports/

Btw “GCSE performance in arts, business, languages, mathematics, technology and science schools is no different from other state secondaries, they said. They found that only schools specialising in sports showed any difference, with slightly lower GCSE results than other schools on average.”
http://education.guardian.co.uk/newschools/story/0,,2164505,00.html

soru — thanks. I’m no such sceptic, and my own experience in college suggested the headline result, which I therefore didn’t find surprising, but the result that achievement varied among private school attendees inversely to the level of fees they had paid. What struck me as bizarre was that they could find that out, rather than that it was true (though I was surprised by it, too).

Hi Dean — it seems to me your beef is with your party, not with me, right?

I’ll try to respond to andromeda if I get a chance tomorrow, but I may not, so others should feel free to. For now it might help to say that the private/public divide is so different between the two countries that experience and olicy in one has just about no bearing on experience or policy in the other (eg, your comment about taxes reducing access for the disadvantaged is true and relevant in the US, but not at all in the UK).

Suppose that you see the divide between private and state schools as the major institutional instantiation of educational inequality

This is a good question, but it seems the appropriate method for redressing the problem will depend on the cause of educational inequality.

Does inequality exist because private schools provide superior instruction to public schools? If so, the solution could be to bring the successful instructional methods and institutional structures to the public system. (This is an element of pro-privatization arguments)

Is the inequality caused by higher level of funding in the privates? Then equalize funding.

Or is it because private schools reinforce network/nepotism effects? Then one would want to create more class-based integration of the top privates (via scholarship programs, perhaps), or in a more extreme version, abolish the privates entirely.

Or does the inequality result from some other factor? I know nothing about the UK school system, but would be interested to hear how Harry thinks inequality is produced.

My beef , I suppose, is with the party, primarily but also with your analysis. It reads too much like a just-so story for the sceptical. What reasons are there to think that your interpretation explains the policy rather than just fits the limited number facts we have at the moment? Do you predict that over the next 5 years, say, a significant number of private schools will come into the state system? Or, what is the relevant timeframe?

You will never persuade the existing private schools to join the state sector on equal terms; even you will – new elite private schools will be immediately created.
Because there are no miracles.
Just ban them, there is no other way.

Its not just the far left who have wanted to ban private schools, there have been plenty of Labour members who have as well. Probably still are on the left of the party, and I suspect the majority of the population (who tend in my experience to be quite resentful of private schools, and public schools in particular) would be very supportive of such a move.

“I once calculated the real effect of removing charitable status, which worked out at about 5% on school fees.”

Currently school fees are exempt from VAT. Remove that, and you’re looking at an increase of roughly 20%. If nothing else, that would be quite a good progressive way of redistributing income, and spending more on state schools. I think you’re also underestimating how much of a struggle paying school fees is for many parents, and how marginal the financial status of many private schools actually is.

“I doubt that much of the expertise in the private sector would come along.”

Where are the teachers going to go? Abroad?
And I suspect the expertise is greatly overrated. The schools that do well are extremely selective, and tend to kick out students who would depress the results (this isn’t something that gets mentioned that much, oddly). They also don’t have the problems that a lot of state schools have to deal with (social deprevation, for example), and have far more resources to throw at teaching kids – or more accurately, cramming kids through the A-level and university selection process.

Oops, just saw Harry B’s comment at #4, which was making roughly the same point.

I do have a worry which follows on from something said at 15. You might eventually persuade a good number of private schools to become state schools. But what effect does this have on DEMAND for private education? If people paying for private education really ARE doing so because they worry about the quality of state education, then this might assuage some of those worries, for those sure that their children will find places at the new academies. But if parents send their children to private schools for a complex mix of reasons including a concern for their education but also their social connections and status, for instance, then why will this make any major difference? In other words, just what are people buying when they buy private education? And just how much of that will get provided under this ‘quiet revolution’?

soru,

We have that in the US; it’s called internships.

In a lot of fields (particularly leftish non-profits and the culture industry) working as an unpaid intern for several summers, and as a very low-paid contract worker for a few years afterward, is pretty much a requirement for getting any of the high-status or higher-paying jobs.

Harry – What makes the private schools so much better in the UK than the public schools? Are their costs lower because they don’t have to pay the teachers as much? Do they have a lot more resources? Are the school free from bureaucracy? Do they cream students? Homogeneous student population? I suspect all of the above.

Instead of making the private system change, why can’t the public system change? They can be given more resources and be freed from requirements. Charter schools and magnets. Not that it works here.

Or, if we’re entertaining radical and politically unfeasible ideas… Instead forcing the rich to attend public schools, increase their taxes tenfold and spend all the money on schools. The rich would have less money to spend on private schools. It might push some families back into the public school system. And the public schools will benefit from all the extra capital.

Bob B @ 20 – I’m not entirely sure what point you are trying to make. When you say “maintained schools”, are you referring to state schools generally, or grant maintained schools, or what?

#27 Katherine: “I’m not entirely sure what point you are trying to make. When you say “maintained schools”, are you referring to state schools generally, or grant maintained schools, or what?”

Maintained schools is the => official jargon

Another attempt:

#27 Katherine: “I’m not entirely sure what point you are trying to make. When you say “maintained schools”, are you referring to state schools generally, or grant maintained schools, or what?”

Maintained schools is the official jargon for non-feepaying schools, while non-maintained schools are feepaying. My guess is that this jargon was devised by our betters to avoid the confusion over the so-called “Public Schools” – like Eton, Harrow, Winchester and Shrewsbury – being feepaying schools.

The excellent boys schools within walking distance from where I write are maintained selective grammar schools, of which there are only 164 left in England with none in Wales and Scotland. My son went to one, which I later discovered was the same school that Chris Woodhead – the (somewhat notorious) Chief Inspector of Schools in Mr Blunkett’s time – had attended.

The thousands of “comprehensives” are also maintained schools, as are the few hundred “city academies” and “city technology colleges”. See this official account of the so-called academies:
http://www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/academies/what_are_academies/?version=1

The big problem that we have is that almost a quarter of maintained schools are failing – according to Lord Adonis, a government education minister:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/education/article2577874.ece

That is the real problem and the real source of educational inequalities, not the non-maintained schools which only provide schooling for 7% of children at school.

It’s interesting that countries employing comprehensive and non-fee-paying schools (Japan, Finland, S. Korea) completely outperform the hybrids in PISA.

Do the hybrids want to remain mediocre?

They have to be better, no parent would pay money to a school that provided an inferior product to the state run alternative that you get for free.

Well, some would (and do) for reasons of snobbery for instance. Though of course your point is true in general and in most specific cases.

#32: “defining schools as ‘failing’ or not simply by means of counting GCSEs is not particularly useful, since it gives no sense of the value-added by a school.”

Rubbish. There is no general agreement on defining and measuring school “value added”. Besides, I don’t think prospective employers give a damn about “value added” whereas they are certainly interested in a job applicant’s GCSEs and his/her grades – not least because:

“One third of employers have to give their staff remedial lessons in basic English and maths, a survey suggests. Managers said staff needed to be able to use correct spelling and grammar and should be competent in simple mental arithmetic without a calculator. One in five employers said non-graduate recruits of all ages struggled with literacy or numeracy, the Confederation of British Industry poll found.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/5263812.stm

I noticed that you dodged responding to the curious fact that British schools evidently have more problems “adding value” for poor white boys than for poor children from other ethnic groups:

“The research says: ‘One striking fact is that poor white students are the lowest performing of all groups at age 16, showing a substantial deterioration in their relative scores through secondary school.'”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/5051850.stm

“White British boys from poor families perform worse at GCSE than almost any other racial group. Official figures show that only 24% of those entitled to free school meals gained five or more good GCSEs last year, compared with 65% of the poorest Chinese boys and 48% of poor Indian and Bangladeshi boys.”
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/mike_ion/2007/01/the_bnp_and_the_white_boys.html

In the US, the private-state spending figures are much closer…

I don’t know, at least in the NE a few years ago when I was considering a private school for my kid it was around 6-7K/pupil/year in the public schools and over 20K tuition for a decent private school. So, I assume 20K/pupil/year is what they spend; that’s 3 times more than the public sector. It’s true, there are private religious schools in the US, where tuition is often actually less than 6K, but why would you want to count those? Those are not the children you’ll see later in Harvard and Standford.

In other words, just what are people buying when they buy private education?

There’s no mystery here, what they are buying is social reproduction. From the elite private schools their children transition into elite universities and then their very first jobs place them within the top 5% of the income earners. Few years later they are up there with their parents in the top 1%. That’s all.

Richard, but I’m not talking about great many parents and schools. I’m talking specifically about upper middle class nad rich parents and private schools where they send their children. The questions was (as I understood it): why don’t they send their children to public schools? My answer is: it’s social reproduction specific to this socio-economic group. What’s you answer?

abb1: I teach at one of those $20K+ New England schools, and it’s a lot more complicated than that. Yes, that’s definitely an element of what’s going on, but it’s not the only element.

People are buying a particular kind of cachet that goes along with being private-school-educated (a number of our families are from places like Wellesley and Brookline — for non-Bostonians, read that as “towns with fantastically expensive real estate and exceptionally well-regarded public schools” — they could get great education for the price of their taxes, so one must assume cachet comes into play).

People are continuing a family tradition. The school is a known quantity that served them and their relatives well; they trust it and, perhaps, want their kids to be carbon copies.

People are seeking specific services or amenities that they can’t get in the public schools — small class sizes (I have a class of three), extensive athletic facilities and grounds, an advanced curriculum (for instance, even strong public schools tend to have algebra I as the standard 9th grade course, whereas most private schools around here have it as the standard 8th grade course). Our school offers a variety of one-on-one tutoring options and an extensive arts program (of course, some public schools have great arts programs too, but a lot of them are facing cutbacks as towns look to deal with budget crises).

Some of our kids have had bad experiences in other schools (public or private) — not challenged, trouble finding their niche socially, bullied, lost in the crowd, etc. — and they think our school has specific ways of addressing those problems.

Some of them (generally the heavily scholarshipped kids) are from places where the public schools are genuinely awful and perhaps unsafe.

Some of them (again, scholarship) are talented athletes who are looking to parlay that talent into a better secondary education and, ultimately, college access.

That’s what I can think of off the top of my head, and in all cases I’m thinking of specific school programs and/or kids. So yeah. It’s a lot more complicated than selfish class interests.

abb1 — in that case my guess is that people are ignorant — its worth factoring that in. For many kids it really isn’t the case that a $20k a year school paid for out of one’s own pocket enhances one chances of going to an Ivy League school at all over a $20k a year school paid for by the public.

the bottom line here is clear and obvious. Do you think I would care about (and paid extra $20K/year for) curriculum and class size and tradition if I knew that my free public school had a better chance to send my kid to Harvard?

Because Harvard is free, you don’t pay for class reproduction there, and its undergraduate teaching across the board is known to be superior to that of other universities?

snigger

It’s worth noting that dumb / slacker / stoner / criminal kids are not unknown in elite UK public schools. They tend to get jobs in government. The lower-fee public schools, on the other hand, can throw them out quite easily.

Sigh, this discussion is making me cross. Although that’s mostly the fault of abb1.

Firstly, I see two major reasons for buying private education: to get a selective
school where your kid can be intelligent in peace, and as a status symbol. The
latter is an obvious Giffen good; it’s not surprising that the pure status
schools aren’t as good.

(At Cambridge I met several smart Westminsterites, some smart and musical
Wykeamists, quite a few smart people from NI’s grammar schools, and no smart
Etonians …)

Politically, there are basically two factions at play. The first lot are the “nobody
should have education better than anyone else”; this faction identifies
anywhere where a better education is given out for money and seeks to demolish
it. This is just squalid and anti-intellectual; what’s more, it will only make
the curve look worse, as the ability to buy personal tutors at home becomes
more important. That’s available to perhaps 1%, versus the private school 7%.
Also, where does this levelling down extend to? Do you ban parents buying books
for their children, as this confers an unfair educational advantage?

Bring the state sector up to the level of the private, not the private down. It
can be done; some schools are doing it. Which ones are they? How are they doing
it? The best way to get rid of the private sector is to make it unnecessary.

The second (overlapping) faction is the “if we force kids of rich/organised
parents into our rubbish state schools, they will exert political pressure to
improve the schools / their presence will raise standard”. This is not as bad
as the first, but both of the parts of it are unproven, and both parts rely on
using other people’s children as a means to a political end, which is morally
dubious. It’s also a strange idea of what “freedom of association” means.

It also includes a strange political assumption: you have enough political
power to condem private schools, but not enough political power to improve
public schools on your own, without enlisting the help of a class of people who
were a priori indifferent to you but will hate you if you try to force them
into your social model.

Evidence-based education would be great, as would education based recognising
that different children learn in different ways and therefore the system needs
to be flexible.

cian: “Where are the teachers going to go? Abroad?”

Well, yes, that’s one possibility, I’ve known people who’ve done that; or, if
you have some skills other than teaching, go to a regular job that pays better.
Someone I know has just gone from teaching to being an actuary before the age
of 30. It’s a free country.

bob b: nearly there. There’s a cultural problem with people not valuing
education. I have no idea how to fix this.

Andromeda has a very good point that’s worth repeating about private schools
for kids that have trouble fitting in in the public system.

One way would be to abolish private schools by law, a demand that has occasionally been considered by the very far left in the UK

Well, this is Adam Swift’s position iirc. Is he on the “very far left” now?

Anyway, do you honestly believe that buying off 5 out of the roughly 1250 UK private schools represents a serious first step towards the goal of their eventual abolition or are you just trying to antagonise your leftwing readers? At a rate of 5 a year, and on the unrealistic assumption that no new schools are created, it would be 250 years before we see the back of this country’s repulsive and anachronistic two-tier system of education. Until that happens people like Andrew Adonis and Tony Blair will continue to reap huge rewards which are denied to those more talented and harder working than they are, on the basis of cronyism, snobbery and their possession of undeserved educational advantages which are denied to the many.

Harry, I believe I said pretty much the same thing in #50, how is it that I misunderstand it? Still, a decent private school around route 128 (leave alone places like Phillips academy) easily beats Wellesley or Newton High. Probably even Weston High.

But the true bottom depths of American character can only be explored in a public high school in a wealthy suburb.

Well, I doubt it can be any worse than large private schools here around lac Leman, popular among second- and third-tier Russian oligarchs and other nuevo rich characters. Though who knows…

Yeah, confusing, all this education stuff. Maybe it’s just a symptom; something else needs fixing.

“Small data set, obviously, but is there perhaps some difference in the way American teachers are trained to interact with the children?”

Well, the American idea of education, being rooted in Dewey, is more student-centered than the UK’s or the French. And doesn’t emphasize loading the head with a bunch of facts.

Disadvantages are that the process of education and starting a career takes longer: when I came to the US at 25, colleagues were surprised that I had both a graduate degree and a few years of work experience, when most of my US contemporaries were still figuring out what they wanted to be when they grew up.

Advantages are that your average product of a US education hasn’t had their confidence beaten out of them from being unable to vomit out material in an exam setting. I went to an excellent Grammar (selective) school in Norn Iron, and that system served me well, as it did the others who passed the 11-plus. But I can’t say the same from the other 70% of the population who got told they were failures at age 11.

“Well, I doubt it can be any worse than large private schools here around lac Leman, popular among second- and third-tier Russian oligarchs and other nuevo rich characters. Though who knows…”

You have a lot to learn. There’s a certain absolute depth of depravity and casual sadism in a wealthy American suburban school. It’s nearly impossible to explain to a continental European. The old English public schools had it too (and some still do I suppose), but at least in the English public school there was a certain sense of tradition, an encouragement to public service and at least a potential decent education in the classics (all of that was more honored in the breach than in reality, but still).

A big problem (though it’s hushed up) in most wealth suburban American schools is that there’s nearly always a certain clique that will literally do anything: most wealthy suburbs have a problem with that clique simply casually destroying the houses of fellow students they don’t like (this often happens multiple times a year). That clique regularly will gang rape any young woman they wish to, casually and frequently torture and beat numerous other students (in some cases managing a regime where dozens of students are beaten on a daily basis), torture and kill animals and so on. All of this occurs with the explicit approval of the entire community.

The citizens of Geneva are protected from the predations of the offspring of Russian oligarchs by the simple expedient of phoning the reliable and trustworthy Genevan police-force. Try doing that in American suburbia if the thug who’s raped your daughter and burned down your house also happens to be the quarterback. You’ll be lucky if you yourself make it out alive.

Mark Ames and I are from the same town, though we went to different high schools (different school districts). And he is ten years older than I am.