Private Schooling Over Public Schooling example essay topic

Now more than ever parents in the United States have become very disgruntled with their children's education. The main reason behind this massive dissatisfaction is that public schools are not living up to parent's expectations. The standards which the public schools that today's parents, and their parents, attended are quiet different from the ones their children are now attending. It is widely felt that public schools are not performing their basic civil duties.

With this, parents are now taking their children's education and future into their own hands, and doing so quite efficiently. Many parents are turning to alternative means of educating to school their children. One option is home schooling. Home schooling is simply the education of school-aged children at home rather than at school. There is another sector, which opts for private school systems. Parents are choosing home schooling over public because public schools are not meeting their children's academic, individual, and special education needs.

First, parents expect that their children will know how to read, write, and acquire basic math skills by the time they graduate. However, public schools throughout the United States are failing to teach these basic academic skills. The French Commission for American Education reported that: 'If there be a nation which has expected everything from... education... that nation certainly is the people of the United States' (160). It seems that not much has changed. Recent studies show that of the 2.4 millions who graduate, as many as twentieth percentiles cannot read or write at the eighth grade level. This is a tragic statistic for a nation claiming to be so developed.

There are more opportunities to education in the United States than any other country in the world, yet evidence shows that the United States ranks 'at the bottom of nineteen industrial nations in reading, writing, and arithmetic. ' In addition, students are ranking lower than ever on Academic Achievement test (ACT.) Children who attend public schools rank in the fiftieth percentile whereas private schooled children typically score at the seventieth to hundredth percentile. To add to these statistics, in December 1989, the education press reported the distinctive news that private schooled children are doing better in math, science, reading, and writing compared to children attending public schools. Secondly, parents are choosing private schooling over public schooling because public schools are no longer taking student's individual needs into consideration. In his article Gatto writes:' The children are numbered so that if any get away they can be returned to the right class.

Over the years the variety of ways children are numbered by schools has increased dramatically, until it is hard to see the human being plainly under the weight of numbers they carry' (168). Since student are taught lessons based on an academic calendar year, they are expected to be able to complete specific tasks by the end of that year. When students fail to meet these expectations they are still allow moving to the next grade with no understanding what they are missing. Teachers in the public school systems are teaching our students as though they are on an assembly line. To be fair, teachers for public schools have their hands tied over what or how to conduct their classes. These same teachers have to report to a political game at their school and government rules.

For example, if a child is not ready to go on to the next class, his teacher would have to go thought administration discussions, revaluation, and decisions. Gatto says:' Indeed, the lesson of the bells is that no work is worth finishing, so why care too deeply about anything?' (169). In contrast, students from private schools are seldom needed to be help back since those schools have smaller class, often fifteen to seventeen students per class which in turn allow teachers to work on one-to-one, Jean Anyone writes in her article: 'work is developing one's analytical intellectual powers. Children are continually ask to reason through a problem, to produce intellectual products that are both logically sound and of top academic quality' (199). Students of private schools get individual attention from their teachers. In sum, parents are finding private sectors meet the individual needs of their children better and especially at an early education in their children academic life than public schools.

Finally, parents such as myself, find that private schools offers extra programs which we consider important in our children academic and cultural developments. For example bilingual programs are being taught in the early childhood at many private schools. Learning another language beside their own helps children to have a better prospective of the world and what is around them. It is also proven that learning a second language in early childhood is much easier and faster than later in life.

With a worldwide economy and global communication, it is essential for our children to be able to interact globally either from the Internet perspective to jobs related traveling or recreation traveling. We can no longer ignore our neighbors nor keep a blind eye to what is going on outside of our nation's borders. Public schools may have been once the center for learning in the United States, 'What is currently under discussion in our national hysteria about failing academic performance misses the point. Schools teach exactly what they are intended to teach and they do it well: how to be good Egyptian and remain in your place in the pyramid' (Gatto 173). However, today they are not meeting children's academic, individual, and economics' needs. As a result, parents are choosing private school to educate their children and statistics are enforcing their believe in these maters.

Private schools are currently offering the best solution to their problems facing the public school systems.

Bibliography

Anyon, Jean. 'From Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work. ' Reading America. Cultural contexts for critical thinking and writing 4th ed. EDS. Gary Colombo, Robert Cullen, and Bonnie Lisle. Boston: Bedford Books / St Martin's Press. 1998.
186-202. ' From Report of the French Commission on American Education, 1879' Reading America.
EDS. 1998.
159-163. Gatto, John Taylor. 'The Seven Lesson Schoolteacher' Reading America. EDS. 1998.