Would 100% Private Education Solve America’s School Problems? A Teacher’s Perspective
The conversation started over turkey, of course. My brother-in-law, a good-natured guy who listens to a lot of talk radio, was holding court about the state of education. “The public school system is a monopoly,” he said, waving a drumstick. “If we just broke it up, made it all private, the market would fix it. Schools would have to compete, and the kids would benefit.”
I didn’t say anything right away. I was too busy thinking about Maria, one of my seventh graders from last year, and the stack of paperwork that followed her everywhere.
Maria came to us in October, after her family moved for her dad’s job. She was quiet, kept her head down, and avoided eye contact whenever I called on her. Her previous school had flagged her for “reading concerns,” but the file was thin. By November, I noticed she would stare at a passage for a long time, then guess at the words. On a hunch, I asked our special education coordinator to screen her.
It took six months to get her a full evaluation. There was a backlog, a that would be familiar to anyone who’s worked in a public school. Meanwhile, Maria kept showing up. She did worksheets. She tried. She cried in the hallway after reading aloud from a science textbook.
In March, the report came back: dyslexia, moderate to severe. We put an IEP in place—accommodations, multisensory reading instruction, extra time on tests. By May, she was reading a graphic novel, slowly, but on her own. She came to my desk before class one morning. “I used to think I was stupid,” she said. “But I’m not. I just learn different.”
That is what public education did for her. And I couldn’t help wondering, sitting at that dinner table, whether a private school would have done the same.
My brother-in-law’s vision of a fully private system sounds clean. Schools compete for customers, parents vote with their feet, and the weak institutions close. In theory, every school becomes a charter school, a private academy, a Montessori, a STEM magnet. Parents get a voucher or a tax credit, and they choose. The government steps back. Innovation flourishes.
But here’s the thing about private schools: They get to choose their students. Most of them. They can reject a kid with a history of behavior problems, a kid with no records, a kid whose parents missed the application deadline because they were working two jobs. They can quietly say, “We don’t have the resources for a child with severe dyslexia.” That’s not malicious; it’s just practical. A private school has to balance its budget. A reading specialist for one student may not make sense financially.
Public schools don’t have that option. We take everyone. We take the kid in foster care, the kid who can’t afford lunch, the kid whose third-grade teacher is the only stable adult in their life. And yes, the system is bloated and sometimes dysfunctional. Bureaucracy can crush good ideas. Standardized test pressure can make us teach to the middle. But there is a baseline of responsibility that no private business would ever accept—because no private business could afford to.
I’m not saying public schools are perfect. I’ve lost count of the meetings where we talked about data and didn’t talk about the kid in the corner who was clearly exhausted. I’ve seen wonderful teachers burned out by endless paperwork. I’ve seen principals manage buildings like great principals, and I’ve seen others who were just placeholders. The system is not some sacred cow. It has real problems.
But the conservative critique often misses something essential. Education is not like buying a phone. When you buy a phone, you only care about your own phone. When a school educates a child, everyone in the community is affected. That child becomes a nurse, a mechanic, a neighbor, a voter. If a child is not educated, we all live with the consequence. The market doesn’t care about that—it cares about the transaction. The rest of us have to care.
There’s another part of it, too, that doesn’t get talked about enough: the value of a common experience. A private school system would fragment us by income, by religion, by ideology. The kids on the north side would go to the expensive academy. The kids on the south side would end up in the discount private school, the one that rents space in a church basement and can’t afford enough textbooks. We would stop saying “those kids” from the other district. We would say “the kids at the other school,” and we would be fine with it, because they chose to be there? No. Their parents chose. The five-year-old didn’t choose anything.
I thought about this as my brother-in-law continued, talking about teachers’ unions and administrative bloat. Some of it was fair. Some of it was oversimplified. I decided to say something.
“So what happens to a kid like Maria?” I asked.
He looked confused. “Who?”
I told him about Maria. I told him about the wait list for testing and the IEP and the slow progress. I told him about the morning she told me she wasn’t stupid. I said, “In a private school, they would have moved her to a different school. They wouldn’t say it, but they’d suggest it. She wouldn’t have gotten a free evaluation. Her parents couldn’t afford one. So what would happen to Maria?”
He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “Well, maybe the market would create a school specifically for kids with dyslexia.”
“Maybe a few,” I said. “But not in every town. Not in the small places. Not for everyone who needs it. And what about the kids who don’t have a family that knows how to fight for them?”
He shook his head. “So you’re saying we should just keep doing what we’re doing?”
No, that’s not what I was saying. That’s the thing. I’m not defending the status quo. I’d love to see public schools get more flexibility—more autonomy over their budget, their staffing, their curriculum. Let innovative principals and teachers actually run their schools instead of following mandates from a central office. Give parents real choices within the public system: specialized programs, language immersion, project-based learning. In a lot of cities, that already happens. Magnet schools, dual enrollment, community partnerships.
What I’m saying is that 100% private is the wrong answer, because it guarantees a race where some children start three laps behind and the race organizers don’t care who finishes.
Dinner ended, and we didn’t resolve anything. My brother-in-law went back to talk radio, and I went back to grading essays. But I still think about Maria. She finished seventh grade, then moved again. I hope she’s getting the support she needs. And I hope, whatever direction this country takes in education policy, we don’t forget about the kids whose names aren’t in the application pile.
Because the market works. For those who can buy. For everyone else, it just leaves them outside the gate.
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