Do Private Schools Really Just Pass Everyone? I Found Out At A Family Barbecue
Last weekend we had the annual extended family barbecue at my uncle’s house out in the suburbs. The whole thing smelled like burnt hot dogs and my cousin’s weird citrus vodka punch that gives me a 24-hour headache, same as every year. Halfway through, my aunt Linda cornered three of us by the cooler to brag about her son Tyler, who’s a junior at the same private prep school my other cousin Lila teaches at. Tyler’s got a B average this semester, she said, even though he’s missed almost a month of school for ski trips and that golf camp he did over spring break. “They really take care of their kids there,” she said, winking like we all know what that means. That’s when the question popped into my head that I’ve been turning over ever since: do they really just pass anyone, as long as the check clears?
I pulled Lila away to get another beer, away from Linda, because I knew she’d tell the real story. She’s been teaching 10th grade English there for seven years, pays her mortgage with that salary, has two little kids in daycare, so she’s not gonna yell about how corrupt it is from the rooftops, but she’ll be honest when it’s just us.
She leaned against the back fence, kicked a loose acorn across the grass, and sighed. “It’s not that simple,” she said. Which is the answer no one ever wants, right? We want it to be all good or all bad. But she gave me the example that’s stuck with me all week. There’s this kid Jake, in her second period class this year. His dad sits on the school’s board of directors, gave a million bucks for the new football stadium two years ago. Jake failed every single quiz first semester, never turned in a single major essay, once fell asleep mid-presentation and snored for 10 minutes while the whole class recorded him on their phones. Lila marked him down for an F, wrote a whole note about how he wasn’t meeting any of the grade level standards, turned it in to the head of guidance.
Three days later she got called into that tiny office off the main hallway, the one right next to the copy room that smells like old coffee and toner. The copy machine was jammed the whole meeting, kept beeping every two minutes, so she could barely hear what the guidance head was saying anyway. What she got was: Jake’s got anxiety, holding him back would destroy his self-esteem, we have a summer enrichment program that’ll get him caught up, we need to bump him up to a D minus so he can move on to 11th grade.
Lila said she argued a little. Said if he can’t write a basic thesis statement, what’s he gonna do in 11th grade? They said that’s next year’s teacher’s problem. She didn’t push it too hard. Why would she? The pay is twice what she made at the public high school down the road, her kids get free tuition there, she can’t risk rocking the boat that hard. That’s the part no one talks about, right? It’s not just the headmaster being corrupt, it’s all the teachers having to look the other way because their own livelihoods depend on it. That feels awkward to say out loud, but it’s true.
But then she said it’s not always like that. Two years ago, she had a girl, Mia, whose parents paid full tuition every year, no extra donations, no connections on the board. Mia had undiagnosed ADHD, missed a lot of school when her mom was going through cancer treatment, failed two classes. Lila suggested the same summer enrichment thing they gave Jake. They made her repeat 10th grade, and when her parents complained, they basically said if you don’t like it you can leave. They left. Mia went to the public high school, last I heard she’s doing fine. But that’s just how it goes. It’s not a rule that everyone passes. It’s a flexible rule that bends for the people who matter to the school’s bottom line.
I remembered when I was in college, I tutored a 9th grader from another fancy private school on the north shore. Twice a week, his mom would pay me 50 bucks cash to help him with his English homework. This kid could barely read a full page of a novel without getting distracted, couldn’t string two coherent sentences together for an essay. I worked with him for three months, and by the end he could write a halfway decent paragraph, but that was it. His teacher gave him a B minus that semester. His mom called me to thank me, said I did such a great job. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that kid should’ve been getting a C at best, probably an F if we’re being honest. But the school didn’t want to deal with her complaining, so they just bumped his grade up.
Lila said the whole thing’s just a balancing act. They need the tuition money, they need the big donations, so they bend over backwards for the people who can give them what they want. If you’re not that person, you get held to the regular, actually strict, standard. It’s not that they always let you pass. It’s that they let you pass if it benefits them to let you pass.
I walked back to the barbecue after talking to Lila, and Linda was still telling anyone who’d listen about Tyler’s B average. I didn’t say anything. What am I gonna do, start a fight at a barbecue over high school grading? My own sister is saving up to send her 8 year old to that same school, because the public schools in our neighborhood are underfunded and overcrowded. I haven’t asked her what she thinks about all this. I don’t really want to know, honestly.
It’s not some big national scandal, I guess. It’s just the way things work. You don’t get a neat ending out of it. No one got fired, Jake’s gonna graduate next year, go to a college his dad donated to, get a job somewhere through connections, and no one will ever know he couldn’t write a solid essay in 10th grade. Lila still goes to work every day, still grades papers, still looks the other way when she has to. I still go to the annual barbecue, still drink the bad citrus punch, and still leave wondering how much of what we call “excellence” in private schools is just buying passing grades. (1182 words)
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