Would 100% Private Education Fix What’s Wrong With American Schools? A Parent’s Honest Look
The tour guide was a sixth grader named Marcus, and he walked us past the art room with the confidence of someone who had never been asked to defend his school. There were twelve easels set up, each one holding a half-finished canvas. A girl in the corner was mixing paint on a piece of cardboard. Marcus said, “We all get to do a project in the spring. Last year I made a birdhouse out of old skateboards.”
My daughter, who had spent the last six months telling us she hated school, squeezed my hand and whispered, “They have a garden.”
That was what sold her. Not the small classes. Not the promised field trips. The garden.
We were there because our daughter was struggling in third grade. Her public school was fine—good teachers, a decent building, a principal who returned emails. But something wasn’t clicking. She came home tired, cranky, and convinced she was bad at reading. The private school tuition was painful, but the idea of not watching her cry over a worksheet every night was more painful.
The question that kept circling in my head—and in conversations with my conservative dad—was simple: If private schools are this good, why not just make all schools private? Let the market sort it out. Let parents choose. Competition forces everyone to get better, right?
I believed that for a long time. I still do in some ways. Standing in that quiet hallway, though, I wasn’t as sure.
The principal met with us in a room full of student artwork. She was warm, direct, and honest. She explained that every family signs a contract: twenty volunteer hours a year, a daily reading log, and a promise that if a child struggles socially, the school expects parents to partner with them. She also mentioned, almost casually, that they did not have a special education program. “We don’t have many kids who need that,” she said. “If it comes up, we help families find a school that fits.”
That stuck with me. Because the thing that made the private school feel so good wasn’t just the garden or the art easels. It was the word “fit.” The school got to decide who fit and who didn’t. If my daughter had a behavior issue, they could ask her to leave. That’s what a hundred percent private education really means. It means some schools will have a garden and a skateboard birdhouse. It also means some schools will have a waiting list and a front gate.
My dad likes to say that a private school is just a public school without the worst twenty percent dragging everyone down. I understand the frustration. He taught at a public high school for thirty years, and he saw kids come to class hungry, exhausted, or stoned. He saw teachers spend more time on paperwork than on lesson plans. He watched good principals get pushed around by district politics.
But when I asked him if every kid in America should be able to afford a private school, he went quiet. Because the honest answer is that private schools work partly because they can say no. They can cap class sizes. They can require parent involvement. They can refuse to take a child who needs a full-time aide or a specialized reading intervention. Public schools don’t have that choice. They take everyone, and everyone is messy.
I saw this play out in my own family. My son, who is four years older than my daughter, has a mild attention issue. He’s not formally diagnosed, but every teacher we’ve had has said the same thing: he needs movement and frequent check-ins. His public school teacher set up a system where he could stand at his desk and use a fidget cube. She emailed me a photo of the setup. She did that without me even asking, during the first week of school.
The private school we toured? They had a strict no-fidget policy because, in their words, “the kids have to learn to manage themselves.” For some kids, that’s true. For a kid like my son, it would have been a disaster.
So the idea of a hundred percent private education isn’t just about money. It’s about who gets left out. It’s about what happens to a child who doesn’t fit a school’s vision of a great student. In a fully private system, that child might end up with no school at all. Or they might end up in a cheap, unregulated school with a name like “Bright Future Academy” and a parking lot full of vans.
I’m not saying the public system is perfect. Our daughter’s public school read out loud too fast during assessments. The teacher didn’t realize she was avoiding words she didn’t know. It took a parent-teacher conference where I said, “She tears her paper up at night,” before anyone took her reading anxiety seriously.
But that’s what happened: someone took it seriously. The school sat down with us. They agreed to let her use whisper reading headphones. They assigned her to a reading group of three instead of six. Her teacher started sending home a simple checklist instead of a long worksheet. She still didn’t love school, but she stopped dreading it.
The private school tour was a good reality check. It reminded me that smaller doesn’t automatically mean better. A school can have a garden and still not have a plan for a kid who needs extra time to decode words. A school can be brilliant and selective and still not know how to handle a child who has a meltdown at 2 p.m.
If I could tell parents anything, it’s this: when you’re looking at any school, private or public, ask the awkward questions. Don’t ask about test scores. Ask, “What does a child who’s having a bad day look like in your classroom?” Ask, “What happens when a lesson isn’t working?” Ask, “How many kids in a class have an IEP, and who helps them?” Those answers tell you more than any brochure.
We didn’t end up switching schools. Not because the private school wasn’t good—it was. It was warm and beautiful and Marcus was a wonderful ambassador. But we realized that the thing our daughter needed wasn’t a garden. She needed a teacher who looked at her and said, “I know you can read. Let’s figure out where it’s hard.” And for better or worse, the public school down the street had a teacher who was willing to do that.
I still think competition can improve schools. I still think school choice matters. But a hundred percent private education would mean those choices get made by someone else’s gatekeeper. The kid who struggles with attention, the girl who can’t sit still in phonics block, the child whose parents work two jobs and can’t volunteer twenty hours—they’d all end up somewhere. The question is who decides where.
For now, we’re staying public. My daughter still checks out books from the school library, and last week she read one to me without stopping to tear the page. She’s not cured, and neither is the system. But someone saw her when it mattered. That doesn’t require a private school. It requires a teacher who’s looking.
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