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Public School vs. Private School: Argumentative Comparison

Table of contents, public schools: accessibility and diversity, public schools: limited resources and class sizes, private schools: specialized curriculum and resources, private schools: affordability and socioeconomic disparities.

• Baker, B. D., & Welner, K. G. (Eds.). (2017). School Choice: Policies and Outcomes. University of California Press.
• Henig, J. R., Hula, R. C., & Orr, M. T. (Eds.). (2019). Educational Inequality and School Finance: Why Money Matters for America's Students. Harvard Education Press.
• Kahlenberg, R. D. (Ed.). (2013). The Future of School Integration: Socioeconomic Diversity as an Education Reform Strategy. Century Foundation Press.
• Ravitch, D. (2013). Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools. Knopf.
• Van Dunk, D. D., & Taylor, S. S. (Eds.). (2020). Global Perspectives on School Choice and Privatization. Information Age Publishing.

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Home — Essay Samples — Education — Public School — Public Schools vs. Private Schools: A Comparative Analysis

Public Schools Vs. Private Schools: a Comparative Analysis

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Words: 509 |

Published: Feb 7, 2024

Words: 509 | Page: 1 | 3 min read

Table of contents

Funding: the financial divide, class size: small vs. large, curriculum: standardized vs. specialized, extracurricular opportunities: quantity vs. quality, student diversity: multicultural vs. homogeneous, conclusion: making the right choice.

• Public schools are funded by taxpayer dollars through government budgets.
• Due to budget constraints, public schools often have limited resources for facilities, materials, and staff.
• Many public schools face challenges in maintaining and upgrading their infrastructure.
• Private schools rely primarily on tuition fees, donations, and endowments to fund their operations.
• As a result, private schools generally have higher per-student spending and access to additional resources.
• They often maintain well-equipped facilities and may offer specialized programs due to their financial advantages.
• Public schools typically have larger class sizes, which can lead to less individualized attention for students.
• Teacher-student ratios may vary widely within the public school system, impacting the quality of instruction.
• Private schools often boast smaller class sizes, which foster more personalized instruction and allow for closer teacher-student relationships.
• Lower student-to-teacher ratios contribute to increased interaction, making it easier for students to seek help when needed.
• Public schools are typically governed by state or district regulations, leading to standardized curricula.
• While they may offer a broad range of courses, public schools have limited flexibility in tailoring education to individual student needs.
• Private schools enjoy more curricular autonomy, allowing for tailored programs that cater to the specific needs and interests of students.
• They often offer specialized curricula, such as Montessori or religious-based education, to meet the demands of diverse learners.
• Public schools often provide a wide range of extracurricular activities , including sports, clubs, and community involvement.
• However, the availability and quality of these opportunities may vary depending on the school's budget and available resources.
• Private schools offer diverse extracurricular options, including unique clubs, activities, and experiences.
• Smaller student bodies may allow for increased participation, leadership roles, and a more tightly-knit community.
• Public schools are typically more diverse in terms of socioeconomic status , ethnicity, and backgrounds.
• Students in public schools are exposed to a broader range of perspectives and cultures, fostering tolerance and understanding.
• Private schools may have less socioeconomic and ethnic diversity due to tuition costs, potentially leading to a more homogenous environment.
• While they may provide a more consistent demographic, private schools often have smaller class sizes, allowing for increased individual attention.

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Public Schools vs. Private Schools Essay

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Public and Private Schools: Comparing

Private schools, public schools.

Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school. – Albert Einstein.

Are private schools more effective than public schools to educate children? The first couple of United States sent their children to the élites private school in Washington and so did the grandchildren of the present vice president of the United States. Study shows that all congressional representatives staying in Washington send their children to public schools and 25 percent of the public school teachers send their children to private schools. Research has shown that the students of privately run schools perform better in standardized tests than students from public schools. Nevertheless, the question that arises is that how true is these findings? If at all there are differences between private and public schools, where are the differences? Are there no similarities between the two? If we take what Einstein said is true, should such a distinction be made?

Proponents of private schools argue that they provide higher quality of education as compared to public schools whereas on the other side of the debate, the argument is that public schools are better suited to meet the educational demand of the nations. Clearly, there are inherent differences between the two types of schooling. However, the aim of the essay is not to take a side in the debate around public and private schools but to compare and contrast both system of schooling. In the following paragraphs, this essay will evaluate the differences and similarities between public and private schools.

Private schools are independently run schools, which cater to small number of students and are costlier. There are more than 28 thousand private schools in the US and 25 thousand in the UK. These schools run independent of local or central government. As they are not under any government regulations, they are not restricted under the state budget. They also get extra freedom in designing their education system and curriculum.

The annual cost of private schools in the United States in 2005-06 was $14000 for grades 1 to 3 and $15000 for grades 6 to 8, and $16000 for 9 to 12. The fees for the boarding schools are higher ranging from $29000 to $32000. In the UK, the average cost of private school per annum is £2400 to £5000 and in a boarding school, the cost ranges from £3100 to £5600.

As these schools are costlier, they cater to a limited number of students. Further, they are also not under compulsion to enrol all the students seeking admission. Therefore, these schools are in a position to design their curriculum in order to meet individual child’s needs. In a 1915 letter to the editor of New York Times , has mentioned that private schools are more “democratic” in nature and have greater “personal influence” over pupil at an age when they most need it. As these schools have individualistic attention on students, co-curricular activities like arts, music, sports, etc. are also a part of the educational values. Therefore, along with the general curriculum (like maths, English, science, etc.) children are also introduced to other activities.

The class sizes in private schools are small. As students have to go through a selection process, they form an almost homogeneous crowd with similar goals. Not all students are accepted in such schools, thus limiting the access of students with special needs to such schools. The following paragraphs look at the nature of public schools their functioning.

In contrast to private run schools, public schools are state or government run schools. In the UK, such schools are called state schools. They follow local, state or central government laws. As they are state run, these schools receive funding from the government. Therefore, the budget of these schools is fixed by the government. Admissions to such schools are easy, as the schools have to accept all children who seek admission. There are no tuition fees and education is free. Still a test is set a selection process.

The teaching staffs in these schools are state certified. The certification is a surety that the teachers have the necessary educational background and experience to teach in schools. The public schools offer a general program in terms of curriculum. Here the curriculum is set by a mandate by the state and the school board has no influence over it.

In the public schools, children from all background can be found, thus boasting of diversity. They usually reflect the community. Further, due to the existence of special education laws, students with special needs can be taught in such schools. The teachers are trained to handle such requirements. Usually the schools are larger in public schools.

There are a lot of difference between public and private schools. Private schools are costlier and take in few students. Arguably, individual attention can be more in such a school. While public schools can boast of diversity and students, get to interact with children from various socioeconomic backgrounds. Private schools can decide their own curriculum and the management decision are not bounded by state governance. Public schools must accept all students who wish to enrol in the school, while private schools have the liberty to accept students who meet their standards. Public schools must adhere to state regulations and decisions. Private schools, even though they have to follow some state rules, their governance is privately run independent of government intervention. There is a difference in the graduation rate from private and public schools. 90-95 percent student from private schools enter college while 62 to 67 percent of the students from public schools enter college. The difference is attributable to the socioeconomic background of the student’s and the selective admission procedure of private schools.

There are certain similarities between private and public schools. All schools have to adhere to certain state laws. For instance, both the schools must follow the general curriculum form like teaching maths, science, and english. Regulations and disciplining of students are practiced in both forms of schools. Though private schools have an option of taking or not taking standardized tests, they usually take them and public schools usually take them mandatorily. In both form of schools student’s safety is a priority issue for the school management.

Even though there are more differences than similarities between private and public schools, it should be overlooked that both type of schools primarily are educational bodies. Their main aim is to educate students.

Suzanne Fields, “Public or private schools”, Washington Times, 2008, p21.

Kevin C. Duncan and Jonathan Sandy, “Explaining The Performance Gap Between Public And Private School Students”, Eastern Economic Journal, Vol. 33, No. 2, 2007.

Great Schools, “Private vs. Public Schools: What’s the Difference?” , 2009. Web.

Private Schools Directory & Guide 2009.

Letter to the Editor by William F. Slocum, President Colorado College, “Public and Private Schools”, The New York Times, 1915.

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The Public School Advantage: Why Public Schools Outperform Private Schools

The following is an excerpt from the preface and from chapter seven of the book, "Reconsidering Choice, Competition, and Autonomy as the Remedy in American Education."

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By Christopher A. Lubienski & Sarah Theule Lubienski Dec. 9, 2013

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There has long been a perception that public schools are second-rate—that anyone who can get their child into a private school should do so. Such desires for private education are so strong that in some districts we’ve even allocated public funds—through voucher and charter programs—to allow those who can’t afford private education a chance to. But what if our underlying assumption is wrong? What if private schools aren’t better? That is the stunning conclusion of The Public School Advantage. Eschewing most ideologies in favor of empirical data, it argues, via evidence, that our longstanding but much-beleaguered public education system is still the best choice we have.

Of the many competing plans to improve America’s schools, one overall agenda distinguishes itself in terms of its logical potential for fundamentally changing education. The innovative strategy of giving parents more choice of schools, of encouraging competition between those schools, and of granting schools more autonomy to satisfy parents—in short, “incentivizing” education—has taken hold as perhaps the most prominent and promising idea for improving American education at its core. This approach is evident in efforts such as charter schools, vouchers and tax credits for private schools, private management of schools, and privatization. All such “incentivist” approaches draw on market mechanisms modeled after the private sector, including the private education sector.

The reason reformers look to the private sector is obvious. The beauty of the logic is its simplicity. Governments and the bureaucracies they generate are thought to lead to overspending and ineffectiveness—whether the U.S. Postal Service, military procurements, or public schools. This is because governments typically administer enterprises on a monopoly basis, setting up barriers to potential competitors in order to protect their own entities in areas such as education. Hence, virtually all public funding goes only to “public” schools that are traditionally regulated by government bureaucrats, run by administrators who have obtained an official endorsement from the state, and staffed by teachers who have been certified by state-approved teacher training programs. As with all monopolies, this may lead to complacency, and even disincentives for employees to innovate or otherwise respond to the needs of their “customers.” But the private sector, driven by choice and competitive market incentives, is thought to produce better outcomes, such as those associated with FedEx, eBay, or private schools. There, school employees have built-in incentives to work harder, or at least more effectively, at providing a better education, for fear of losing students, losing tuition funds, losing their jobs, or even seeing their school “go out of business.”

At least that is what we thought. Indeed, that is the narrative of the market and, increasingly, public policy in the United States and around the globe. Yet the evidence we have found tells quite a different story than what theorists and the current crop of self-proclaimed reformers assert. Specifically, it points to a new, emerging view of the academic performance and impact of public schools in contrast to the outcomes of their more autonomous counterparts in the charter and private sectors. And the question of the impact of different types of schools, or schools in different sectors, is paramount in this era of choice, charter schools, and vouchers for private schools.

Yet, despite the significance and timeliness of this issue, this topic was not really on the research agenda for either of us. We were each happily ensconced in our own work—one studying mathematics instruction and achievement, the other examining school organization and innovations. While the question of achievement in different types of schools had occasionally appeared on the radar of the wider research community in recent years, it was usually around the hotly contested voucher debates—often vicious arguments that seemed to be geared more toward personal acrimony than enlightenment when it comes to social policy. Indeed, like many researchers, we believed the question of a beneficial private school effect on achievement had been essentially settled by the seminal studies of the 1980s and ’90s, and we had virtually no inclination to delve into that area. And then, while examining data on mathematics instruction from the 2000 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), Sarah added “private school” as a control variable, and some surprising results appeared.

We were both skeptical when we first saw the initial results: public schools appeared to be attaining higher levels of mathematics performance than demographically comparable private and charter schools—and math is thought to be a better indicator of what is taught by schools than, say, reading, which is often more influenced directly and indirectly by experiences in the home. These patterns flew in the face of both the common wisdom and the research consensus on the effectiveness of public and private schools. Immediately, we checked to see what had happened in the analysis, whether “public” and “private” had been “reverse-coded” or some other such error was involved. But after further investigation and more targeted analyses, the results held up. And they held up (or were “robust” in the technical jargon) even when we used different models and variables in the analyses. We eventually posted a technical paper on a respected website and published a short article, which received some attention. And then, like any good researchers, we applied for funding to study this issue in more depth using the most recent, comprehensive databases. The results across datasets are consistent and robust—indicating that these patterns are substantial and stable, regardless of changes in the details of the analyses.

These results indicate that, despite reformers’ adulation of the autonomy enjoyed by private and charter schools, this factor may in fact be the reason these schools are underperforming. That is, contrary to the dominant thinking on this issue, the data show that the more regulated public school sector embraces more innovative and effective professional practices, while independent schools often use their greater autonomy to avoid such reforms, leading to curricular stagnation.

There is an old joke about an economist walking across a college campus with a student. When the student notices a five-dollar bill on the ground, the economist is dismissive: “It can’t be a five dollar bill. If it were, someone would have picked it up.”

While not exactly a rib splitter, this joke illustrates the inherent, if underappreciated, limitations of assumption-driven disciplines such as economics in understanding the world. Too often, people not only interpret evidence through ideological assumptions, but ignore facts that fall outside of, or run counter to, those assumptions. Particularly in areas such as a market theory of education, surrogate evidence on the quality of organizational options based on presumptions of how rationally self-interested individuals would act is often privileged over actual evidence of how organizations are really performing. That is, ideological assumptions often trump empirical evidence.

Such is the case with education. If families—and especially parents with defined preferences for better schooling—are avoiding public schools and are instead competing to get their children into private and charter schools, often paying substantial amounts of their family income toward tuition or other costs, then this must indicate that such independent schools are better, according to this narrow economic logic. Indeed, such a conclusion is constantly affirmed in the media and in reports from countless think tanks and blogs. Yet as the data indicate, those behaviors are not an accurate reflection of the reality of school effectiveness. So why would people pay for a product or service when a superior product or service is available for free? Such was the perplexity expressed by one prominent economist when faced with unexpected patterns such as these:

This result is quite surprising, because it appears to violate simple price theory. Public schools are free; [independent] schools often charge substantial tuition, making them noticeably more expensive than the alternatives. Yet some percentage of parents systematically chooses [independent] schools despite high cost and mediocre performance. Is this real? 1

According to this logic, public schools are known to be inferior because people are willing to pay for an alternative; if they had real value, we could tell because people would embrace them … just like they would have embraced the wayward greenback.

Yet the evidence presented here on mathematics achievement — the subject that best reflects school effects — in nationally representative samples of elementary schools suggests otherwise. Despite what many reformers, policy makers, media elites, and even parents may believe, these public schools are, on average, actually providing a more effective educational service relative to schools in the independent sector. In fact, the limitations of our data, if anything, likely underemphasize the notable performance of public schools, given that factors not measured in our data sets would favor private, independent schools—public schools are doing something right that overcomes these factors. While this challenges the very basis of the current movement to remake public education based on choice, competition, and autonomy, our analyses indicate that public schools are enjoying an advantage in academic effectiveness because they are aligned with a more professional model of teaching and learning. Meanwhile, attributes such as operational autonomy championed by the market theory of education—or, as it is increasingly a belief system rather than a policy theory, we might use the term “marketism”—may actually be hindering or even diverting schools in the independent sector from higher achievement as they use their freedom in embracing stagnant, less effective curricular practices.

Reprinted with permission from The Public School Advantage: Why Public Schools Outperform Private Schools, by Christopher A. and Sarah Theule Lubienski, published by the University of Chicago Press. © 2014 University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved.

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