January 4, 2010

Are Private Schools Worth the Investment?

How Nuture, Structure, and Latitude Add Value to the Private School Experience

Category: Academy Headlines | Community News Headlines

Tags: Monthly Column

An Independent School Head’s (Biased) View
By Mark Heller

American parents want their children to be both happy and productive into adulthood.  We want our children to be able to form and sustain meaningful relationships and to successfully hold down jobs that allow them to be not only self-sufficient, but also able and willing to contribute to their communities and the world.  Both Tolstoy and Freud put it more succinctly: we want our children to be able to love and work.  A basic formula to guide us in helping them to grow to their potential does exist: it requires that we provide appropriate levels of nurture, structure, and latitude.

An Important Sidebar:  I believe in the worth of public schooling.  I attended only public schools through high school graduation, received a very strong education, and very much believe that great schools come in many different packages.  See “Choosing a School” in the January 2009 edition of Tampa Bay Parenting.   I believe that public schools have a more difficult job to do than private schools do, for public schools in many ways have to be all things to all people.  Private schools can (and need to) choose what they want to be; they also have the added benefit of being able to choose whom they invite to join in the experience.  Though many private schools (including the one I lead) have healthy budgets for financial aid to make the experience available to more great students and community members than simply those who can pay, the unfortunate fact exists that not all families can afford the price tag.  I wish that were not the case.  Nonetheless, in this “Private School Edition” of Tampa Bay Parenting, I hope my words can be seen as a means toward exploring a few of the ways all schools contribute toward raising our children, and, perhaps, encouraging in all schools a more developmental and mindful approach regarding how we deliver the essential triad of nurture, structure, and latitude.

Nurture

Nurture in this context means unconditional love and acceptance.  Parents provide it not because a child has met expectations or achieved particular goals, but simply because we belong to each other.  Nurture requires investments of parental engagement and attention in order to be the truly positive force from which social growth and social ability are generated.  Nurture needs time, not just “quality time.”

This is true for children of all ages (even adolescents).  In schools, an enormously significant piece of the value added lies in how much attention the adults can give each student.  And it need not be academic attention in order to be transformative.  This is one reason why I am biased in favor of small schools, for in the small school, each child is more important to the life and pulse of the community.  In the small school, students cannot be anonymous.  In the small school, the frequent contact with adults socializes and acts as a counter-weight to the negative influences of peers, media, and our challenging culture.  There is power in the small school.

Structure

I am far from the first writer to say that every culture is like a box.  Each box is shaped and sized differently, but two things are always true: what’s inside the box is permissible and what’s outside generally is not.  Each family (and each school) has its own particular box, and the structure put in place by the walls of the box does much to help children learn how to be productive, socially appropriate adults.  Great clarity, comfort, and confidence come from knowing the limits of the box. 

Private schools have an easier time defining and enforcing the limits of their respective boxes.  If students choose to behave in ways that are not permissible inside the school’s culture, they may be asked to leave. 

Private schools also strive to teach students about the boxes that exist in the game of life.  We work with students of all ages (and especially with our oldest students) on teaching appropriate social interactions in the adult world and the business world.  Standards of dress, politeness, assertiveness, approach, communication, and attention to detail are part of the culture and experience inside the private school box.  Again, we may be swimming against the powerful tide of our nation’s media-saturated culture, but private schools work hard to give students advantages for their future by teaching them how to play the game ethically, morally, and well.

On the flip side, some public school teachers feel handcuffed by the limits of today’s public school box.  Whether it’s high-stakes testing or district-imposed constraints on curriculum or time allocations, teacher flexibility is generally more limited in the public sector.  A major factor that attracts teachers to private schools is the generally higher level of autonomy that exists in the private setting.  Of course, there is room for teacher autonomy in the public sector and there is structure in the private sector, but the balance between those two poles is struck a bit differently in the respective arenas.

Latitude

Latitude involves granting children the freedom to learn from experience.  Problem-solving skills arise from confronting and dealing with problems, not from shielding children from problems.  This is often a difficult area to navigate, as too much latitude can lead to too much unsupervised time (teenagers home alone for the weekend), and too little latitude (parents jumping in to solve every problem or continually smoothing the way for the child) can rob the child of the valuable lessons they will learn from adversity.  A huge part of the value of sports is that children can experience both success and lack of success in real, close, and immediate ways.  The learning that comes from those experiences can be very meaningful.  Opportunities to play sports are more common in private schools, many of which have “no-cut” policies.

Latitude in the school setting need not be overly permissive (and is not when structure is clearly and consistently communicated).  Instead, latitude takes the form of allowing appropriate trust and risk, taking the challenging course, attempting to put on an event, designing and producing the yearbook, or starting a club.

Latitude is very successfully negotiated when it is accompanied by the watchful eyes of many caring adults.  Again, the generally smaller size of private schools allows for this watchfulness to happen in very successful ways for a high percentage of students.  

Both parents and schools need to provide our young people with nurture, structure, and latitude.  Though each family and each school provides a different mix, private school parents often take great comfort that the partnerships they form with their child’s school reinforce and support the structures the family aims to provide.  Both mission and scale contribute to this value added in the private school experience.  Recognizing the power of scale, Bill and Melinda Gates (both private school grads) are pursuing significant school reform through their foundation’s small schools initiative.  Efforts like the Gates’ see private schools as a laboratory to help us understand how to improve education for all of our nation’s students.  Our children deserve no less.