In the April 2021 issue of The Atlantic, a writer named Caitlin Flanagan published an article titled “Private Schools Have Become Truly Obscene.” A friend sent it to me because I am an educator, because I work for an independent school and send my children here, and because she thought I might be interested. The subhead surely was something: “Elite schools breed entitlement, entrench inequality—and then pretend to be engines of social change.” Hmmm. I wondered what exactly made a school elite, in her view, and further wondered why she was so sure that these schools are pretending. I was interested all right. I spent 40 minutes of my life reading that article, time I spent growing increasingly irritated by the tone, the self-righteousness, and the sheer bias of the author. The only way I can make it worth that time is by writing a response.
Flanagan is described by her bio on The Atlantic’s website as a “highly entertaining social critic unafraid to take on self-indulgence and political correctness, and her essays provide penetrating and witheringly funny observations about the sexes and their discontents.” So, it seems she took that same tone with which she craftily dismantles other people and put it to work on the subject of education. The problem is that she needs to educate herself more on the subject itself: it’s one thing to make general witty observations about “the sexes and their discontents” and quite another to throw outlandish accusations on an entire population who support private education. Flanagan clearly has a bone to pick, but it seems to be to the detriment of her own credibility as a critic who actually has something important to say. Let’s examine why.
First, in full disclosure—I grew up the last of four children, and I was the only one not to go to public school. Some people lump Catholic schools in with independent schools, and some call them parochial, but either way, because it requires tuition, it counts as private, I suppose. Was it elite? I am not sure how Flanagan defines that, but it seems to be mostly tuition-based. I also went to private universities that could be considered elite, and after teaching both at a public and a parochial school, I settled into a career in independent schools, which my kids have always attended. Despite all this, I find myself reading Flanagan’s caricature of a private school parent and do not recognize that person. It doesn’t look like me or the many, many parents whose children I have had the privilege of teaching over the years. Maybe it’s because I am not elite enough?
Flanagan begins her assault on private education by taking us into the world of the Dalton School in Manhattan. Go big or go home, right? While I know of Dalton, I do not know anyone who teaches there or sends their kids there. Still, I am willing to bet that many of them were rightfully appalled by Flanagan’s article, which skillfully demonstrates her zeal for gleefully and willfully misunderstanding private education. She begins by mocking the school for a new building project and then quotes the institution as saying it is preparing their students “for the exciting world they will inherit.” This hyperlinked quote does take the reader to a Dalton webpage describing the project, but that actual quote does not appear. It’s possible it was there and was removed, but I hope not. While Flanagan clearly and cleverly zones in on the word “inherit” to play on her overriding theme that all private schools are about money, there is nothing wrong with saying our children will inherit the world. That phrase is used all the time with reference to all demographics of kids, and we all know what a mess they’re inheriting anyway. This is just a tactic of using political correctness against power—a tactic that rarely has any real meaning or effect—and it essentially encapsulates all the fodder Flanagan has for her attack on private schools.
The fact that this article runs in The Atlantic is just one of the absurdities of this piece; I mean, who does she think is reading this stuff? But surely there are some sanctimonious public-school proponents and private-school haters who really enjoy the captivating portrait of the Dalton parent who isn’t supposed to be a victim of inequality but who is “supposed to care about savage inequalities…her gentle concern muffled by the jet-engine roar of her morning blowout.” Flanagan explains how Dalton parents wanted their school to reopen during the pandemic and she paints pandemic reopening as a privilege of the private school world. While it may seem like that in Manhattan, this is simply not true. It wasn’t only (or all) private schools that reopened during the pandemic—it was, for the most part, schools that could reopen safely. In many cases, it was simply a matter of space. This is why many rural schools reopened as well, not because they are a bunch of science-denying yahoos, which is what I would expect this author to posit, based on her affinity for sweeping characterizations of entire populations. But why does Flanagan insist on taking such an ungenerous view of private school parents who presumably want the best for their kids, just like anyone else? Well, we get a sense of that a bit later in the article, when Flanagan divulges that she worked for an elite private school. And from the sound of it, she didn’t quite believe in what she was doing or who she was doing it for, as she describes her student as a “little fucker” for calling his mom to tell her about an A minus. (Sidenote: this happened to me as a teacher in every school, public and private. We work with adolescents. Some call their parents. Our job is to teach them. Dealing with disappointment appropriately is part of what we teach.)
Flanagan goes on to say that her story was meant to illustrate how the school had her back, and how that’s not the case anymore for teachers. This is certainly not my experience, as I feel well-supported by my school, but it also overlooks a very important point: Times have changed. Parents at all types of schools are more involved than they were 25 years ago. This is the generational difference that has led to the term “helicopter parents.” Technology has fueled that change. My students for at least 15 years have sent photos of their test grades to their parents immediately. While that seemed strange in the beginning, it simply became expected and was a harbinger of things to come—open portals for gradebooks, for instance. It increased transparency, and it was for sure an uncomfortable adjustment for some teachers, but it’s now commonplace in schools both public and private. It’s really strange how Flanagan remembers fondly how she was guilty of a little grade inflation for the students she liked and then rails against the systems that are increasing accountability.
Because this is about accountability, right? Flanagan wants private schools to be held accountable? Or is it that she wants the parents who pay for these schools to be accountable? This part gets a bit confusing. After explaining how worried parents want to diagnose and drug their children to get them to the top colleges, she then points it back to the schools—maybe this high-pressured environment is the problem! Or wait, maybe it is the parents, because they are generally awful for sending their kids to these schools that perpetuate an unfair society! Either way, Flanagan has a gift for making fun of the ironies of rich people and rich institutions; she can mock the “sumptuous plainness” of the “Saks Fifth Avenue” of Quakerism, but while readers laugh, most will still totally want a piece of that if they can get it. It’s like laughing at jokes about yoga and bubble tea, but still absolutely partaking of both shamelessly. So, what’s the point? Why is Flanagan so concerned with why other people are choosing to send their kids to schools that might give them a better shot at life? And much more importantly, why isn’t she talking about the severe inadequacies of the American public school system that make private schools a necessary option for so many?
Again and again, Flanagan lashes out at private schools and misses the mark. Clearly, to doubt whether or not tuition dollars cover the whole expense of what each student costs the school, she must have never sat down with any people who actually manage the budget. If her real goal is to say that all private school efforts to be inclusive are fake, then she should probably question where the money comes from for financial aid and scholarships. She pooh-poohs the notion of annual giving, obnoxiously positing that these campaigns are “fundraising events dedicated to financing a major school project: paving the locker rooms with gold coins, annexing Slovakia, putting out a hit on a rival headmaster.” I get it; it’s a joke, but at whose expense? What kind of trauma did Flanagan suffer at that school where she taught for a few years in the 90s to be this bitter 30 years later? Or perhaps it was a more recent trauma she isn’t telling us? After all, her own son is a private school graduate. The truth is, for someone who professes to be so concerned about inclusion and diversity, Flanagan flagrantly overlooks the fact that the reason many private schools still exist is because they provide an option where public schools are failing miserably through no fault of their own.
Let’s take the facts of Flanagan’s own profile of Princetonian Liam O’Connor, a public-school graduate who wrote about how better prepared the private-school kids were for college. This is an indictment of private education?! Everything O’Connor says about private school kids having access to higher-level classes is accurate, and the fact that private school kids are more used to academic competition is also true. This shows deficiencies within the public system, though, not the private one. Flanagan’s entire article never deals with the fact that the public education system in the United States of America is inherently unfair. Every single person who lives here understands that the richest areas have the best public schools, and the poorest areas have the worst. And all those mediocre areas that make up most of the country? They get the mediocre schools. There’s no competition driving them forward except what comes from public charter schools, and also, they aren’t governed by school missions and ideals, but rather by the whims of whatever political party happens to be in charge at the time.
The fact that Flanagan wants to level her guns on private schools with heaping helpings of often obnoxious criticism is fine, but it does nothing to solve the problem. And the problem is not that the private system exists, but that it needs to exist. Flanagan laments that of the “top 25 feeders to Princeton, only three are public schools where 15 percent or more of the students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch,” but instead of suggesting how we can improve the playing field for everyone, she simply wants the people who can pay for better education to stop. It’s absurd. And despite all the name calling, roasting, and flagrant misrepresentation of a whole cadre of private school populations, Flanagan gives us nothing helpful. In fact, there are instead paragraphs like this:
“If you went to Lawrenceville, a boarding school not far from Princeton and the university’s top sending school, your chances of going to Princeton were almost seven times greater than if you went to Stuyvesant High School, an ultra-selective public school in New York City and itself a top Princeton feeder, where 45 percent of the kids qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. But compared with an average American public school? You don’t want to know.”
But we do want to know. We should want to know. Because the truth is that the public system is tremendously over-stressed, under-funded, and in great need of reform. Are private schools in need of reform, too? Of course. But the fact is that most private schools are taking steps to be more inclusive and diverse and are investing their own resources to create initiatives that actually work. When Flanagan categorically writes these efforts off as some kind of fake “lip-service,” it’s infuriating. We are seeing this again and again in our culture today—somehow efforts being made are not enough to satisfy critics like Flanagan. Imagine going through a day trying to do your best to make people feel like they matter, and then imagine someone following you, telling every single person you passed that you didn’t really mean it. Guess which makes more of an impression? For every one-step forward, people like Flanagan put us two steps back. Committing to making an institution anti-racist and adopting every anti-racist demand to include in a curriculum aren’t the same thing, as John McWhorter already discussed in article in The Atlantic. And apparently it’s not enough for Flanagan’s former employer and her son’s alma mater to acknowledge that it sits on land that once belonged to Native Americans—no! Because now the school is showing its phoniness by acquiring more land! In other words, Flanagan believes the school should make amends for occupying former Native land by not buying any more of it. Why? Is there a better use for it, other than for educating people?
What “woke” parents, presumably including Flanagan, prefer to paint as hypocrisy and dishonesty may actually be a way of moving forward in a world that is not going backward. The Natives are not getting their land back. Reparations are not going to be paid. And in an ideal, fully just world, those things would happen. But we don’t live in world that works that way, and there’s value in that lesson, too. These are not issues that are so easy; there is nuance here that has to be addressed with serious, painful discussion, not glib categorization by self-righteous reporters who feel like it’s fair to trash an entire system of private schools—schools that do a lot of good, incidentally—because public schools are failing. The fact is that most private schools are trying. And just as in the case of anyone who is trying, a critic might look on, doubting intentions, procedures, even outcomes. But it’s easier to be the critic than the one who is trying, isn’t it? Flanagan isn’t trying to solve a problem here; she is simply daydreaming about a “just society” that doesn’t exist and surely won’t exist if she and others like her continue to put out the flames that are firing reform in self-funded private schools.
Flanagan is right that in a just society there wouldn’t be the same kind of need for “private wealth to subsidize something as fundamental as education.” We could make the same argument for health care. The thing is, that society is not the one that exists in America today, and it is unlikely to ever exist in America without serious and sweeping reforms in our public education system. Flanagan offers exactly one small paragraph towards the end of her article that finally acknowledges that the public system is broken. Interestingly, she adds that it may be “irreparably” broken. When a public system is broken, of course people will pay for something privately if they can. There is no real mystery here. And it seems repugnant to call people out for behavior that almost anyone would replicate if they could. This is the very reason why people move to neighborhoods that are more expensive so that they can send their kids to better public schools. Everyone wants what best for their kids and not everyone can have it. That is a terrible truth. It doesn’t, however, make monsters of those who can have it, and it doesn’t make them shallow hypocrites for wishing things weren’t that way and for pushing educational initiatives in private schools that may, in time, help change things.
“Shouldn’t the schools that serve poor children be the very best schools we have?” Yes. I wish it were that way. Am I a hypocrite because I don’t teach at a public school or send my kids there? I don’t think so. It’s clear that it’s been awhile since Flanagan taught in a private school, but I can attest to the fact that good things happen here. I have the privilege of working with kids from all over the world in a small, independent school that is not elite but is extraordinary. I believe in our mission and I believe that schools are very much places of positive transformation. I am sorry that instead of seeing private schools as potential partners to make this a more just world, she sees them as part of the problem. It really doesn’t have to be that way. Nobody teaching at a private school is getting rich; our public-school colleagues often make more than twice as much as we do. We are not unionized. We receive no pensions. Many of us are here because we believe private schools can be agents of change. I teach at a school that stands for something; a school that is striving all the time to be better than it was yesterday. It’s difficult to see someone from the outside try to flush all that meaning down the proverbial toilet, writing it off as a bunch of crap. It really does feel unjust. But hey, that’s life. Right, Flanagan? I guess all I can do is get up tomorrow and get to work.