Public vs Private: The Fight for an Equitable School System
By: Rhys Hedges
The SF Chronicle recently posted a project detailing University of California admissions data for California high schools. This data seems to paint the picture of public and private schools having close to equal odds for getting students admitted to UCs. This narrative is misleading, and convenient for private school advocates who benefit from the idea that there are no equity issues between public and private schools. If there are equal odds for public schools and private schools to get into a UC, then there is no need to acknowledge the funding and resource disparities between public and private schools. There would be no need to increase funding for public schools, as more fully funded private schools do not even get more students into UCs.
This is not true, and is one of many reasons why we need to reform Proposition 13 in order to fully fund public schools. These graphs are deeply flawed for the purposes of comparing public and private schools. The graphs presented exclude schools where less than 100 students applied to each UC, which means the data is not representative of all California schools.
There are two main reasons why a school may have less than 100 students apply to UCs. One is more applicable to our least funded public schools: if students do not have the resources and support necessary to even graduate high school, much less apply to difficult to get into UC campuses, then they simply won’t apply. This reason is applicable to schools like Thurgood Marshall Academic High and John O’Connell High in San Francisco, which are not included on these graphs despite having a relatively large number of students.
The other reason is more applicable to our most prestigious, and expensive, private schools. These schools often have a smaller number of students, students who are more likely to apply to Ivy League schools or other out of state schools which are relatively easy for them to afford. This applies to schools like Cate School and The Thacher School, which also were not included in the graphs despite having high rates of students who go to college. 60% of Cate School’s most recent graduating class went to the US’s 25 top ranked universities, a list which is majority private universities.
Excluding college admittance data from our lowest and highest performing California schools paints an incomplete and misleading picture when it comes to college admissions rates. If these schools were included, there is no doubt that public schools would skew towards the lower end of admissions rates and private schools would skew higher. This is unacceptable. Every student has the right to an equal education, and a better education should not be able to be bought by the wealthy.
Proposition 13 is responsible for the severe underfunding of California public schools. Simply closing the corporate loophole in Prop. 13 would give us $17 billion to fully fund our California public schools, giving all California students the resources and support they need to get an education that will set them up for success, regardless of their income level. We need to reform Prop. 13 in order to close the education gap between income levels, and make California a more equitable state for all students.