A reader comment on Jenny Anderson's article on Monday about top-tier private schools, known for their rigor, re-evaluating homework policies echoed several other comments we have been seeing recently.
The reader decried "worshipful coverage of various far-out-of-reach-for-most-mortals private schools, with tuitions that often exceed or equal people's yearly SALARIES," and urged us "to visit the 1000s of public schools that WORK. Talk to our teachers. Talk to our students. Besides reporting on what you claim is 'broken,' I think your readers deserve to know about how much good we are doing too."
"Who CARES what Dalton is doing?" the reader continued. "Far fewer than 1 percent of us go there or could replicate an elite school's extremely low teacher/student ratio, top facilities, & ability to select whomever they want and kick out whomever they want. How is Dalton relevant to anyone except the — dare I say it? — top 1 percent? Why is this featured as national news??"
Similar questions also came up last week, in response to an article about Fieldston firing a popular but controversial history teacher for making comments some saw as racist.
I thought I would take a stab at responding.
When The Times decided in 2010 to create a beat devoted to private schools, we described them as "bastions of aspiration and privilege both, places that inspire fierce competition and intense curiosity, worlds known to few outside their citizens yet critical to the shaping of the wider one."
We wanted to focus our lens on these institutions in part because we knew many of our readers had children in them (or hoped to). But the far more important reason is that they are objects of intrigue for the broader population, not least because they educate the children of many of our city's most powerful leaders — and produce many of the leaders of tomorrow.
The education desk has seven other reporters and a columnist who primarily write about public schools, as well as three journalists devoted full time to SchoolBook, our new initiative to expand the scope and nature of news, data and conversation about education.
In any typical day or week we write far more about public schools than private ones — on Monday, there was Michael Winerip's excellent column about a CUNY program aimed at dealing with the difficult challenge of triple remediation.
That is as it should be: public schools are not just educating far more of our children — my twins are in pre-K at Public School 11 in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn — but they also are financed by our money and governed by our elected and appointed officials.
So we will continue to write about public and private schools, and we will decide what to write about each based on two main criteria: interest and importance (the best stories have both).
The Fieldston article last week was incredibly interesting — driven like any good story by interesting characters and conflict. It also had important themes — racism, sensitivity, political correctness, appropriate humor — as its context.
A reader named Frank questioned whether we would have done the same article if a teacher at a public school in Brooklyn were fired for the same reason. The answer is: absolutely.
One of the reasons we created SchoolBook was to broaden our viewfinders to unearth stories in schools across the city. There are 2,500 of them, 1,700 public and 800 private.
Each has its own SchoolBook page, and we hope that parents, teachers, principals and others will post on those pages to share information, tips, perspectives, announcements, ideas, questions, student work and whatever else they would like.