Public Schools as Community Anchors

Our public schools come in for a lot of criticism from parents, students, educators, and politicians. There are reasons to be critical, but I want to take the position in this article that there are also a lot of reasons to be proud and protective of public education.

Public schools educate 90% of American students, the remaining 10% are privately schooled. Let’s just assume for the sake of argument that 90% of educational success stories — as determined by the adults who eventually become good citizens, good parents, good employees — are public school educated. Of course it is just as likely that 90% of those who struggle in society as adults are also public school educated. But of course we have to make the same generalizations about adults who were educated in private schools. Some turn out fine, others don’t.

What seems to me misguided, but likely unprovable, is that advocates for private education believe that the ratio of social successes to social strugglers is higher for kids educated privately than those educated publicly. So as a fictional example, they might argue that private schools turn out 80% successes versus 20% strugglers, while the ratio in public schools is, say, 60% to 40%. But it’s critically important that there is no such data available.

There are of course good schools and bad schools, but that’s true of private schools as well as public schools. And it goes for homeschooling also. Some home school environments are good, some not.

Further complicating the analysis, there’s not even consensus on the criteria that measure success. Should individual graduates be measured by their financial worth, by their ability to pay bills, their highest level of formal education, their work skills, their artistic accomplishments, the number of children they’ve had, the kinds of legal jams they’ve landed in, their charitable giving, how often they volunteered, how often they went to church, mosque, temple, or synagogue?

But both sides would agree that schools, public or private, are where success stories begin, because it is in schools that the ‘infrastructure’ for successful living is laid down. That infrastructure consists of knowledge, practical skills, community involvement, sports and arts accomplishments, and beliefs. Other social organizations, such as religious and cultural groups, also contribute, but schools arguably contribute more, if only because kids spend more of their lives there than with any other group.

The big exception to this generalization is the family unit. Following from this vital connection between children and parents, you often hear the claim that parents know best how their children should be educated. Advocates of this position extrapolate from this belief to the idea that parents, through homeschooling, may even provide a better education than the schools.

I find this last proposition difficult to buy. It seems to me that it’s not rooted in any kind of defensible evidence. It seems to be more motivated by a dislike or mistrust of public education. Does a parent, who lacks the preparation of a credentialed teacher in curriculum, instruction, and assessment, have anywhere near the skill set, let alone the enthusiasm and persistence, to sit with their child for 6 hours a day to guide their learning?

And then consider what exactly a child is supposed to learn. Every state, including West Virginia, publishes a comprehensive list of content standards. These standards cover a host of critical skills and prescribe the knowledge and experience that will build those skills. Critical thinking is an overarching objective. Private schools, and homeschooling, are not obligated to follow those standards and may even disagree with them. Could that have an eventual effect on reducing the cohesiveness of a community? I don’t know, but neither, I’d argue, do advocates for alternative education, who would claim the opposite.

So what does all this mean for school choice? Is it a matter of believing one system is right and the other wrong? Since it’s a parental decision ultimately that determines where a child will be educated, does it come down to just the parent personally preferring one system over another? I think it’s possible that this reason and not quality of education could be the basis behind most decisions to place a child in a private school. In these schools, particularly parochial schools, the curriculum will emphasize cultural and religious instruction that align with the parents’ religious beliefs. Does that alone guarantee a quality education?

Throughout West Virginia, school districts, including our own Jefferson County Schools (JCS), are being impacted by the state’s Hope Scholarship program. This government program gives parents a financial incentive to bypass public schooling. The impact on public education comes about because the state’s school funding formula pays school districts by the head count of their enrollment. Fewer students, less money.

During the 2025–2026 school year a total of 752 students in Jefferson County were enrolled in the HOPE program, which provides tuition and expense vouchers for parents to home school their children or send them to private schools. This number represented approximately 9% of the entire school age population in the county (approximately 8,300 students).

The HOPE enrollment picture for the current school year (2026–2027) as of July stood at 550 students. (This was information provided in a FOIA request to JCS.) The school district reported that the majority of these students were already enrolled in private schools and only 35 students had left JCS schools in favor of HOPE. On the other hand, 48 of previous HOPE recipients returned to the public schools.

This information indicates that most parents feel satisfied with entrusting their children’s education to JCS — not without some reservations, perhaps — but, on balance, a better alternative than HOPE.

A further breakout of the HOPE enrollment data from the 2025–2026 school year shows a heavy preponderance of HOPE students in the lower grades (K-2, 42%; 3–5, 22%; 6–8, 19%; and 9–12, 14%). Here are some possible reasons for this distribution. Parents of young children are more convinced of their ability to educate their children in education fundamentals or they’re concerned about entrusting their children to a new learning environment.

Later as children age, educational demands increase and parents may feel less able or willing to tackle the teaching burden themselves or less trusting that private schools can do that either. For instance, private schools may not have course offerings in certain areas or lack credentialed teachers in those areas.

Or parents can come to feel that there are opportunities that only the public schools can provide. These might include extracurricular opportunities, athletics, Advanced Placement (AP) courses, counseling services, special education services, and so on. HOPE doesn’t exclude their students from taking part in these public school programs, but they have to reimburse from their HOPE funds the school district when they do. JCS reported that in the previous school year, 30 HOPE students did participate in JCS extracurricular activities, but none had enrolled for AP courses. Successfully completing an AP course earns the student college credit in that subject.

Another possible reason for the fall off in HOPE participation in the upper grades, particularly high school, may be attributable to the students themselves. If we recognize the right of self-determination for parents to decide on their children’s education, we should also expect that the kids on their way to becoming adults, especially during their adolescent years, develop a desire to carve out their own path.

It isn’t so unlikely that teenagers, with friends in public schools, might want to be with them inside and outside of school. Peer pressure is strong in these formative years. This also speaks to the desire kids might have to expand their social horizons beyond what they can experience in a more restricted private school setting, where there is by definition more homogeneity, and less diversity.

And of course, there is the cost factor. Even though HOPE can pay up to $5400 a year for private schooling, it won’t go the full way to paying for full tuition at many private schools. Even in Jefferson County the cost of tuition at the largest of the private schools in the area ranges between $8,000 and $10,000 per student per year, which may not be inclusive of other fees and materials. HOPE is not going to be a cheaper alternative to public education. It may only subsidize parents who would send their kids to private schools anyway.

But yet another factor to consider is that the network of public schools, just by their very nature of being public, are looked on as essential components of the community. They are mandated by our state Constitution and provided for by our state government, and funded by our taxes. They belong to us and to our communities. They become assets to the community and we invest them with community pride — pride in their sports teams, in their academic stars, in their inclusiveness. We even vote for those who serve as school board members. They are answerable to the larger community in a way that private schools are not.

To wrap up, here’s a quote from Megan Austin an education researcher at the American Institutes of Research. “Many parents name academic quality as their top priority, but fewer parents end up having a strong understanding of the academic quality of the school their student goes to. Instead, they tend to rely on reputation, word-of-mouth or less concrete information that may or may not actually reflect school quality.” If school quality (or its absence)is what motivates parents to “escape” public education, the advice of experts concerned with quality of education is to “do your homework” and understand what you’re getting and what you’re giving up.