essay on government school

10 Lines Essay On Government Schools In English For Students

1.Right to education is the fundamental right of every child.  2. Government schools provide education to all the children without any partiality. 3. They form an integral part of India’s education system 4. These are the state sponsored schools found all over the world.  5. Every country has a different system of government schools. 6. They are totally or partially financed by the taxes paid by the public. 7. Government schools are affordable and cheaper than private schools. 8. They provide the minimum required infrastructure to meet the basic needs. 9. Kendriya Vidyalaya, Army schools, Navoday Vidyalay, etc are some government-affiliated schools in India.  10. Government schools ensure quality education to every child irrespective of their caste, creed, gender and socioeconomic status.

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If you are a teacher searching for essay topics to assign to your U.S. government or civics class or looking for ideas, do not fret. It is easy to integrate debates and discussions into the classroom environment. These topic suggestions provide a wealth of ideas for written assignments such as  position papers , compare-and-contrast essays , and  argumentative essays . Scan the following 25 question topics and ideas to find just the right one. You'll soon be reading interesting papers from your students after they grapple with these challenging and important issues.

• Compare and contrast what is a direct democracy versus representative democracy. 
• React to the following statement: Democratic decision-making should be extended to all areas of life including schools, the workplace, and the government. 
• Compare and contrast the Virginia and New Jersey plans. Explain how these led to the Great Compromise .
• Pick one thing about the U.S. Constitution including its amendments that you think should be changed. What modifications would you make? Explain your reasons for making this change.
• What did Thomas Jefferson mean when he said, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants?" Do you think that this statement still applies to today's world? 
• Compare and contrast mandates and conditions of aid regarding the federal government's relationship with states. For example, how has the Federal Emergency Management Agency delivered support to states and commonwealths that have experienced natural disasters?
• Should individual states have more or less power compared to the federal government when implementing laws dealing with topics such as the legalization of marijuana  and abortion ? 
• Outline a program that would get more people to vote in presidential elections or local elections.
• What are the dangers of gerrymandering when it comes to voting and presidential elections?
• Compare and contrast the major political parties in the United States. What policies are they preparing for upcoming elections?
• Why would voters choose to vote for a third party, even though they know that their candidate has virtually no chance of winning? 
• Describe the major sources of money that are donated to political campaigns. Check out the Federal Election Regulatory Commission's website for information.
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• Explain why the media has been called the fourth branch of government. Include your opinion on whether this is an accurate portrayal.
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• Explain how the 14th Amendment has affected civil liberties in the United States from the time of its passage at the end of the Civil War.
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A primer on elementary and secondary education in the United States

Editor’s Note: This report is an excerpt, with minor edits, from Addressing Inequities in the US K-12 Education System , which first appeared in Rebuilding the Pandemic Economy , published by the Aspen Economic Strategy Group in 2021.

This report reviews the basics of the American elementary and secondary education system: Who does what and how do we pay for it? While there are some commonalities across the country, the answers to both questions, it turns out, vary considerably across states. 1

Who does what?

Schools are the institution most visibly and directly responsible for educating students. But many other actors and institutions affect what goes on in schools. Three separate levels of government—local school districts, state governments, and the federal government—are involved in the provision of public education. In addition, non-governmental actors, including teachers’ unions, parent groups, and philanthropists play important roles.

Most 5- to 17-year-old children – about 88%– attend public schools. 2 (Expanding universal schooling to include up to two years of preschool is an active area of discussion which could have far-reaching implications, but we focus on grades K-12 here.) About 9% attend private schools; about a quarter of private school students are in non-sectarian schools, and the remaining three-quarters are about evenly split between Catholic and other religious schools. The remaining 3% of students are homeschooled.

Magnet schools are operated by local school districts but enroll students from across the district; magnet schools often have special curricula—for example, a focus on science or arts—and were sometimes designed specifically to encourage racial integration. Charter schools are publicly funded and operate subject to state regulations; private school regulations and homeschooling requirements are governed by state law and vary across states. Nationally, 6.8% of public school students are enrolled in charter schools; the remainder attend “traditional public schools,” where students are mostly assigned to schools based on their home address and the boundaries school districts draw. Washington, D.C. and Arizona have the highest rates of charter enrollment, with 43 and 19% of their public school students attending charter schools. Several states have little or no charter school enrollment. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, nearly all public schooling took place in person, with about 0.6% of students enrolled in virtual schools.

Local School Districts

Over 13,000 local education agencies (LEAs), also known as school districts, are responsible for running traditional public schools. The size and structure of local school districts, as well as the powers they have and how they operate, depend on the state. Some states have hundreds of districts, and others have dozens. District size is mostly historically determined rather than a reflection of current policy choices. But while districts can rarely “choose” to get smaller or larger, district size implicates  important   trade-offs . Having many school districts operating in a metropolitan area can enhance incentives for school and district administrators to run schools consistent with the preferences of residents, who can vote out leaders or vote with their feet by leaving the district. On the other hand, fragmentation can lead to more segregation by race and income and less equity in funding, though state laws governing how local districts raise revenue may address the funding issues. Larger districts can benefit from economies of scale as the fixed costs of operating a district are spread over more students and they are better able to operate special programs, but large districts can also be difficult to manage. And even though large districts have the potential to pool resources between more- and less-affluent areas, equity challenges persist as staffing patterns lead to different levels of spending at schools within the same district.

School boards can be elected or appointed, and they generally are responsible for hiring the chief school district administrator, the superintendent. In large districts, superintendent turnover is often cited as a barrier to sustained progress on long term plans, though the causation may run in the other direction: Making progress is difficult, and frustration with reform efforts leads to frequent superintendent departures. School districts take in revenue from local, state, and federal sources, and allocate resources—primarily staff—to schools. The bureaucrats in district “central offices” oversee administrative functions including human resources, curriculum and instruction, and compliance with state and federal requirements. The extent to which districts devolve authority over instructional and organizational decisions to the school level varies both across and within states.

State Governments

The U.S. Constitution reserves power over education for the states. States have delegated authority to finance and run schools to local school districts but remain in charge when it comes to elementary and secondary education. State constitutions contain their own—again, varying—language about the right to education, which has given rise to litigation over the level and distribution of school funding in nearly all states over the past half century. States play a major role in school finance, both by sending aid to local school districts and by determining how local districts are allowed to tax and spend, as discussed further below.

State legislatures and state education agencies also influence education through mechanisms outside the school finance system. For example, states may set requirements for teacher certification and high school graduation, regulate or administer retirement systems, determine the ages of compulsory schooling, decide how charter schools will (or will not) be established and regulated, set home-schooling requirements, establish curricular standards or approve specific instructional materials, choose standardized tests and proficiency standards, set systems for school accountability (subject to federal law), and create (or not) education tax credits or vouchers to direct public funds to private schools. Whether and how states approach these issues—and which functions they delegate to local school districts—varies considerably.

Federal Government

The authority of the federal government to direct schools to take specific actions is weak. Federal laws protect access to education for specific groups of students, including students with disabilities and English language learners. Title IX prohibits sex discrimination in education, and the Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination on the basis of race. The U.S. Department of Education issues  regulations and guidance  on K-12 laws and oversees grant distribution and compliance. It also collects and shares data and funds research. The Bureau of Indian Education is housed in the Department of the Interior, not the Department of Education.

The federal government influences elementary and secondary education primarily by providing funding—and through the rules surrounding the use of those funds and the conditions that must be met to receive federal funding. Federal aid is typically allocated according to formulas targeting particular populations. The largest formula-aid federal programs are Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), which provides districts funds to support educational opportunity, and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), for special education. Both allocate funding in part based on child poverty rates. State and school district fiscal personnel ensure that districts comply with rules governing how federal funds can be spent and therefore have direct influence on school environments. Since 1965, in addition to specifying how federal funds can be spent, Congress has required states and districts to adopt other policies as a condition of Title I receipt. The policies have changed over time, but most notably include requiring school districts to desegregate, requiring states to adopt test-based accountability systems, and requiring the use of “evidence-based” approaches. 

IDEA establishes protections for students with disabilities in addition to providing funding. The law guarantees their right to a free and appropriate public education in the least restrictive setting and sets out requirements for the use of Individualized Educational Programs. Because of these guarantees, IDEA allows students and families to pursue litigation. Federal law prohibits conditioning funding on the use of any specific curriculum. The Obama Administration’s Race to the Top program was also designed to promote specific policy changes—many related to teacher policy—but through a competitive model under which only select states or districts “won” the funds. For the major formula funds, like Title I and IDEA, the assumption (nearly always true) is that states and districts will adopt the policies required to receive federal aid and all will receive funds; in some cases, those policy changes may have  more impact than the money  itself. The federal government also allocated significant funding to support schools during the Great Recession and during the COVID-19 pandemic through specially created fiscal stabilization or relief funds; federal funding for schools during the COVID crisis was significantly larger than during the Great Recession.

The federal tax code, while perhaps more visible in its influence on higher education, also serves as a K-12 policy lever. The controversial state and local tax deduction, now limited to $10,000, reduces federal tax collections and subsidizes progressive taxation for state and local spending, including for education. As of 2018, 529 plans, which historically allowed tax-preferred savings only for higher education expenses, can also be used for private K-12 expenses.

Non-Governmental Actors

Notable non-governmental actors in elementary and secondary education include teachers’ unions and schools of education, along with parents, philanthropists, vendors, and other advocates.The nation’s three million public school teachers are a powerful political force, affecting more than just teachers’ compensation. For example, provisions of collective bargaining agreements meant to improve teachers working conditions also limit administrator flexibility.  Teachers unions  are also important political actors; they play an active role in federal, state, and school board elections and advocate for (or, more often, against) a range of policies affecting education.  Union strength varies considerably across U.S. states.

Both states and institutions of higher education play important roles in determining who teaches and the preparation they receive. Policies related to teacher certification and preparation requirements, ranging from whether teachers are tested on academic content to which teachers are eligible to supervise student teachers, vary considerably across states. 3 Meanwhile,  reviews of teacher training programs  reveal many programs do not do a good job incorporating consensus views of research-based best practices in key areas. To date, schools of education have not been the focus of much policy discussion, but they would be critical partners in any changes to how teachers are trained.

Parents play an important role, through a wide range of channels, in determining what happens in schools. Parents choose schools for their children, either implicitly when they choose where to live or explicitly by enrolling in a charter school, private school, participating in a school district choice program, or homeschooling, though these choices are constrained by income, information, and other factors. They may also raise money through Parent Teacher Associations (PTAs) or other foundations—and determine how it is spent. And they advocate for (or against) specific policies, curriculum, or other aspects of schooling through parent organizations, school boards, or other levels of government. Parents often also advocate for their children to receive certain teachers, placements, evaluation, or services; this is particularly true for parents of students with disabilities, who often must make sure their children receive legally required services and accommodations. Though state and federal policymakers sometimes  mandate parent engagement , these mechanisms do not necessarily provide meaningful pathways for parental input and are often dominated by  white and higher-SES parents .      

Philanthropy also has an important influence on education policy, locally and nationally. Not only do funders support individual schools in traditional ways, but they are also increasingly active in influencing federal and state laws. Part of these philanthropic efforts happen through advocacy groups, including civil rights groups, religious groups, and the hard-to-define “education reform” movement. Finally, the many vendors of curriculum, assessment, and “edtech” products and services bring their own lobbying power.

Paying for school

Research on school finance might be better termed school district finance because districts are the jurisdictions generating and receiving revenue, and districts, not schools, are almost always responsible for spending decisions. School districts typically use staffing models to send resources to schools, specifying how many staff positions (full-time equivalents), rather than dollars, each school gets. 

Inflation-adjusted, per-pupil revenue to school districts has increased steadily over time and averaged about $15,500 in 2018-19 (total expenditure, which includes both ongoing and capital expenditure, is similar but we focus on revenue because we are interested in the sources of revenue). Per-pupil revenue growth tends to stall or reverse in recessions and has only recently recovered to levels seen prior to the Great Recession (Figure 1). On average, school districts generated about 46% of their revenue locally, with about 80% of that from property taxes; about 47% of revenue came from state governments and about 8% from the federal government. The share of revenue raised locally has declined from about 56% in the early 1960s to 46% today, while the state and federal shares have grown. Local revenue comes from taxes levied by local school districts, but local school districts often do not have complete control over the taxes they levy themselves, and they almost never determine exactly how much they spend because that depends on how much they receive in state and federal aid. State governments may require school districts to levy certain taxes, limit how much local districts are allowed to tax or spend, or they may implicitly or explicitly redistribute some portion of local tax revenue to other districts.

Both the level of spending and distribution of revenue by source vary substantially across states (Figure 2), with New York, the highest-spending state, spending almost $30,000 per pupil, while Idaho, Utah, and Oklahoma each spent under $10,000 per pupil. (Some, but far from all, of this difference is related to higher labor costs in New York.) Similarly, the local share of revenue varies from less than 5% in Hawaii and Vermont to about 60% in New Hampshire and Nebraska. On average, high-poverty states spend less, but there is also considerable variation in spending among states with similar child poverty rates.

Discussions of school funding equity—and considerable legal action—focus on inequality of funding across school districts  within the same state . While people often assume districts serving disadvantaged students spend less per pupil than wealthier districts within a state, per-pupil spending and the child poverty rate are nearly always uncorrelated or  positively  correlated, with higher-poverty districts spending more on average. Typically, disadvantaged districts receive more state and federal funding, offsetting differences in funding from local sources. Meanwhile, considerable inequality exists between states, and poorer states spend less on average. Figure 3 illustrates an example of this dynamic, showing the relationship between district-level per-pupil spending and the child poverty rate in North Carolina (a relatively low-spending state with county- and city-based districts) and Illinois (a higher-spending state with many smaller districts). In North Carolina, higher poverty districts spend more on average; Illinois is one of only a few states in which this relationship is reversed. But this does not mean poor kids get fewer resources in Illinois than in North Carolina. Indeed, nearly  all  districts in Illinois spend more than most districts in North Carolina, regardless of poverty rate.

Figure 4 gives a flavor of the wide variation in per-pupil school spending. Nationally, the district at the 10th percentile had per-pupil current expenditure of $8,800, compared to $18,600 at the 90th percentile (for these calculations we focus on current expenditure, which is less volatile year-to-year, rather than revenue). Figure 4 shows that this variation is notably  not  systematically related to key demographics. For example, on average, poor students attend school in districts that spent $13,023 compared to $13,007 for non-poor students. The average Black student attends school in a district that spent $13,485 per student, compared to $12,918 for Hispanic students and $12,736 for White students. 4  School districts in high-wage areas need to spend more to hire the same staff, but adjusting spending to account for differences in prevailing wages of college graduates (the second set of bars) does not change the picture much.

Does this mean the allocation of spending is fair? Not really. First, to make progress reducing the disparities in outcomes discussed above, schools serving more disadvantaged students will need to spend  more  on average. Second, these data are measured at the school district level, lumping all schools together. This potentially masks inequality across (as well as within) schools in the same district.

The federal government now requires states to report some spending at the school level; states have only recently released these data. One study using these new data finds that within districts, schools attended by students of color and economically-disadvantaged students tend to have more staff per pupil and to spend more per pupil. These schools also have more novice teachers. How could within-district spending differences systematically correlate with student characteristics, when property taxes and other revenues for the entire district feed into the central budget? Most of what school districts buy is staff, and compensation is largely based on credentials and experience. So schools with less-experienced teachers spend less per pupil than those with more experienced ones, even if they have identical teacher-to-student ratios. Research suggests schools enrolling more economically disadvantaged students, or more students of color, on average have worse working conditions for teachers and experience more teacher turnover. Together, this means that school districts using the same staffing rules for each school—or even allocating more staff to schools serving more economically disadvantaged students—would have different patterns in spending per pupil than staff per pupil.

[1] : For state-specific information, consult state agency websites (e.g., Maryland State Department of Education) for more details. You can find data for all 50 states at the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics , and information on state-specific policies at the Education Commission of the States .

[2] : The numbers in this section are based on the most recent data available in the Digest of Education Statistics, all of which were collected prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.

[3] : See the not-for-profit National Council on Teacher Quality for standards and reviews of teacher preparation programs, and descriptions of state teacher preparation policies.

[4] : These statistics may be particularly surprising to people given the widely publicized findings of the EdBuild organization that, “ Nonwhite school districts get $23 billion less than white school districts. ” The EdBuild analysis estimates gaps between districts where at least 75% of students are non-White versus at least 75% of students are White. These two types of districts account for 53% of enrollment nationally. The $23 billion refers to state and local revenue (excluding federal revenue), whereas we focus on current expenditure (though patterns for total expenditure or total revenue are similar).

Disclosures: The Brookings Institution is financed through the support of a diverse array of foundations, corporations, governments, individuals, as well as an endowment. A list of donors can be found in our annual reports published online  here . The findings, interpretations, and conclusions in this report are solely those of its author(s) and are not influenced by any donation .

About the Authors

Sarah reber, joseph a. pechman senior fellow – economic studies, nora gordon, professor – mccourt school of public policy, georgetown university.

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The Role of Government in Education

From Milton Friedman (1962/1982), Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press); earlier version (1955) in Robert A. Solo (Ed.), Economics and the Public Interest , pp. 123-144 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press).

The general trend in our times toward increasing intervention by the state in economic affairs has led to a concentration of attention and dispute on the areas where new intervention is proposed and to an acceptance of whatever intervention has so far occurred as natural and unchangeable. The current pause, perhaps reversal, in the trend toward collectivism offers an opportunity to re-examine the existing activities of government and to make a fresh assessment of the activities that are and those that are not justified. This paper attempts such a re-examination for education.

Education is today largely paid for and almost entirely administered by governmental bodies or non-profit institutions. This situation has developed gradually and is now taken so much for granted that little explicit attention is any longer directed to the reasons for the special treatment of education even in countries that are predominantly free enterprise in organization and philosophy. The result has been an indiscriminate extension of governmental responsibility.

The role assigned to government in any particular field depends, of course, on the principles accepted for the organization of society in general. In what follows, I shall assume a society that takes freedom of the individual, or more realistically the family, as its ultimate objective, and seeks to further this objective by relying primarily on voluntary exchange among individuals for the organization of economic activity. In such a free private enterprise exchange economy, government’s primary role is to preserve the rules of the game by enforcing contracts, preventing coercion, and keeping markets free. Beyond this, there are only three major grounds on which government intervention is to be justified. One is “natural monopoly” or similar market imperfection which makes effective competition (and therefore thoroughly voluntary exchange) impossible. A second is the existence of substantial “neighborhood effects,” i.e., the action of one individual imposes significant costs on other individuals for which it is not feasible to make him compensate them or yields significant gains to them for which it is not feasible to make them compensate him — circumstances that again make voluntary exchange impossible. The third derives from an ambiguity in the ultimate objective rather than from the difficulty of achieving it by voluntary exchange, namely, paternalistic concern for children and other irresponsible individuals. The belief in freedom is for “responsible” units, among whom we include neither children nor insane people. In general, this problem is avoided by regarding the family as the basic unit and therefore parents as responsible for their children; in considerable measure, however, such a procedure rests on expediency rather than principle. The problem of drawing a reasonable line between action justified on these paternalistic grounds and action that conflicts with the freedom of responsible individuals is clearly one to which no satisfactory answer can be given.

In applying these general principles to education, we shall find it helpful to deal separately with (1) general education for citizenship, and (2) specialized vocational education, although it may be difficult to draw a sharp line between them in practice. The grounds for government intervention are widely different in these two areas and justify very different types of action.

General Education for Citizenship

A stable and democratic society is impossible without widespread acceptance of some common set of values and without a minimum degree of literacy and knowledge on the part of most citizens. Education contributes to both. In consequence, the gain from the education of a child accrues not only to the child or to his parents but to other members of the society; the education of my child contributes to other people’s welfare by promoting a stable and democratic society. Yet it is not feasible to identify the particular individuals (or families) benefited or the money value of the benefit and so to charge for the services rendered. There is therefore a significant “neighborhood effect.”

What kind of governmental action is justified by this particular neighborhood effect? The most obvious is to require that each child receive a minimum amount of education of a specified kind. Such a requirement could be imposed upon the parents without further government action, just as owners of buildings, and frequently of automobiles, are required to adhere to specified standards to protect the safety of others. There is, however, a difference between the two cases. In the latter, individuals who cannot pay the costs of meeting the required standards can generally divest themselves of the property in question by selling it to others who can, so the requirement can readily be enforced without government subsidy — though even here, if the cost of making the property safe exceeds its market value, and the owner is without resources, the government may be driven to paying for the demolition of a dangerous building or the disposal of an abandoned automobile. The separation of a child from a parent who cannot pay for the minimum required education is clearly inconsistent with our reliance on the family as the basic social unit and our belief in the freedom of the individual.

Yet, even so, if the financial burden imposed by such an educational requirement could readily be met by the great bulk of the families in a community, it might be both feasible and desirable to require the parents to meet the cost directly.

Extreme cases could be handled by special provisions in much the same way as is done now for housing and automobiles. An even closer analogy is provided by present arrangements for children who are mistreated by their parents. The advantage of imposing the costs on the parents is that it would tend to equalize the social and private costs of having children and so promote a better distribution of families by size. 1

Differences among families in resources and in number of children — both a reason for and a result of the different policy that has been followed — plus the imposition of a standard of education involving very sizable costs have, however, made such a policy hardly feasible. Instead, government has assumed the financial costs of providing the education. In doing so, it has paid not only for the minimum amount of education required of all but also for additional education at higher levels available to youngsters but not required of them — as for example in State and municipal colleges and universities. Both steps can be justified by the “neighborhood effect” discussed above — the payment of the costs as the only feasible means of enforcing the required minimum; and the financing of additional education, on the grounds that other people benefit from the education of those of greater ability and interest since this is a way of providing better social and political leadership.

Government subsidy of only certain kinds of education can be justified on these grounds. To anticipate, they do not justify subsidizing purely vocational education which increases the economic productivity of the student but does not train him for either citizenship or leadership. It is clearly extremely difficult to draw a sharp line between these two types of education. Most general education adds to the economic value of the student — indeed it is only in modern times and in a few countries that literacy has ceased to have a marketable value. And much vocational education broadens the student’s outlook. Yet it is equally clear that the distinction is a meaningful one. For example, subsidizing the training of veterinarians, beauticians, dentists, and a host of other specialized skills — as is widely done in the United States in governmentally supported educational institutions — cannot be justified on the same grounds as subsidizing elementary education or, at a higher level, liberal education. Whether it can be justified on quite different grounds is a question that will be discussed later in this paper.

The qualitative argument from the “neighborhood effect” does not, of course, determine the specific kids of education that should be subsidized or by how much they should be subsidized. The social gain from education is presumably greatest for the very lowest levels of education, where there is the nearest approach to unanimity about the content of the education, and declines continuously as the level of education rises. But even this statement cannot be taken completely for granted — many governments subsidized universities long before they subsidized lower education. What forms of education have the greatest social advantage and how much of the community’s limited resources should be spent on them are questions to be decided by the judgment of the community expressed through its accepted political channels. The role of an economist is not to decide these questions for the community but rather to clarify the issues to be judged by the community in making a choice, in particular, whether the choice is one that it is appropriate or necessary to make on a communal rather than individual basis.

We have seen that both the imposition of a minimum required level of education and the financing of education by the state can be justified by the “neighborhood effects” of education. It is more difficult to justify in these terms a third step that has generally been taken, namely, the actual administration of educational institutions by the government, the “nationalization,” as it were, of the bulk of the “education industry.” The desirability of such nationalization has seldom been faced explicitly because governments have in the main financed education by paying directly the costs of running educational institutions, so that this step has seemed required by the decision to subsidize education. Yet the two steps could readily be separated. Governments could require a minimum level of education which they could finance by giving parents vouchers redeemable for a specified maximum sum per child per year if spent on “approved” educational services.

Parents would then be free to spend this sum and any additional sum on purchasing educational services from an “approved” institution of their own choice. The educational services could be rendered by private enterprises operated for profit, or by non-profit institutions of various kinds. The role of the government would be limited to assuring that the schools met certain minimum standards such as the inclusion of a minimum common content in their programs, much as it now inspects restaurants to assure that they maintain minimum sanitary standards. An excellent example of a program of this sort is the United States educational program for veterans after World War II. Each veteran who qualified was given a maximum sum per year that could be spent at any institution of his choice, provided it met certain minimum standards. A more limited example is the provision in Britain whereby local authorities pay the fees of some students attending nonstate schools (the so-called “public schools”). Another is the arrangement in France whereby the state pays part of the costs for students attending non-state schools.

One argument from the “neighborhood effect” for nationalizing education is that it might otherwise be impossible to provide the common core of values deemed requisite for social stability. The imposition of minimum standards on privately conducted schools, as suggested above, might not be enough to achieve this result. The issue can be illustrated concretely in terms of schools run by religious groups. Schools run by different religious groups will, it can be argued, instill sets of values that are inconsistent with one another and with those instilled in other schools; in this way they convert education into a divisive rather than a unifying force.

Carried to its extreme, this argument would call not only for governmentally administered schools, but also for compulsory attendance at such schools. Existing arrangements in the United States and most other Western countries are a halfway house. Governmentally administered schools are available but not required. However, the link between the financing of education and its administration places other schools at a disadvantage: they get the benefit of little or none of the governmental funds spent on education — a situation that has been the source of much political dispute, particularly, of course, in France. The elimination of this disadvantage might, it is feared, greatly strengthen the parochial schools and so render the problem of achieving a common core of values even more difficult.

This argument has considerable force. But it is by no means clear either that it is valid or that the denationalizing of education would have the effects suggested. On grounds of principle, it conflicts with the preservation of freedom itself; indeed, this conflict was a major factor retarding the development of state education in England. How draw a line between providing for the common social values required for a stable society on the one hand, and indoctrination inhibiting freedom of thought and belief on the other? Here is another of those vague boundaries that it is easier to mention than to define.

In terms of effects, the denationalization of education would widen the range of choice available to parents. Given, as at present, that parents can send their children to government schools without special payment, very few can or will send them to other schools unless they too are subsidized.

Parochial schools are at a disadvantage in not getting any of the public funds devoted to education; but they have the compensating advantage of being funded by institutions that are willing to subsidize them and can raise funds to do so, whereas there are few other sources of subsidies for schools.

Let the subsidy be made available to parents regardless where they send their children — provided only that it be to schools that satisfy specified minimum standards — and a wide variety of schools will spring up to meet the demand. Parents could express their views about schools directly, by withdrawing their children from one school and sending them to another, to a much greater extent than is now possible. In general, they can now take this step only by simultaneously changing their place of residence.

For the rest, they can express their views only through cumbrous political channels. Perhaps a somewhat greater degree of freedom to choose schools could be made available also in a governmentally administered system, but it is hard to see how it could be carried very far in view of the obligation to provide every child with a place. Here, as in other fields, competitive private enterprise is likely to be far more efficient in meeting consumer demands than either nationalized enterprises or enterprises run to serve other purposes. The final result may therefore well be less rather than more parochial education.

Another special case of the argument that governmentally conducted schools are necessary to keep education a unifying force is that private schools would tend to exacerbate class distinctions. Given greater freedom about where to send their children, parents of a kind would flock together and so prevent a healthy intermingling of children from decidedly different backgrounds. Again, whether or not this argument is valid in principle, it is not at all clear that the stated results would follow. Under present arrangements, particular schools tend to be peopled by children with similar backgrounds thanks to the stratification of residential areas. In addition, parents are not now prevented from sending their children to private schools. Only a highly limited class can or does do so, parochial schools aside, in the process producing further stratification. The widening of the range of choice under a private system would operate to reduce both kinds of stratification.

Another argument for nationalizing education is “natural monopoly.” In small communities and rural areas, the number of children may be too small to justify more than one school of reasonable size, so that competition cannot be relied on to protect the interests of parents and children. As in other cases of natural monopoly, the alternatives are unrestricted private monopoly, state-controlled private monopoly, and public operation — a choice among evils. This argument is clearly valid and significant, although its force has been greatly weakened in recent decades by improvements in transportation and increasing concentration of the population in urban communities.

The arrangement that perhaps comes closest to being justified by these considerations — at least for primary and secondary education — is a mixed one under which governments would continue to administer some schools but parents who chose to send their children to other schools would be paid a sum equal to the estimated cost of educating a child in a government school, provided that at least this sum was spent on education in an approved school. This arrangement would meet the valid features of the “natural monopoly” argument, while at the same time it would permit competition to develop where it could. It would meet the just complaints of parents that if they send their children to private nonsubsidized schools they are required to pay twice for education — once in the form of general taxes and once directly — and in this way stimulate the development and improvement of such schools. The interjection of competition would do much to promote a healthy variety of schools. It would do much, also, to introduce flexibility into school systems. Not least of its benefits would be to make the salaries of school teachers responsive to market forces. It would thereby give governmental educational authorities an independent standard against which to judge salary scales and promote a more rapid adjustment to changes in conditions of demand or supply. 2

Why is it that our educational system has not developed along these lines? A full answer would require a much more detailed knowledge of educational history than I possess, and the most I can do is to offer a conjecture. For one thing, the “natural monopoly” argument was much stronger at an earlier date. But I suspect that a much more important factor was the combination of the general disrepute of cash grants to individuals (“handouts”) with the absence of an efficient administrative machinery to handle the distribution of vouchers and to check their use. The development of such machinery is a phenomenon of modern times that has come to full flower only with the enormous extension of personal taxation and of social security programs. In its absence, the administration of schools was regarded as the only possible way to finance education. Of course, as some of the examples cited above suggest, some features of the proposed arrangements are present in existing educational systems. And there has been strong and I believe increasing pressure for arrangements of this general kind in most Western countries, which is perhaps to be explained by the modern developments in governmental administrative machinery that facilitate such arrangements.

Many detailed administrative problems would arise in changing over from the present to the proposed system and in administering the proposed system. But these seem neither insoluble nor unique. As in the denationalization of other activities, existing premises and equipment could be sold to private enterprises that wanted to enter the field, so there would be no waste of capital in the transition. The fact that governmental units, at least in some areas, were going to continue to administer schools would permit a gradual and easy transition. The localized administration of education in the United States and some other countries would similarly facilitate the transition, since it would encourage experimentation on a small scale and with alternative methods of handling both these and other problems.

Difficulties would doubtless arise in determining eligibility for grants from a particular governmental unit, but this is identical with the existing problem of determining which unit is obligated to provide educational facilities for a particular child. Differences in size of grants would make one area more attractive than another just as differences in the quality of education now have the same effect.

The only additional complication is a possibly greater opportunity for abuse because of the greater freedom to decide where to educate children. Supposed difficulty of administration is a standard defense of the status quo against any proposed changes; in this particular case, it is an even weaker defense than usual because existing arrangements must master not only the major problems raised by the proposed arrangements but also the additional problems raised by the administration of the schools as a governmental function.

The preceding discussion is concerned mostly with primary and secondary education. For higher education, the case for nationalization on grounds either of neighborhood effects or of natural monopoly is even weaker than for primary and secondary education. For the lowest levels of education, there is considerable agreement, approximating unanimity, on the appropriate content of an educational program for citizens of a democracy — the three R’s cover most of the ground. At successively higher levels of education, there is less and less agreement. Surely, well below the level of the American college, one can expect insufficient agreement to justify imposing the views of a majority, much less a plurality, on all. The lack of agreement may, indeed, extend so far as to cast doubts on the appropriateness of even subsidizing education at this level; it surely goes far enough to undermine any case for nationalization on the grounds of providing a common core of values. Similarly, there can hardly be any question of “natural monopoly” at this level, in view of the distances that individuals can and do go to attend institutions of higher learning.

Governmental institutions in fact play a smaller role in the United States in higher education than at lower levels. Yet they grew greatly in importance until at least the 1920’s and now account for more than half the students attending colleges and universities. 3 One of the main reasons for their growth was their relative cheapness: most State and municipal colleges and universities charge much lower tuition fees than private universities can afford to. Private universities have in consequence had serious financial problems, and have quite properly complained of “unfair” competition. They have wanted to maintain their independence from government, yet at the same time have felt driven by financial pressure to seek government aid.

The preceding analysis suggests the lines along which a satisfactory solution can be found. Public expenditure on higher education can be justified as a means of training youngsters for citizenship and for community leadership — though I hasten to add that the large fraction of current expenditure that goes for strictly vocational training cannot be justified in this way or, indeed, as we shall see, in any other. Restricting the subsidy to education obtained at a state-administered institution cannot be justified on these grounds, or on any other that I can derive from the basic principles outlined at the outset. Any subsidy should be granted to individuals to be spent at institutions of their own choosing, provided only that the education is of a kind that it is desired to subsidize. Any government schools that are retained should charge fees covering the cost of educating students and so compete on an equal level with non-government-supported schools. The retention of state schools themselves would, however, have to be justified on grounds other than those we have so far considered. 4 The resulting system would follow in its broad outlines the arrangements adopted in the United States after World War II for financing the education of veterans, except that the funds would presumably come from the States rather than the Federal government.

The adoption of such arrangements would make for more effective competition among various types of schools and for a more efficient utilization of their resources. It would eliminate the pressure for direct government assistance to private colleges and universities and thus preserve their full independence and diversity at the same time that it enabled them to grow relatively to State institutions. It might also have the ancillary advantage of causing a closer scrutiny of the purposes for which subsidies are granted. The subsidization of institutions rather than of people has led to an indiscriminate subsidization of whatever activities it is appropriate for such institutions to undertake, rather than of the activities it is appropriate for the state to subsidize. Even cursory examination suggests that while the two classes of activities overlap, they are far from identical.

Vocational or Professional Education

As noted above, vocational or professional education has no neighborhood effects of the kind attributed above to general education. It is a form of investment in human capital precisely analogous to investment in machinery, buildings, or other forms of nonhuman capital. Its function is to raise the economic productivity of the human being. If it does so, the individual is rewarded in a free enterprise society by receiving a higher return for his services than he would otherwise be able to command. 5 This difference is the economic incentive to acquire the specialized training, just as the extra return that can be obtained with an extra machine is the economic incentive to invest capital in the machine. In both cases, extra returns must be balanced against the costs of acquiring them. For vocational education, the major costs are the income foregone during the period of training, interest lost by postponing the beginning of the earning period, and special expenses of acquiring the training such as tuition fees and expenditures on books and equipment. For physical capital, the major costs are the expenses of constructing the capital equipment and the interest during construction.

In both cases, an individual presumably regards the investment as desirable if the extra returns, as he views them, exceed the extra costs, as he views them. 6 In both cases, if the individual undertakes the investment and if the state neither subsidizes the investment nor taxes the return, the individual (or his parent, sponsor, or benefactor) in general bears all the extra cost and receives all the extra returns: there are no obvious unborne costs or unappropriable returns that tend to make private incentives diverge systematically from those that are socially appropriate. If capital were as readily available for investment in human beings as for investment in physical assets, whether through the market or through direct investment by the individuals concerned or their parents or benefactors, the rate of return on capital would tend to be roughly equal in the two fields: if it were higher on non-human capital, parents would have an incentive to buy such capital for their children instead of investing a corresponding sum in vocational training, and conversely. In fact, however, there is considerable empirical evidence that the rate of return on investment in training is very much higher than the rate of return on investment in physical capital.

According to estimates that Simon Kuznets and I have made elsewhere, professionally trained workers in the United States would have had to earn during the 1930s at most 70 percent more than other workers to cover the extra costs of their training, including interest at roughly the market rate on non-human capital. In fact, they earned on the average between two and three times as much. 7

Some part of this difference may well be attributable to greater natural ability on the part of those who entered the professions: it may be that they would have earned more than the average non-professional worker if they had not gone into the professions. Kuznets and I concluded, however, that such differences in ability could not explain anything like the whole of the extra return of the professional workers. 8 Apparently, there was sizable underinvestment in human beings. The postwar period has doubtless brought changes in the relative earnings in different occupations.

It seems extremely doubtful, however, that they have been sufficiently great to reverse this conclusion. It is not certain at what level this underinvestment sets in. It clearly applies to professions requiring a long period of training, such as medicine, law, dentistry, and the like and probably to all occupations requiring a college training. At one time, it almost certainly extended to many occupations requiring much less training but probably no longer does, although the opposite has sometimes been maintained. 9

This underinvestment in human capital presumably reflects an imperfection in the capital market: investment in human beings cannot be financed on the same terms or with the same ease as investment in physical capital. It is easy to see why there would be such a difference. If a fixed money loan is made to finance investment in physical capital, the lender can get some security for his loan in the form of a mortgage or residual claim to the physical asset itself, and he can count on realizing at least part of his investment in case of necessity by selling the physical asset. If he makes a comparable loan to increase the earning power of a human being, he clearly cannot get any comparable security; in a non-slave state, the individual embodying the investment cannot be bought and sold. But even if he could, the security would not be comparable. The productivity of the physical capital does not — or at least generally does not — depend on the co-operativeness of the original borrower. The productivity of the human capital quite obviously does — which is, of course, why, all ethical considerations aside, slavery is economically inefficient. A loan to finance the training of an individual who has no security to offer other than his future earnings is therefore a much less attractive proposition than a loan to finance, say, the erection of a building: the security is less, and the cost of subsequent collection of interest and principal is very much greater.

A further complication is introduced by the inappropriateness of fixed money loans to finance investment in training. Such an investment necessarily involves much risk. The average expected return may be high, but there is wide variation about the average. Death or physical incapacity is one obvious source of variation but is probably much less important than differences in ability, energy, and good fortune. The result is that if fixed money loans were made, and were secured only by expected future earnings, a considerable fraction would never be repaid. In order to make such loans attractive to lenders, the nominal interest rate charged on all loans would have to be sufficiently high to compensate for the capital losses on the defaulted loans. The high nominal interest rate would both conflict with usury laws and make the loans unattractive to borrowers, especially to borrowers who have or expect to have other assets on which they cannot currently borrow but which they might have to realize or dispose of to pay the interest and principal of the loan. 10 The device adopted to meet the corresponding problem for other risky investments is equity investment plus limited liability on the part of shareholders. The counterpart for education would be to “buy” a share in an individual’s earning prospects: to advance him the funds needed to finance his training on condition that he agree to pay the lender a specified fraction of his future earnings. In this way, a lender would get back more than his initial investment from relatively successful individuals, which would compensate for the failure to recoup his original investment from the unsuccessful.

There seems no legal obstacle to private contracts of this kind, even though they are economically equivalent to the purchase of a share in an individual’s earning capacity and thus to partial slavery. One reason why such contracts have not become common, despite their potential profitability to both lenders and borrowers, is presumably the high costs of administering them, given the freedom of individuals to move from one place to another, the need for getting accurate income statements, and the long period over which the contracts would run. These costs would presumably be particularly high for investment on a small scale with a resultant wide geographical spread of the individuals financed in this way. Such costs may well be the primary reason why this type of investment has never developed under private auspices. But I have never been able to persuade myself that a major role has not also been played by the cumulative effect of such factors as the novelty of the idea, the reluctance to think of investment in human beings as strictly comparable to investment in physical assets, the resultant likelihood of irrational public condemnation of such contracts, even if voluntarily entered into, and legal and conventional limitation on the kind of investments that may be made by the financial intermediaries that would be best suited to engage in such investments, namely, life insurance companies. The potential gains, particularly to early entrants, are so great that it would be worth incurring extremely heavy administrative costs. 11

But whatever the reason, there is clearly here an imperfection of the market that has led to underinvestment in human capital and that justifies government intervention on grounds both of “natural monopoly,” insofar as the obstacle to the development of such investment has been administrative costs, and of improving the operation of the market, insofar as it has been simply market frictions and rigidities.

What form should government intervention take? One obvious form, and the only form that it has so far taken, is outright government subsidy of vocational or professional education financed out of general revenues. Yet this form seems clearly inappropriate. Investment should be carried to the point at which the extra return repays the investment and yields the market rate of interest on it. If the investment is in a human being, the extra return takes the form of a higher payment for the individual’s services than he could otherwise command. In a private market economy, the individual would get this return as his personal income, yet if the investment were subsidized, he would have borne none of the costs. In consequence, if subsidies were given to all who wished to get the training, and could meet minimum quality standards, there would tend to be overinvestment in human beings, for individuals would have an incentive to get the training so long as it yielded any extra return over private costs, even if the return were insufficient to repay the capital invested, let alone yield any interest on it. To avoid such overinvestment, government would have to restrict the subsidies. Even apart from the difficulty of calculating the “correct” amount of investment, this would involve rationing in some essentially arbitrary way the limited amount of investment among more claimants than could be financed, and would mean that those fortunate enough to get their training subsidized would receive all the returns from the investment whereas the costs would be borne by the taxpayers in general. This seems an entirely arbitrary, if not perverse, redistribution of income.

The desideratum is not to redistribute income but to make capital available for investment in human beings on terms comparable to those on which it is available for physical investment. Individuals should bear the costs of investment in themselves and receive the rewards, and they should not be prevented by market imperfections from making the investment when they are willing to bear the costs. One way to do this is to have government engage in equity investment in human beings of the kind described above.

A governmental body could offer to finance or help finance the training of any individual who could meet minimum quality standards by making available not more than a limited sum per year for not more than a specified number of years, provided it was spent on securing training at a recognized institution. The individual would agree in return to pay to the government in each future year x percent of his earnings in excess of y dollars for each $1,000 that he gets in this way. This payment could easily be combined with payment of income tax and so involve a minimum of additional administrative expense. The base sum, $y, should be set equal to estimated average — or perhaps modal — earnings without the specialized training; the fraction of earnings paid, x , should be calculated so as to make the whole project self-financing. In this way the individuals who received the training would in effect bear the whole cost. The amount invested could then be left to be determined by individual choice. Provided this was the only way in which government financed vocational or professional training, and provided the calculated earnings reflected all relevant returns and costs, the free choice of individuals would tend to produce the optimum amount of investment. The second proviso is unfortunately not likely to be fully satisfied. In practice, therefore, investment under the plan would still be somewhat too small and would not be distributed in the optimum manner. To illustrate the point at issue, suppose that a particular skill acquired by education can be used in two different ways; for example, medical skill in research or in private practice. Suppose that, if money earnings were the same, individuals would generally prefer research. The non-pecuniary advantages of research would then tend to be offset by higher money earnings in private practice. These higher earnings would be included in the sum to which the fraction x was applied whereas the monetary equivalent of the non-pecuniary advantages of research would not be. In consequence, the earnings differential would have to be higher under the plan than if individuals could finance themselves, since it is the net monetary differential, not the gross, that individuals would balance against the non-pecuniary advantages of research in deciding how to use their skill. This result would be produced by a larger than optimum fraction of individuals going into research necessitating a higher value of x to make the scheme self-financing than if the value of the non-pecuniary advantages could be included in calculated earnings. The inappropriate use of human capital financed under the plan would in this way lead to a less than optimum incentive to invest and so to a less than optimum amount of investment. 12

Estimation of the values of x and y clearly offers considerable difficulties, especially in the early years of operation of the plan, and the danger would always be present that they would become political footballs. Information on existing earnings in various occupations is relevant but would hardly permit anything more than a rough approximation to the values that would render the project self-financing. In addition, the values should in principle vary from individual to individual in accordance with any differences in expected earning capacity that can be predicted in advance — the problem is similar to that of varying life insurance premia among groups that have different life expectancy. For such reasons as these it would be preferable if similar arrangements could be developed on a private basis by financial institutions in search of outlets for investing their funds, non-profit institutions such as private foundations, or individual universities and colleges.

Insofar as administrative expense is the obstacle to the development of such arrangements on a private basis, the appropriate unit of government to make funds available is the Federal government in the United States rather than smaller units. Any one State would have the same costs as an insurance company, say, in keeping track of the people whom it had financed. These would be minimized for the Federal government. Even so, they would not be completely eliminated. An individual who migrated to another country, for example, might still be legally or morally obligated to pay the agreed-on share of his earnings, yet it might be difficult and expensive to enforce the obligation. Highly successful people might therefore have an incentive to migrate. A similar problem arises, of course, also under the income tax, and to a very much greater extent. This and other administrative problems of conducting the scheme on a Federal level, while doubtless troublesome in detail, do not seem serious. The really serious problem is the political one already mentioned: how to prevent the scheme from becoming a political football and in the process being converted from a self-financing project to a means of subsidizing vocational education.

But if the danger is real, so is the opportunity. Existing imperfections in the capital market tend to restrict the more expensive vocational and professional training to individuals whose parents or benefactors can finance the training required. They make such individuals a “non-competing” group sheltered from competition by the unavailability of the necessary capital to many individuals, among whom must be large numbers with equal ability. The result is to perpetuate inequalities in wealth and status. The development of arrangements such as those outlined above would make capital more widely available and would thereby do much to make equality of opportunity a reality, to “diminish inequalities of income and wealth, and to promote the full use of our human resources. And it would do so not, like the outright redistribution of income, by impeding competition, destroying incentive, and dealing with symptoms, but by strengthening competition, making incentives effective, and eliminating the causes of inequality.

This re-examination of the role of government in education suggests that the growth of governmental responsibility in this area has been unbalanced. Government has appropriately financed general education for citizenship, but in the process it has been led also to administer most of the schools that provide such education. Yet, as we have seen, the administration of schools is neither required by the financing of education, nor justifiable in its own right in a predominantly free enterprise society. Government has appropriately been concerned with widening the opportunity of young men and women to get professional and technical training, but it has sought to further this objective by the inappropriate means of subsidizing such education, largely in the form of making it available free or at a low price at governmentally operated schools.

The lack of balance in governmental activity reflects primarily the failure to separate sharply the question what activities it is appropriate for government to finance from the question what activities it is appropriate for government to administer — a distinction that is important in other areas of government activity as well. Because the financing of general education by government is widely accepted, the provision of general education directly by governmental bodies has also been accepted. But institutions that provide general education are especially well suited also to provide some kinds of vocational and professional education, so the acceptance of direct government provision of general education has led to the direct provision of vocational education. To complete the circle, the provision of vocational education has, in turn, meant that it too was financed by government, since financing has been predominantly of educational institutions not of particular kinds of educational services.

The alternative arrangements whose broad outlines are sketched in this paper distinguish sharply between the financing of education and the operation of educational institutions, and between education for citizenship or leadership and for greater economic productivity. Throughout, they center attention on the person rather than the institution. Government, preferably local governmental units, would give each child, through his parents, a specified sum to be used solely in paying for his general education; the parents would be free to spend this sum at a school of their own choice, provided it met certain minimum standards laid down by the appropriate governmental unit. Such schools would be conducted under a variety of auspices: by private enterprises operated for profit, nonprofit institutions established by private endowment, religious bodies, and some even by governmental units.

For vocational education, the government, this time however the central government, might likewise deal directly with the individual seeking such education. If it did so, it would make funds available to him to finance his education, not as a subsidy but as “equity” capital. In return, he would obligate himself to pay the state a specified fraction of his earnings above some minimum, the fraction and minimum being determined to make the program self-financing. Such a program would eliminate existing imperfections in the capital market and so widen the opportunity of individuals to make productive investments in themselves while at the same time assuring that the costs are borne by those who benefit most directly rather than by the population at large.

An alternative, and a highly desirable one if it is feasible, is to stimulate private arrangements directed toward the same end. The result of these measures would be a sizable reduction in the direct activities of government, yet a great widening in the educational opportunities open to our children. They would bring a healthy increase in the variety of educational institutions available and in competition among them. Private initiative and enterprise would quicken the pace of progress in this area as it has in so many others. Government would serve its proper function of improving the operation of the invisible hand without substituting the dead hand of bureaucracy.

Note: I am indebted to P. T. Bauer, A. R. Prest, and H. G. Johnson for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

1. It is by no means so fantastic as may at first appear that such a step would noticeably affect the size of families. For example. one explanation of the lower birth rate among higher than among lower socio-economic groups may well be that children are relatively more expensive to the former, thanks in considerable measure to the higher standards of education they maintain and the costs of which they bear.

2. Essentially this proposal — public financing but private operation of education has recently been suggested in several southern states as a means of evading the Supreme Court ruling against segregation. This fact came to my attention after this paper was essentially in its present form. My initial reaction — and I venture to predict, that of most readers — was that this possible use of the proposal was a count against it, that it was a particularly striking case of the possible defect — the exacerbating of class distinctions — referred to in the second paragraph preceding the one to which this note is attached.

Further thought has led me to reverse my initial reaction. Principles can be tested most clearly by extreme cases. Willingness to permit free speech to people with whom one agrees is hardly evidence of devotion to the principle of free speech; the relevant test is willingness to permit free speech to people with whom one thoroughly disagrees. Similarly, the relevant test of the belief in individual freedom is the willingness to oppose state intervention even when it is designed to prevent individual activity of a kind one thoroughly dislikes. I deplore segregation and racial prejudice; pursuant to the principles set forth at the outset of the paper, it is clearly an appropriate function of the state to prevent the use of violence and physical coercion by one group on another; equally clearly, it is not an appropriate function of the state to try to force individuals to act in accordance with my — or anyone else’s views, whether about racial prejudice or the party to vote for, so long as the action of anyone individual affects mostly himself. These are the grounds on which I oppose the proposed Fair Employment Practices Commissions; and they lead me equally to oppose forced nonsegregation. However, the same grounds also lead me to oppose forced segregation. Yet, so long as the schools are publicly operated, the only choice is between forced nonsegregation and forced segregation; and if I must choose between these evils, I would choose the former as the lesser.

The fact that I must make this choice is a reflection of the basic weakness of a publicly operated school system. Privately conducted schools can resolve the dilemma. They make unnecessary either choice. Under such a system, there can develop exclusively white schools, exclusively colored schools, and mixed schools. Parents can choose which to send their children to. The appropriate activity for those who oppose segregation and racial prejudice is to try to persuade others of their views; if and as they succeed, the mixed schools will grow at the expense of the nonmixed, and a gradual transition will take place. So long as the school system is publicly operated, only drastic change is possible; one must go from one extreme to the other; it is a great virtue of the private arrangement that it permits a gradual transition.

An example that comes to mind as illustrating the preceding argument is summer camps for children. Is there any objection to the simultaneous existence of some camps that are wholly Jewish, some wholly non-Jewish, and some mixed? One can — though many who would react quite differently to negro-white segregation — would not explore the existence of attitudes that lead to the three types; one can seek to propagate views that would tend to the growth of the mixed school at the expense of the extremes; but is it an appropriate function of the state to prohibit the unmixed camps?

The establishment of private schools does not of itself guarantee the desirable freedom of choice on the part of parents. The public funds could be made available subject to the condition that parents use them solely in segregated schools; and it may be that some such condition is contained in the proposals now under consideration by southern states. Similarly, the public funds could be made available for use solely in nonsegregated schools. The proposed plan is not therefore inconsistent with either forced segregation or forced nonsegregation. The point is that it makes available a third alternative.

3. See George J. Stigler. Employment and Compensation in Education, (National Bureau of Economic Research, Occasional Paper 1111, 1950). p. 1111.

4. The subsidizing of basic research for example. I have interpreted education narrowly so as to exclude considerations of this type which would open up an unduly wide field.

5. The increased return may be only partly in a monetary form; it may also consist of non-pecuniary advantages attached to the occupation for which the vocational training fits the individual. Similarly, the occupation may have nonpecuniary disadvantages, which would have to be reckoned among the costs of the investment.

6. For a more detailed and precise statement of the considerations entering into the choice of an occupation, see Milton Friedman and Simon Kuznets, Income from Independent Professional Practice, (National Bureau of Economic Research, N.Y., 1945). pp. 81-94, 118-37.

7. Ibid., pp. 68-69. 84. 148-51.

8. Ibid., pp. 88-94.

9. Education and Economic Well-Being in American Democracy , (Educational Policies Commission, National Education Association of United States and American Association of School Administrators, 1940).

10. Despite these obstacles to fixed money loans, I am told that they have been a very common means of financing university education in Sweden, where they have apparently been available at moderate rates of interest. Presumably a proximate explanation is a smaller dispersion of income among university graduates than in the United States. But this is no ultimate explanation and may not be the only or major reason for the difference in practice. Further study of Swedish and similar experience is highly desirable to test whether the reasons given above are adequate to explain the absence in the United States and other countries of a highly developed market in loans to finance vocational education, or whether there may not be other obstacles that could be removed more easily.

11. It is amusing to speculate on how the business could be done and on some ancillary methods of profiting from it. The initial entrants would be able to choose the very best investments, by imposing very high quality standards on the individuals they were willing to finance. If they did so, they could increase the profitability of their investment by getting public recognition of the superior quality of the individuals they financed: the legend, “Training financed by XYZ Insurance Company” could be made into an assurance of quality (like “Approved by Good Housekeeping”) that would attract custom. All sorts of other common services might be rendered by the XYZ company to “its” physicians, lawyers, dentists, and so on.

12. The point in question is familiar in connection with the disincentive effects of income taxation. An example that perhaps makes this clearer than the example in the text is to suppose that the individual can earn $5, say, by some extra work and would just be willing to do so if he could keep the whole $5 — that is, he values the non-pecuniary costs of the extra worth at just under $5. If x is say 0.10, he only keeps $4.50 and this will not be enough to induce him to do the extra work. It should be noted that a plan involving fixed money loans to individuals might be less seriously affected by differences among various uses of skills in non-pecuniary returns and costs than the plan for equity investment under consideration. It would not however be unaffected by them; such differences would tend to produce different frequencies of default depending on the use made of the skill and so unduly favor uses yielding relatively high non-pecuniary returns or involving relatively low non-pecuniary costs. I am indebted to Harry G. Johnson and Paul W. Cook, Jr., for suggesting the inclusion of this qualification. For a fuller discussion of the role of non-pecuniary advantages and disadvantages in determining earnings in different pursuits. See Friedman and Kuznets, loc. cit.

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Public School vs Private School Essay

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Public School vs Private School Essay Introduction

Private schools vs public schools: classroom size & admission, cost & tuition.

Need to compare and contrast public and private schools? Essay samples like this one will help you with this task! Here, you will learn about advantages, disadvantages, and differences between public schools vs private schools. Choose your side of the debate and persuade the readers in your public school vs private school essay!

Comparing private and public schools can be more or less like comparing oranges and apples, two very disparate things that can never be held on similar standards. Choosing the best school for your child is one of the most important decisions parents have to make for their children but most parents rely on rumors and hearsay in deciding on whether to send their children to a private or a public school.

The best ways to determine whether you are making the right decision for your child is by visiting the school and asking for clarification from teachers for all your queries. What school your youngster attend to is a personal decision which is greatly determined by the family values, special needs of the kids, his mannerisms and interests.

This essay critically compares the differences and similarities, advantages and disadvantages and the issues that a rise in both private and public schools that affects the education of the children mainly preschool kids the its effects they on the kids future life.

Statistics show that some time back private school used to do better than public schools but recently this gap has been narrowing and making it harder for parents to choose between a private independent school with a high price tag on it, from a local public school which is relatively cheaper (Diana, 2006).

According to Maureen ( 2011, pp.10) public schools usually have larger class sizes due to the fact that they are required to admit every child who meets the qualifications set by the government. This offers an advantage to the pre-school children by improving their communication and socializing skills since they interact with more children from different races, cultures and social classes.

However, large classes are also disadvantageous in that it reduces the ratio of teachers to students and this tends to limit the teacher’s concentration on students hence limiting the children’s there performance. The average ratio of teachers to students in public schools is 1:17while in private schools its 1:9.

Private schools on the other hand are very selective in terms of their admissions. Some schools cannot admit students from certain religions, races or even economic status. This tends to reduce the population of private schools. Some of the long term effects to children attending privately owned pre-schools are poor socializing skills due to the low population size and similar social classes, religion and lack of diverse cultures (Robert, 2011, pp4).

Public schools are cheaper and they are funded by the government and some of them are usually underfunded. They are a part of the large school system which is part of the government and this makes them vulnerable to the political influence hence exposes them to political vulnerabilities which if experienced affects their performance.

The economic status of the country and the government also greatly affects the operations of public schools. Their curriculum is determined by the government and as you know different regions face different challenges hence the need for different curriculum to meet the different needs. (GreatSchools, 2010, pp.5)

Private schools on the other hand charge a higher tuition fee which is the major source of its funds. This makes them independent and protects them from the political realm hence they are free to determine their own curricula which is usually single minded, producing best results by providing the best quality of education possible (Eddie , 2011, pp.4)

In cases of children with special needs public schools usually have special programs and specially trained teachers who are well trained to work with such children. In contrast most private schools lack these programs and they are sometimes forced to deny such kids admission to their institutions and sometimes these services may be offered at an extra cost.

Is the question about which schools are better, private or public schools, answered yet? I bet not since there are no clear conclusions since they both have advantages and disadvantages as we have seen. In a nut shell the best school for ones child depends on the values, mannerisms, family, back ground, needs and interests of both the parents and the children. In other words one man’s meat is another man’s poison.

Diana, J. S. (2006). Public Schools Perform Near Private Ones in Study . Web.

Eddie, R. (2011). Pre School Education: Private Schools Vs PublicSchools . Web.

Great Schools Staff. (2010). Private versus public . Web.

Maureen, B. (2011). Public vs. private : Which is right for your child? Web.

Robert, N. (2011). Private vs Public Schools: Class Size. Web.

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Public School vs. Private School: Argumentative Comparison

Table of contents, public schools: accessibility and diversity, public schools: limited resources and class sizes, private schools: specialized curriculum and resources, private schools: affordability and socioeconomic disparities.

• Baker, B. D., & Welner, K. G. (Eds.). (2017). School Choice: Policies and Outcomes. University of California Press.
• Henig, J. R., Hula, R. C., & Orr, M. T. (Eds.). (2019). Educational Inequality and School Finance: Why Money Matters for America's Students. Harvard Education Press.
• Kahlenberg, R. D. (Ed.). (2013). The Future of School Integration: Socioeconomic Diversity as an Education Reform Strategy. Century Foundation Press.
• Ravitch, D. (2013). Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools. Knopf.
• Van Dunk, D. D., & Taylor, S. S. (Eds.). (2020). Global Perspectives on School Choice and Privatization. Information Age Publishing.

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An excerpt from ‘ordinary people, extraordinary teachers: the heroes of real india’, by s giridhar..

There is change in our government schools if one cares to look for it. In a survey my colleagues conducted in 2005 in northeast Karnataka, only four out of ten schools had obtained uniforms and books in time for the start of the academic year. Today, this number has more than doubled. Nearly every school I visited had planned and procured books and uniforms well in time, even if it meant that their teachers had to sacrifice some holidays.

In most schools that we visited, attendance was over 90 per cent. In the Surpur block in northeast Karnataka where attendance, for years had stubbornly stuck at around 65 per cent, it has now moved close to 80 per cent.

In each of the hundred and ten schools, punctuality and presence of teachers were a given. In rural government schools, even these basic requirements of punctuality and regular attendance of children are significant signs of a vibrant culture.

In the same survey of 2005, some or the other form of student fights or corporal punishment was observed in seven out of ten schools. In contrast, in the schools that we visited this time, there was no sign of the “cane” nor physical fights among students beyond the usual pushing and shoving.

In 2005, the researchers had noted that around 15 per cent of the head teachers were not in school when they visited because they were away at the Block Education Office on some errand or the other. Not so today. Nearly every head teacher was present in the schools that we visited. A major reason for this is that head teachers are able to meet incessant demands for information from their headquarters by seeking help from their younger colleagues who are more IT- and internet-savvy.

This is also perhaps a good place in this essay to put to rest the bogey of teacher absenteeism that is a favourite flogging horse in public discourse. A study by the Foundation in 2017, across six states, in a sample of six hundred and nineteen schools covering two thousand eight hundred and sixty-one teachers, showed that teacher absenteeism, that is, absence without legitimate reason or truancy is less than 2.5 per cent.

The study noted that in difficult circumstances that one would often associate with high teacher absenteeism, these teachers and head teachers showed remarkable commitment (manifested in no perceivable absenteeism) and high levels of engagements in classrooms.

Ten to fifteen years ago, I would come across the odd heroic teacher during my field visits. This time, what I saw among the two hundred and fifty to three hundred teachers spoke of a journey of growth, self-expression and commitment that comes from an upward curve in the area of self-development. There were multiple strands that demonstrated this transformation.

One such change is that more teachers are writing a daily diary, reflecting on their school-day – the joys and struggles of teaching. The diary of a school teacher is a kaleidoscope of emotions but when it is introspective, it becomes a symbol of the learning teacher who wants to improve each day. The diaries of some teachers are so rich, they could be made mandatory reading in teacher education programmes.

This is remarkable progress from twelve years ago when teachers would be hesitant to even read academic articles. In 2005, when newsletters like Pravaah were sent to schools in Uttarkashi, teachers would have to be called together once in a few months and coaxed to read and discuss some of the essays. But by 2017, Pravaah had become a sixty-four-page publication with a number of articles contributed by teachers themselves.

Many of these teachers make up for their inadequacies in subject knowledge by their commitment to continuous self-development. There can be no greater evidence of this than the fact that some science teachers, acknowledged for their excellence in teaching the subject, have no formal degree in science. The lesson plans and activities, the worksheets and experiments that they had constructed were indicative of their efforts to learn and teach the subject.

Many teachers have acquired further educational qualifications through correspondence courses. When I spoke to them, their self- appraisal was honest and spontaneous: “My school can only be classified as ‘B’ category today but I hope it will reach ‘A’ in the future,” or, “There are at least twenty schools that are better; you must visit those (naming a few)“.

They also expressed their frustrations openly, accepting their limitations of subject knowledge, the wicked inadequacy of not being able to teach English as well as they would like to and the enormous struggle for resources.

But what was not lacking was the recurrent theme of personal ownership and pride. Confident that the community would sooner or later perceive the quality of education that their children were receiving, one teacher in a memorable turn of phrase, said to me, “Mark my words, there will be a reverse migration from private schools to our schools.”

Are the children learning better? At each of these schools, the answer to the question is a definitive “yes”. We saw a variety of classroom activities and children’s portfolios – from neat handwriting to the ability to read and write completely new sentences; the ability to solve not merely algorithmic but word problems; the ability at mental math and higher order thinking; and, the spirit of the “quicker” children to help their friends with their work.

The teachers in these schools know the learning levels of each child in every subject. Many implement continuous and comprehensive evaluation (CCE, see glossary) in true spirit, going beyond the prescribed formats to record rich observations in individual child portfolios and then using these to plan additional support for identified children.

If schools are a true microcosm of our society, then the schools that I visited, where equity and quality have reclaimed their place, give us hope of an improved school education system that provides quality schooling to every child.

The World Bank report of 2017 estimates that by 2021, India will have three hundred and seventy-two million children in the age group of 0-14 years and three hundred and sixty- seven million in the youth group of fifteen to twenty-nine years. Only the quality of education will determine what these children and youth will make of their lives and how they will contribute to society.

Children from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds in rural India are the worst sufferers in a system that does not offer equitable quality of education. This is a moral burden each one of us has to bear.

The late JP Naik, the doyen of Indian education during the twentieth century, titled his seminal work on Indian education Equality, Quality and Quantity: The Elusive Triangle in Indian Education . Through some of its landmark initiatives, such as the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA), India has been able to address issues of access and retention by providing a primary school in every habitation of the country with midday meals (the largest such programme in the world).

As a result, enrolment has risen from 72 per cent in 2002 (when fifty-nine million children, of two hundred and twenty million in the age group of 6-14 years were out of school) to over 99 per cent in recent years. The attendance in schools has gone up and retention till Class VIII has risen from 42 per cent in 2002 to around 80 per cent in recent times.

But the elusiveness that JP Naik pointed to is borne out by the fact that the third vertex of this triangle, namely, quality of education has remained unattainable. Often, suggestions for improvement of the quality of government school education have harped on teacher accountability and incentives; the use of technology in schools; and other efficiency-related actions. These have taken us nowhere.

Thankfully, in recent times, the approach to this vexing problem is changing and the centrality of the teacher and the need to invest in their professional preparedness is being recognised. To those working on the ground with rural government schools for years, this acknowledgement is a welcome validation of the criticality of teacher education.

This signals that sustained improvement in school quality will not come through fixing a few specific aspects but by addressing the core issue which is to create well-equipped, well-prepared teachers. There are no shortcuts, the path to a complete revamp of teacher education in the country will be long and arduous.

How well we can reform teacher education, implement high quality four-year integrated teacher education programmes and create excellent institutions for teacher education will determine the fate of three hundred and seventy million children who will, in a few years, join India’s adult population. Obviously, many parallel strands of radical reform in our education system need to be addressed simultaneously but teacher education is the most critical.

Perhaps one of the most crucial aspects within this that needs to be fixed is our very weak undergraduate education system that fails to equip teachers with subject-matter proficiency. For our teachers to be truly competent in their subjects, our Bachelor programmes ought to provide them with depth and breadth in their chosen disciplines. One cannot discuss quality in school education without acknowledging that the root cause is the abysmal quality of our undergraduate programmes.

The Kothari Commission report of 1966,7 the National Education Policy of 1986,8 and the National Curriculum Framework of 20059 are milestones in India’s quest for equitable quality in education. The next National Education Policy may well prove to be one of the most important documents with radical suggestions to transform public education in India.

If it can provide clear recommendations on teacher education, the need to invest in teacher preparation and the accompanying systemic and structural reforms, it will go a long way in strengthening our public education system. The reality is, that for at least 60 per cent of our children, the government school is the only lifeline. It is only when the children who are completely dependent on government schools, receive equitable quality of education that we can hope to progress towards the ideals enshrined in our Constitution.

Excerpted with permission from Ordinary People, Extraordinary Teachers: The Heroes Of Real India , S Giridhar, Westland.

Government vs private schools: What works better?

Aditya natraj (piramal foundation) and parth shah (centre for civil society) discuss the crucial role played by both school systems, and why they must work together to ensure quality education..

But are these numbers sufficient indicators of the performance of government and private schools? How are they perceived by parents and society at large? And finally, what do they tell us about India’s education system?

On our podcast  On the Contrary by IDR , we spoke with Aditya Natraj and Parth Shah to find the answers to these questions, and to understand the different roles played by government and private schools.

Aditya is the CEO of Piramal Foundation . Before taking on this role, he founded and led Kaivalya Education Foundation , which works entirely with the government school system. Parth Shah is the founder-president of the Centre for Civil Society , an independent public policy think tank. His research and advocacy work focus on the themes of economic freedom, choice and competition in education, and good governance.

Below is an edited transcript that provides an overview of the guests’ perspectives on the show.

Government and private schools shape ideas of democracy and social justice

Aditya : Schooling is not just a utilitarian goal for the sake of the child. I’d like to zoom out and look at schooling as a larger democracy-building project. We are a very young democracy. Just 76 years ago, we were 550 princely states. We did not have the concept of India. Public education is one of the key tools for building that concept. [Our school diaries] used to have ‘unity in diversity’, which is reinforced [as a value], because I needed to believe and affiliate. I’m from Tamil Nadu; I need to affiliate with a person from Tripura, Jammu and Kashmir, and Jaisalmer, etc., whose food and culture are substantially different from mine. Public education helps in the process of creating that democracy, saying, “What are the common values by which we live? Why have we come together?”

Then there is the social justice perspective. We are a country that has huge diversity in terms of caste. There are not just Dalits and Bahujans, but also particularly vulnerable tribal groups. So for social justice reasons as well, making sure public education is accessible to everyone is extremely critical. We really need to build democracy, social justice, and the idea of India. And the public education system is very critical at this stage in the country’s growth and development.

Parth : My choice for emphasising the role for private schools is largely based on…experience of the fact that monopolies are bad. There are certain public goods such as education, healthcare, and social support—what we normally call welfare—in that category, where you don’t really want to have a government monopoly. We have had an aided school system in India from the very beginning, and even the government recognised that you need to promote different kinds of schools, different approaches to education, and different pedagogies. And, therefore, the aided school system was one way for the government to support the private sector and provide that alternative option. Actually, Kerala, which has been seen as a shining example of the education system in India, has [one of] the highest proportions of privately managed schools compared to any other state in India.

The second [reason why I think private schools are important] is parental choice. I do believe that parents should have the right to choose what kind of education their children get. And this right should not be controlled by the state by providing just one kind of schooling system in the country. The UN Charter of Human Rights has three clauses regarding the right to education. The first two are about it being free and compulsory. The third clause, which unfortunately is hardly ever talked about, states that the parents have a prior right to decide what kind of education should be given to their children.

I think the third [is] about the Indian [school] system. When we talk about ‘affordable’ or ‘budget’ private schools—my take is that those are largely community schools. These are not the schools that somebody from outside the community started. Usually, people living in the same slum, same neighbourhood thought that there was a demand for education that was somehow not being met, and this was an opportunity for them to provide education. These three reasons tell me very clearly that we need to emphasise multiple systems of education delivery.

[When it comes to] the idea of India and social justice, people normally assume that that can happen only in government schools. Even private schools are equally, if not more, capable of promoting that kind of inclusiveness, solidarity, and social justice.

The two school systems adopt different approaches to equity and inclusion

Parth : The way I think about the kind of education system we want is primarily based on the simple fact that each child is unique, and if you provide customised, personalised input to the child, then you will get a more equitable outcome at the end. The approach that we unfortunately have taken in India—which the Right to Education Act is a prime example of—is to standardise inputs. If each child is unique and you provide standardised input, you get very unequal outcomes. The thinking has been that “How can I provide equitable education to all children across a country as diverse as India?” “How could I have a school in Balangir which is as good as one in Bangalore?” Therefore, the focus in achieving that equity is largely on building the same core type of schools. But if you really believe that each child is unique, then you need to provide differential input that is suitable [for] and personalised to that child.

Private school systems do more of this. There is a lot more pressure on the system to deliver on this front and respond to parental demand, which may or may not be the right thing all the time. We know that the parents can also be misguided about what they want from the schools. But generally, over a period of time, my sense is that if you want to build a system for the long term, then you need to allow parents to play that role. Maybe the role for samaaj and sarkar is to educate parents about what makes for good education and what’s good for the children.

Aditya : I don’t disagree that equity is the final goal. The question is, how do you achieve social equity? I agree that low-budget private schools, which are just set up as mom-and-pop shops, are okay. But as soon as you go one level above that, the reality is that those private schools are less likely to admit a child with special needs or learning disabilities. I went to a high-performing government school in Delhi and interviewed the principal. I asked him, “How are you performing so well?” His school was performing better than private schools, and this is approximately 12–15 years ago. He said, “We do the same thing that private schools do. In grade 8, we wean out 10­–15 percent of the children. In grade 9, we wean out another 10–15 percent of the children and tell their parents to put them in some other school. So then, by grade 10, we have 100 percent pass rather than 70 percent pass. If private schools are allowed to do this, why can’t I do it?”

So if the rules of the game are that [as a government school administrator,] I have to take the weakest, the poorest, and the first-generation learner, and you (private schools) can select and take the best, you’re then competing with IIT when you are an inclusive engineering college. And these are two different models. So I think government schools are really good at inclusion. Because as a mandate, we have no choice. I come from the corporate sector. I’m all for private incentives for this delivery, but I’m not able to see how to create the incentives in [a manner] that inclusion is also served. And I think that’s what government schools are really good at.

Perception plays a huge role in informing parental decisions

Parth : In terms of why parents prefer private schools, there are many reasons. Often, one of the primary reasons people cite is the English medium. Parents see that as a ticket to a better future for their children. My views began to change sometime in the mid 2000s when we began to do a voucher pilot in Delhi. It was a three-year pilot program, so I was interacting with the same group of parents over the same period. I realised that what I assumed as the reason for their preference is really last on their list. The things they actually talk about are things that we trivialise. For example, schools that close their gates if students are more than 10 minutes late, ensure homework is given and checked, and have teachers who write comments in the students’ homework notebooks are things that influence parents. These small but significant factors, such as daily teacher engagement and visible feedback, greatly influence parents in choosing those schools. And you can now contrast each one of them in terms of the general perception of government schools. You can understand why parents are willing to sacrifice. If parents are earning INR 20,000, one-third of that monthly income is spent on education. This is everything, not just school fees, [but also] the tuition classes and all of those things that parents do. And so it’s not an easy choice for parents to send even one child out of three or four to a private school. It’s a huge sacrifice.

Aditya : There’s a significant perception problem between government versus private. ASER data has shown that, after adjusting for socio-economic differences, both sectors perform equally in terms of educational outcomes. Unfortunately, that’s not the perception in the market. If you are from the second quartile in the country and going to a private school, and I’m from the fourth quartile and going to a public school, the perception might be that you’re better off. However, the reality could be that your parents are actively supplementing your education in various ways. This highlights a significant perception gap between the two types of schooling.

In addition, any district in the country runs approximately 2000 schools. Two thousand schools, half a million children—you will be serving midday meals half a million times. Even at a Six Sigma level , there will be a possibility that one of those meals is infected in one of six days of the week. But that will be blown out of proportion by the media, [which will go on to say,] “The government does not work.” On the other hand, private schools give ads in the local media, saying, “My child got 98 percent, 97.6 percent, and 97.2 percent.” And governments don’t give ads in the paper. So systematically there is a belief that the government does not work and that private works. On the other hand, IIT and IIM work; they are completely government-run. If you set up a private institution, it’s going to take you several years to catch up with IIM’s reputation or IIT’s reputation.

So, something has happened because of which perceptions in the school sector are such that we believe that government schools don’t work. Let me give an example. A teacher whom I worked with…the principal of a school…works with this child from grade 1 to 3, who starts performing [well]. As soon as this happens, the girl’s parents say, “ Hamein nahin laga ki yeh ladki padh sakti hai. ( We didn’t think this girl would be able to study.) She seems quite smart, let’s put her in the private school.” Two years later, the child was not performing [well] enough because she’s not used to this heavily disciplined environment. She needs love, care, a sense of joy. The parents had to bring her back to this [government] school. I’m giving this example to say that different children need different types of things.

Education is not a customer-focused business alone.

The reality is that there are a bunch of schools that are extremely regimented, and the discipline they require is detrimental to children’s growth. So, the more homework you give, the more you scold my child, the more you’re perceived as a better school. These are perceptions unfortunately, and I have to stall governments from giving in to consumer needs. Education is not a customer-focused business alone. If your child asked for something, you don’t serve it immediately. Because education is the process by which you help the child self-regulate. If school systems become too consumer-centric [and start] saying, “I will listen to the parent and the parent will listen to the child,” you will create a society that is quite dysfunctional as opposed to [one that is] able to regulate itself. Therefore, I think we should be careful about listening to parental choice.

Parth : I am equally proud of the fact that we have great IITs and IIMs, even though they are run by the government. I hope the government is able to do with school education what it has done in higher education. So, there is no doubt in my mind that we are both in favour of both systems, as long as they do well by the children. That’s ultimately what our concern is.

Now, with regard to perception and reality, you have to ask what is being measured by the ASER survey, or for that matter, any other research that looks at learning outcomes. This is what they are trying to quantify to judge which [kind of] school performs better. What they measure is purely the academic part, which is what can be measured. And, on that basis, they are looking at the difference between the two kinds of schools. What I talked about earlier, what parents really want, and why they choose private schools. Academics is actually not as important. And most parents are actually unable to even judge the quality of the academic performance of the school. But they’re able to judge whether the schoolteacher is engaged every day or not. So, all the other things that matter to parents are not even measured in any of this research, which is my beef with many researchers. You are measuring what’s easy to measure: the three Rs [reading, writing and arithmetic]. It’s important to understand that the difference in perception and reality is based on our assumption of what is measurable, which is different from how parents are making choices.

The education sector has made significant progress, but more needs to be done

Aditya : If I just look at when I joined the [education] sector 20 years ago… In 2002, there was a probe report, which said there were 87 million children out of school in India—that’s more than the population of Germany. Today , that number is at 13 million—which is still substantial. However, it is a significant achievement considering the much larger population base now, as compared to 2002, when the problem was even more acute with a smaller overall population.

So one, I think at a societal level, the perceptions about education being our ticket out of poverty are very embedded. Parents know the only way out is education and more education.

The key is that we also push for decentralisation.

The second reason for positivity is the fact that [until] 20 years ago, education was a directive principle of state policy. There was no right to education, there was no educational cess, there was no national curriculum framework, there was no National Education Policy ( NEP ) the way there is today. All these are building blocks, which you might not see the gains of immediately. But to create the Right to Education was a movement for 15 years before it finally became a right. All of us pay for an educational cess, apart from the taxes that we pay. So, I think the financing, the policy, and the infrastructure availability are all getting much better than we could ever have imagined.

The key is that we also push for decentralisation. I don’t know why states need to decide things. An individual district in India handles 800–2,500 schools. That’s a huge number. So how do you decentralise to districts? If you go further down from a district, at a block level, there are 100–250 schools. The power distribution between teacher, school, cluster, block, district, and state needs to be rebalanced, much more towards the teacher. And that is a journey for the next 30 years.

Parth : As you know, the work that we do either in policy or on the ground, cannot be sustained year after year unless you’re optimistic.

I have to say that my experience with the pandemic has really made me question what I thought was improving. So I see a very anti-private sector, anti-parental choice mindset within the government, which has obviously existed in the bureaucracy for a long time. But also, in the larger society, [this mindset has] become obvious in terms of what happened in the last few years and the support that private schools did not get. And here we are talking about high-fee private schools, we’re talking about no fee or very low-fee private schools. And so that has really made me a little less optimistic in terms of how the future looks. Now, yes, the NEP has made some right noises, and you can say that’s a really optimistic sign. It remains to be seen how far they will actually come through when the rubber meets the road, when this actually gets implemented. And so, I’m a little less sanguine now in terms of what is going to emerge as a result of what we have experienced.

You can listen to the full episode here .

• Read about how COVID-19 changed India’s education system.
• Listen to this podcast to understand how parent’s involvement affects the education system.

According to the UDISE+ 2021–22 report, which collects data on school enrolment rates, approximately 54 percent of students in India are enrolled in government schools. On the other hand, private […]

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Home » Social Justice » Issues related to Education Sector » Public Education System in India » Challenges faced by Government schools

• Most of them do not have proper infrastructure like class rooms, black boards, drinking water, toilets and sanitary facilities.
• The school environment is so suffocating that the students are dissuaded from attending the classes which is why the dropout rate is also high.
• Almost half the government schools in the country do not have electricity or playgrounds.
• There is slow progress in building classrooms, labs and libraries to strengthen government higher secondary schools.
• The secondary and higher secondary level government schools do not have adequate capacities, so the net enrolment falls, especially girls, sharply beyond the primary level.
• The budgetary allocations saw a 27% cut from proposals made by the School Education Department. Despite proposals for ₹82,570 crore, only ₹59,845 crore was allocated.
• Overall, for the core Samagra Shiksha Scheme, the department had only spent 71% of revised estimates by December 31, 2019.
• Several reports suggest that nearly 70% of students studying in government schools are ill-equipped to learn in the class they are admitted to.
• The private schools offer an enhanced teaching experience, better student-teacher ratio, efficient learning methodologies, and superior infrastructure, thus driving parents away from government schools.
• India is also dealing with a scenario of significant teacher vacancies, which are to the tune of almost 60-70 per cent in some states.
• Teachers’ professional development is a very weak area in government schools.
• Almost half the regular teacher vacancies are filled by guest or ad hoc teachers.
• Nearly, 95% of teacher education is in private hands and most of it is substandard.
• Absenteeism of teachers in these schools is very high. Even though they are paid a much higher salary than the teachers in private schools, they cheat the government and fail to discharge their duties as teachers. And sadly, no action is being taken to prevent this.
• Barely 15% of the schools can be called compliant with the RTE.
• Section 29 of the RTE explains what kind of education every child has a right to. There is no government school that is complying with that, including elite schools.
• The officers in the education department, being ‘managed,’ file false reports about the working conditions of schools.
• Political interference and patronage shield the corrupt and incompetent.
• People feel there are not enough teachers in government schools, or the schools may not be functioning regularly.
• They get carried away by the notions of a branded private school, even though it may not have good teachers.
• Also, private schools’ brand themselves as English medium and it is most imperative for children’s education.
• According to the ASER report by Pratham in 2020 , parents prefer private schools for education of boys while girl students are primarily sent to government schools to get basic education.
• The ASER 2019 report states that parents exhibit a unique bias when it comes to selection of schools for their children.
• The report shows that parents are more likely to opt for a private school when selecting a school for boys while government schools are primary choice of parents when it comes to girl’s education.

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Civics Education Essay Contest

NCSC's 2022 Civics Education Essay Contest

NCSC's Civics Education Essay Contest gives 3rd-12th grade students the opportunity to understand and explain the importance and the role of the United States government. Winners receive a total of $3,000 in scholarship money.

The contest question is based on the American Bar Association's annual Law Day theme, which in 2022 is "Toward a More Perfect Union: The Constitution in Times of Change."

2022's Essay Contest question:

Which amendment to the u.s. constitution has made the biggest difference in people’s lives explain how and why..

Submit your entry using the form below. This is the preferred method of entry. However, hand-written essays may be submitted by mail to NCSC, c/o Deirdre Roesch, 300 Newport Avenue, Williamsburg, Va., 23185. If submitting my mail, please include the following on separate piece of paper: full name, school name, city, state, phone number, email (if applicable), teacher name and teacher email (if applicable).

• See contest rules and regulations .
• Download flyer to share with students.

A total of $3,000 in scholarship money will be awarded to the winners.

9th-12th grade:

• One (1) First Place: $1,000
• One (1) Second Place: $500
• One (1) Third Place: $250

6th-8th grade:

• One (1) First Place: $400
• One (1) Second Place: $200
• One (1) Third Place: $100

3rd-5th grade:

• One (1) First Place: $300
• One (1) Second Place: $150

Email Contest Manager  Deirdre Roesch with questions about the essay contest.

Contest history

Elementary school: Justice Sandra Day O'Connor believed that people should take part in their communities and government. What does it mean to be involved in your community? Can you think of ways you can help make your school or neighborhood a better place?

Middle/High School: Justice Sandra Day O'Connor stressed the importance of civic engagement. Discuss the role she believed citizens should play in shaping their communities and government. Why did she think that civic participation is so important to democracy?

Read the Media Release Read the winning essays

Elementary/Middle school: The First Amendment protects freedom of speech. What happens when people are free to say anything they want in person or online? For example, yelling "fire" in a crowded room or posting hateful words on social media. What kind of free speech situations require a judge or police officer to get involved to keep the peace? High school: In 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a high school cheerleader could not be punished in school for using curse words on social media when commenting about not making the cheer team while she was off school grounds. Do you think students should be held to the same standard when exercising their First Amendment right to freedom of speech whether they’re on or off school property? Decide if there are circumstances where students should be punished by a court of law for what they say or write to maintain civility.

Read the Press Release Read the winning essays Watch the winner's video

Question: Which Amendment to the U.S. Constitution has made the biggest difference in people’s lives? Explain how and why.

Read the press release. Read the winning entries Watch the winner's video

Question: What does the rule of law mean to you?

Read the winning entries.

Elementary/Middle school: Why is it so important that all citizens have the right to vote? High school: Is voting a right, privilege or responsibility? Why?

Read the press release. Read the winning entries.

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Essay on “Importance of Government Schools in India” Complete Essay for Class 9, Class 10, Class 12 and Graduation and other classes.

Importance of Government Schools in India

Why do private schools, which are known as public schools in India, attract a large number of parents to send their wards to these schools? We need to go deep into this aspect of education in our country particularly because Article 45 of the constitution of India puts the onus of providing free and compulsory education up to the age of 14 on the state government and the central government which run government (state) schools in states and territories under the direct rule of the central government.

Failure of government, run schools to attract students and to stop them from dropping out means that the government will never succeed in fulfilling its obligation under Article 45 and education to all children up to the age of 14 will always remain a dream as it has remained even after 55 years of attaining freedom. Public schools cannot be expected to fulfill this aim as they are out of the reach of the general public even in metropolitan cities, not to speak of the deep and far-flung areas of rural India where large sections of our society still fail to see the face of a primary school. Admissions for KG and Nursery standards start with donation or payment under the table…. amounts varying from ten thousand to one lakh and fifty thousand depending on the name and fame of the public school to which parents want to get their wards admitted. These schools charge heavy fees combined with compulsory purchases of uniforms, books and stationary from stores which are run by these schools themselves or from pre-arranged stores.

Except for board classes, these schools fix their own syllabi and prescribe their own books. Most of these books are those in which someone from a particular school has contributed as a writer and is invariably priced very high.

However, if a child does not end up getting through the class at the end of the year, the parents are called and offered a ‘pass’ certificate, along with an appropriate marks-statement for their children so that they can take their wards to some other school, which invariably is a government school. Thus those not doing well are weaned away, and extra payment-seats are created for new students to be admitted. Thousands of students with such (actually) fake certificates of these financially unaided by the state but recognized schools are fully valid for joining any school. Of course, some of the best students of government schools, whose parents feel that they should do something more for their talented children, shift to “public” schools every year. This continuous churning process ensures supply of better students, of course with better resources, to public schools and also impoverishing the already poor government schools. The net result is that there is a wide difference between their Board results. The different social strata to which the students of the two categories of schools belong is never taken into consideration while comparing their result, nor does anybody care about the abysmal difference in amenities available to the two categories of students.

Unlike public schools, where teachers are selected and kept on merit, the government schools are stuffed with teachers, particularly the senior ones, most of whom do not even know their teaching subjects well. Government schools in Delhi prove the point best. Here Post Graduate Teachers (PGTs) called Lecturers, who teach Senior Secondary classes, get promoted to the post in a queer manner. Trained Graduate Teachers (TGTs) teaching Science or Mathematics up to Secondary level are promoted as Lecturers in any of the subjects in Arts or Commerce stream, like History, Political Science, Geography, Economics, Sociology, Accountancy, Business Studies and even in English, apart from Mathematics, Chemistry, Physics and Biology (which they teach in schools), only by doing a post-graduate degree course in that subject even though they do not study the particulars subject during their graduation and have absolutely no experience of teaching that subject in their schools, whereas the rules do not permit TGTs of Hindi, Sanskrit, Punjabi etc. to be considered for the promotion in subjects other than these languages even though they generally study those subjects at under-graduate level and may have an experience of teaching such a subject for a long period in their schools with competence.

Should the government. and the officers responsible for perpetuating this state of affairs not be held responsible for criminal negligence of their duties and gross violation not only of Article 45 of the Constitution but also of the spirit of the fundamental human rights to equality by denying to the students of government schools equality of opportunity on which the foundation of our Constitution, and in fact of any democratic society, is laid?

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Lesson Plan: AP Government: Argumentative Essay Practice

The Federalist Papers

Boston College professor Mary Sarah Bilder gives a brief overview backgrounding the Federalist Papers

Description

This is intended as an end-of-course review activity for practice with the argumentative essay format included on the AP United States Government and Politics exam since the 2018 redesign. Eleven practice prompts are provided, reflecting content from Units 1-3.

ARGUMENTATIVE ESSAY PROMPT ANALYSIS

• Review the provided Argumentative Essay Prompts in either an individual or jigsaw format.
• Write a thesis statement for your selected prompt(s) and identify the selection you would make from the provided list and the second piece of evidence you would choose.
• If there are prompts for which you struggle to develop a thesis, or items on the bulleted lists with which you are not conversant, use the hyperlinked C-SPAN Classroom resources to extend your understanding of the required founding documents and SCOTUS cases that you found challenging.

ARGUMENTATIVE ESSAY

• Chose one or more of the provided Argumentative Essay Prompts , as assigned, and use the planning and exploration you did above to write a full essay in response to your designated prompt(s) in 25 or fewer minutes , since that's the time limit you'll face on the AP Exam!
• Exchange essays with a classmate and evaluate each others' work.
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Essay on Government

Students are often asked to write an essay on Government in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Government

What is government.

Government is a group of people who make decisions and laws for a country. They are responsible for providing services like education, healthcare, and security to the public.

Types of Government

There are different types of governments, such as democracy, monarchy, dictatorship, and communism. In a democracy, people choose their leaders through voting.

Roles of Government

Governments have many roles. They protect citizens, make laws, and manage the economy. They also provide public services like schools and hospitals.

Importance of Government

Government is important because it maintains order, protects citizens, and provides necessary services. Without it, society would be chaotic.

250 Words Essay on Government

Introduction.

The term ‘Government’ fundamentally signifies the governing body of a nation or state that exercises authority, controls, and administers public policy. It is the political direction and control exercised over the actions of the members, citizens, or inhabitants of communities, societies, and states.

The Role of Government

The government plays a crucial role in society by ensuring the smooth functioning of the nation. It is responsible for maintaining law and order, protecting citizens’ rights, and providing public services. The government also shapes the economy by implementing policies that either stimulate or slow down economic growth.

Governments can be categorized into several types based on their structure and the extent of power they exercise. These include democracy, where power is vested in the people; monarchy, where power is held by a single ruler; and autocracy, where a single person holds unlimited power.

Government and Democracy

In democratic governments, citizens have the right to elect their representatives who make decisions on their behalf. This system promotes accountability, transparency, and the protection of individual rights. However, democracy’s success hinges on an informed and active citizenry that can hold the government accountable.

In conclusion, the government is a fundamental institution in any society. It plays a pivotal role in maintaining societal order, ensuring the welfare of its citizens, and driving the nation’s growth and development. The efficiency of a government is largely determined by its structure, the extent of its powers, and the level of citizen participation.

500 Words Essay on Government

Introduction to government.

The government’s primary role is to safeguard the rights and freedoms of its citizens. This involves ensuring the security of the people, maintaining law and order, and providing public goods and services. A government has the responsibility to protect its citizens from internal and external threats, which is why it maintains law enforcement agencies and a military.

The government also plays a crucial role in economic regulation and stabilization. By controlling monetary and fiscal policies, it can influence the country’s economic trajectory, ensuring growth, stability, and equity. Furthermore, the government is responsible for the provision of public goods and services such as education, healthcare, infrastructure, and social welfare programs.

Forms of Government

In between these extremes, there are numerous variations, such as constitutional monarchies, where a monarch shares power with a constitutionally organized government, or oligarchies, where power rests with a small number of people.

The Importance of Good Governance

Good governance is integral to the effective functioning of a government. It is characterized by transparency, accountability, efficiency, and adherence to the rule of law. Good governance ensures that the government’s actions benefit the majority of the population and that public resources are used efficiently and ethically.

Conclusion: The Evolving Role of Government

In today’s rapidly changing world, the role of government is evolving. With the advent of technology and globalization, governments are not just confined to traditional roles but are increasingly involved in areas such as digital infrastructure, climate change, and global health crises.

As we move forward, the challenge for governments worldwide will be to adapt to these changes and continue to serve their citizens effectively. Understanding the nature, role, and complexities of government is crucial for us as we navigate the political landscape of the 21st century.

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Forms of Government High School Questions

Help students understand how a country's form of government determines whether citizens' voices are magnified or minimized through these essay and discussion questions.

Introduction

• Why is democracy an attractive form of government? Why is authoritarianism? 
• How is a government’s choice of economic system tied to its goals and values? 
• Why has democratic backsliding increased since 2005? 
• How do the pillars of democracy contribute to a healthy, functioning government? 
• What sorts of grievances lead to revolutions? 
• What form of government do you think is best? Why? 
• What do you think can be done about democratic backsliding?
• What form of government do you think is best? Why?

Democracy Essay for Students and Children

500+ words essay on democracy.

Democracy is known as the finest form of government. Why so? Because in a democracy, the people of the country choose their government. They enjoy certain rights which are very essential for any human being to live freely and happily. There are various democratic countries in the world , but India is the largest one. Democracy has withstood the test of time, and while other forms have the government has failed, democracy stood strong. It has time and again proved its importance and impact.

Significance of a Democracy

Democracy is very important for human development . When people have free will to live freely, they will be happier. Moreover, we have seen how other forms of government have turned out to be. Citizens are not that happy and prosperous in a monarchy or anarchy.

Furthermore, democracy lets people have equal rights. This ensures that equality prevails all over the country. Subsequently, it also gives them duties. These duties make them better citizens and are also important for their overall development.

Most importantly, in a democracy, the people form the government. So, this selection of the government by the citizens gives everyone a chance to work for their country. It allows the law to prevail efficiently as the rules are made by people whom they have selected.

In addition, democracy allows people of various religions and cultures to exist peacefully. It makes them live in harmony with one another. People of democracy are more tolerant and accepting of each other’s differences. This is very important for any country to be happy and prosper.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

India: A Democratic Country

India is known to be the largest democracy all over the world. After the rule of the British ended in 1947 , India adopted democracy. In India, all the citizens who are above the age of 18 get the right to vote. It does not discriminate on the basis of caste, creed, gender, color, or more.

Although India is the largest democracy it still has a long way to go. The country faces a lot of problems which do not let it efficiently function as a democracy. The caste system is still prevalent which hampers with the socialist principle of democracy. Moreover, communalism is also on the rise. This interferes with the secular aspect of the country. All these differences need to be set aside to ensure the happiness and prosperity of the citizens.

In short, democracy in India is still better than that in most of the countries. Nonetheless, there is a lot of room for improvement which we must focus on. The government must implement stringent laws to ensure no discrimination takes place. In addition, awareness programs must be held to make citizens aware of their rights and duties.

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Congressional Seminar Essay Contest for High School Students

In winning the writing competition, win a Scholarship for the Congressional Seminar in Washington, D.C. June 23-27 2025.

The Congressional Essay Contest (CEC) is run by NSCDA Corporate Societies and Town Committees across the United States. Freshman, sophomore, junior, or senior year high school students submit essays that are then judged and awarded. Students must be 16 or older to participate in the Congressional Seminar.

The essay topic changes annually. For this upcoming year’s contest (2024-2025) the NSCDA asks students to answer the prompt:

“Explain whether existing defamation and libel laws are or are not sufficient to prohibit baseless AI generated and distributed content.”

Winners receive full tuition and support for travel to our nation’s capital for the Workshops Foundation’s renown Congressional Seminar, a highly interactive, civic-focused workshop. The seminar includes a Mock Congress, enabling students to collaborate with peers from various backgrounds and different views to forge public policy on pressing national and international issues. The seminar provides university campus housing and meals; a per diem for meals purchased off-campus; and access to world class museums, government and congressional offices, and memorable tours. Are you curious about what to expect on this trip? Watch this video from Alexander Glover who talked about his experience as a Congressional Essay Contest winner. Click here to see a sample itinerary of the trip.

Learn more about the Workshops Foundation .

2025 contest information

• 2025 application
• 202 5 contest rules and information
• Write a compelling 750 word essay (judging criteria can be found on page 2)
• Applications are due December 1

Note: Children and grandchildren of an active member of The NSCDA may not receive a scholarship to the Congressional Seminar. They are still eligible to participate at their own expense. See below for further details and application or email Mary Bradshaw, NSCDA Congressional Essay Consultant, at  [email protected]  for more information.

• Legacy Scholar information
• 2025 Legacy Scholar application
• Legacy Scholar payment form

2025 Poster for your classrooms

We look forward to reading your class submissions!

In grateful appreciation to Linda R. Monk, J.D., Constitutional Scholar ( www.lindamonk.com ), for her contribution to the wording of the topic.

Encourage your students to complete and submit their application for 2025 .

Email Mary Bradshaw, NSCDA Congressional Essay Consultant, at [email protected] for more information or if you have any questions.

Donations to this Essay Contest are greatly appreciated.

Congressional Seminar Essay Contest Gallery

Self-Government in Public Schools

ONE day, about four years ago, some boys in a western high school were testing the laws of gravitation by heaving rocks over the edge of a bluff on which the school was located. It chanced that the laws of gravitation were in good working order that day, and the rocks went straight down, and through the roof of a tiny cottage at the foot of the bluff. The widow who lived in the cottage, not being interested in the experiments, bemoaned the damage to her roof, and went straightway to the principal of the school to report the offenders.

The boys were called together and told how carelessness of this sort affects the reputation of the school, and a committee was appointed from their number to determine what reparation should be made to the woman in the cottage. The immediate result was that the boys raised a subscription among themselves and had the roof repaired.

But there was another, and a far more important, result of this little episode. Then and there was inaugurated a system of self-government among the pupils at that school which has proved a force second to none in the efficiency of the school. From a commercial high school with an enrollment of five or six hundred students, the school has changed to a polytechnic school of two thousand. But with each year the work of the self-government committee has broadened and strengthened until self-government has become a vital principle underlying every activity from the study-room to the athletic field.

The system did not spring full-fledged into being. It has evolved. After the boys had made good in the matter of the rocks and the roof, another conference was called and a committee appointed to relieve the teachers of yard-duty. The boys were told that the yard was theirs and that if anything went wrong it was their wrong to right. And the principal of the school was the sort of man who believes that the only way to do a thing is to do it; and from that day no teacher has ever stood watch over the boys in the yard. They were made to feel absolute responsibility for good conduct on the school grounds. And by the end of the year the success of the plan was so pronounced that the pupils were asked to attack the problem of governing the entire school.

A problem it was, indeed, particularly when the school was moved to a fine new building with halls extending over an entire city block, with scores of class-rooms, a large auditorium where frequent assemblies are held, a gymnasium, and all the departments and equipment of a modern polytechnic high school. Order must be maintained in the halls, in the study-room during an assembly, on the playground, and going to and from school, without interference on the part of teachers. Only during recitations must the teacher be responsible for order, and even then any disorder is reported to the committee for correction.

Back in the first days, when the boys were beginning to prove themselves, the girls were given the care of the lunching places. Gradually their responsibility was increased until a committee of girls took place alongside the committee of boys, one having complete jurisdiction over the girls, the other over the boys. The committees, consisting of a boy and a girl from each class, are elected by the pupils, eligibility being merely a question of scholarship. Previous deportment cuts no figure, and it has happened that boys known as ringleaders in all sorts of mischief have been elected even to the presidency of self-government committees. On one occasion the election of a mischievous boy was deliberately plotted, in the hope that a semester of lax discipline would follow. What did follow was a term of the most severe discipline the school had known, and it is needless to say the boy was not reëlected. During his term of office the boy kept out of all mischief, and knowing the ways of his kind and the boys who were likely to be implicated in any wrongdoing, he could lay finger on the offender every time. Always he dealt punishment with justice, but without mercy; and when he went back into the ranks he did so with a somewhat chastened spirit.

In so large a school, every sort of question of discipline arises. There is stealing, there is selfishness of every kind, there is bullying and browbeating on the part of older and stronger boys, and the fear of force and influence on the part of the weaker, beside all the petty annoyances, from note-scribbling to the kicking of tin cans down the aisle during class. As homes are becoming less and less homes in the real sense, the responsibility of moulding the character of boys and girls is being more and more shifted to the public schools; and perhaps at no time in the history of public schools has school discipline required more judgment, more firmness, or more tact, than to-day. And the habitual optimist may score a point when, instead of reverting to the pedagogic principle of “No lickin’, no larnin’,” there is put in practice the democratic dogma of government of the people, by the people, for the people.

The authority of these self-government committees does not stop short of actual suspension, although in taking this last step the principal is invariably consulted. But the greatest strength of self-government work lies in the fact that the offender is tried before a jury of his peers. It is not some unsympathetic, middle-aged person, who has forgotten he was ever young and lawless, who sits in judgment, but a roomful of the offender’s school-fellows — possibly some of his or her best friends. And the question that naturally arises is whether these boys and girls are big enough and broad enough to lay aside all prejudice and personal feeling, and deal impartially with the individual. The best answer is a report of a meeting of the girls’ self-government committee held the last day of the week before the close of school.

A girl was called to answer for continued disorder in the study room, and the cutting of many classes during the week. A note to some boy, afterward hastily torn and thrown on the floor, was the clue that led to the discovery that the girl was in mischief in the study-room when she should have been at her English and mathematics. It was a roomful of her friends that she had to face when the president called her forward to answer to the charges. She had been many times before the committee for disorder. She was guilty now, and had little to say for herself. She was sent to the hall, while another offender was made to tell why she had stolen flowers from a teacher’s desk, and reminded that taking even so small a thing as a flower was really theft. She, too, was guilty, and had little to say for herself to this jury of her fellows.

When both had been sent from the room, the committee discussed, with perfect calmness, the two cases. The chief offender was a particular favorite, but it was pointed out that her behavior had been bad for a long time, that every effort had been made to help her, but that neither the counsel of friends selected to talk with her, nor lighter punishments, had had any effect. It had been deemed useless to leave the matter to her parents, as she was known to be petted and spoiled at home and left entirely to her own will in all things. At last it was decided that since she had shown no disposition to yield either to persuasion or punishment, she should be allowed to remain in school on but one condition — that of absolutely good behavior.

She was then recalled, and the president, one of her friends, told her, gently but earnestly, that her offenses were so serious as to merit an extreme sentence. She was required to make up fifteen hours in study during the final days of school, and would return the next term with a suspended sentence of suspension — which means that each week she must bring to the committee a report of satisfactory work from her teachers, and in the event of being once more reported for disorder or unsatisfactory work, suspension would follow.

The girl who took the flowers was severely reprimanded, and was given sixteen hours to make up during the week when the air was full of the excitement of commencement and class days. These sentences from their playmates were harder to bear than a reprimand from a teacher, with whom the pupil is not associated in a social way. And it is doubtful if any set of grown-ups — for example, a body of teachers — could reach a higher plane of abstract justice, independent of personal feeling, than did those thirty or forty girls.

Nor does self-government have a tendency to develop prigs. While the boys and girls maintain a considerable dignity at all times in the discharge of their duties, at other times they are just boys and girls like the rest. Under stress of youthful spirit, they have even been known to forget for the moment that as goats they were in any wise different from the sheep. On one occasion the boys of the school were much disturbed by the appearance of a several-weeks-old moustache in their midst. The wearer of it was repeatedly requested to shave it, but he always refused. At last the boys could stand it no longer, and half of the offending moustache was shaved off, in spite of the owner’s protests. The shorn one lost no time in bringing his father to the principal. Now, the principal had been a boy himself, and he knew the offense that another boy’s moustache can give. He also knew that if he had been robbed of his first moustache he would never have stopped until he had whipped every boy connected with the robbing. He told the boy and his father to name the punishment for the others, and while they, thus disarmed, went home to decide what it should be, he made inquiry as to the authors of the mischief. To his surprise, he learned that almost every boy was a member of the self-government committee. Even when he called them together to discuss the matter, they could not see that they had done wrong. Nor, down in the principal’s heart, which is still part boy’s, could he. But since the boy, whose dear first moustache was gone, chose to take the matter seriously, something must be done. The boys offered to make public apology. The shorn one refused to hear it. Nor, after much consideration, could he decide that the world contained any solace for griefs like his, and he determined to return to school and let the matter pass. But the boys, realizing that they had lowered the dignity of their office, resigned in a body from the self-government committee. It was the greatest sacrifice they could make, and they made it manfully. But the vindication of their fall from grace, and the appreciation of the stuff they were made of, came at the next election, when every boy was reinstated, one being elected to the presidency, which he filled with rare tact and dignity.

“The self-government system,” says John H. Francis, the principal of this school — the Los Angeles Polytechnic High School — “is more difficult than the old system of government by teachers. You must first secure the belief of the pupils that the committee is absolutely square, and it is difficult to make either pupils or parents believe that pupils can rise above their own prejudices and favoritism. And it is difficult to make parents believe pupils have sufficient judgment to pass upon questions of government.

“It is difficult to get pupils on the committee who have the personality that will command respect and obedience. After you get them you must stay pretty close to them to see that they do rise absolutely above any favoritism, and see that their judgment is at least fair; and after that you must stand back of what they do in a way that will hold both the committee and the rest of the school, and keep parents satisfied. If the committee failed, that would discourage its members. If the parents felt everything was left to the committee, they would criticise. It devolves upon the teacher or principal to maintain a proper balance.

“But self-government is the best solution of the question of school discipline. With self-government introduced into the sixth, seventh, and eighth grades, these higher grades could control the whole school. Pupils should be made to feel that they are the citizens of the schools, that the efficiency and the reputation of their schools are for them as much as for their teachers. The public school is the place to develop the fundamental principles of citizenship, and it is not doing what it should along this line. If teachers and principals had the right kind of ideals they could revolutionize the social world.

“Self-government gives the student a responsibility that is strengthening. Pupils inclined to be trashy and irresponsible have entered upon the work of the committee with a seriousness that was the first indication of real character. Among the better class of students, it has developed a manliness and personality in the boys, and tact and dignity in the girls that are little short of miraculous. The experience and the knowledge of human nature which they derive from it are an invaluable asset in their equipment for life.”

The success of the self-government system in this, the largest high school on the Pacific coast, has aroused interest among educators throughout the country. The example has been followed by another high school in Los Angeles, and the same principle is being applied to a rather more limited extent in the Central High and Central Manual Training High Schools of Philadelphia, and one St. Louis school. Not since the birch switch and hickory rod were relegated to the limbo of unutterable barbarities has anything come so near a solution of the vexed question of school discipline. And while the best results of the self-government system will always be obtained in schools where the principal or teacher back of the student committees is of the sort that could readily enforce law and order by the strength of his personality, in any circumstances its effectiveness would probably equal that of other means, and the by-product of experience is a clear gain to the students who have an active part in the self-government work.

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AI for the People: Use Cases for Government

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2024, Paper: "Artificial intelligence (AI) is the news topic of the 2020s. From ChatGPT writing essays to chatbots answering questions to algorithms identifying cancers, AI is impacting and often disrupting how we live our lives. AI is proposed or in place in every domain and touches every function. In government, AI is relevant for departments from education and transportation to national security and public safety. Within these organizations, AI can facilitate the hiring of new employees, providing interactive responses with constituents, planning workloads, identifying anomalies, and forecasting natural disasters, to name a few applications." 

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