I disagree with most of your post (including the tone here in GQ). I want to point out that, in my opinion, the vast majority of private school students are in private school because their parents feel that the education is better than what is available in the local public schools and/or the private school is safer than the public school, and that, notwithstanding the cost, it is worth it to send their kids to private schools. In Los Angeles, where I live, and in many other urban areas, the public school system is in disarray, and is trying very hard to work with a rapidly growing population of poor immigrant students for whom english is a second language. Many of these school districts are chronically short of funds (and the current fiscal mess in California is not going to help the situation). Many parents have decided that the public schools are so far from what is acceptable, that they need to make whatever sacrifice is required to send their children to a better school. Most of these people are not, by any measure, rich.
Nah, I just learned how to code in LISP. That teaches you to close your parentheses.
But anyone notice the geographic distribution of the schools that keep being brought up? Why are there so few on the west side of the Mississippi?
The question is actually, why are there so many in the East. The answer is that elite secondary schools in America were modeled after elite secondary schools in England. It shouldn’t be surprisingly that the highest concentration are found in areas first settled by the English, where everything from the names of places to the legal systems are modeled on English precedents.
Also, elite secondary schools filled in the gap at a time when public secondary schools were nonexistant, or whose curriculums were inadequate for a college bound student. With time, as more and more students completed secondary school, the quality of public secondary schools increased. Parallel to this was the gradual westward settlement of English-speaking peoples across the American continent. By the time Arizona and New Mexico became states in 1912, for instance, it was accepted that every city should have a public high school whose curriculum was adequate for college entrance.
I live down the street from Brooklyn tech. I ended up going to Northfield Mount Hermon in Mass., which is regarded as a pretty good school.
My boyfriend went to a private high school in San Francisco that costs about 20K a year to go to (signifigantly more than his college education is costing). It’s the sort of place that you have to go to a good private elementry school to eventually get into. It’s a nice place- good teachers, excellent facilites, small and rigorous classes. But it isn’t really “elite” in the way that British schools are. Theres no marble floors of celebrities. It’s just a really really nice school. Lots of kids went on to elite colleges, but plenty of them went on to some of the upper-tier state universities as well.
So the General Answer is “yes, they exist.”
We’re done here, no?