The Importance of Giving Teachers Time

The other day I was chatting with a parent, and the conversation turned to a comparison between private and public schools. The topic is common among parents, particularly those who send their children to private schools after having had them in public schools. Understandably, parents generalize from their own children's individual experiences in their attempts to assess the differences between private and public schools (and, perhaps, to justify their hard-earned tuition dollars).

Although some observations private-school parents make can be questionable—such as that the teachers are "better" or the kids more motivated—one that came up in my recent conversation was that teachers in private schools have more time available to devote to students (which, in turn, helps kids academically and enriches their educational experience).

In general, this perception is true. Because of inadequate funding, classes in public schools are often much larger, which means public school teachers have less time available per student than do their private school counterparts. Moreover, free time can be—and often is—built into the schedules of private school teachers, allowing them to spend more hours correcting papers, giving feedback, meeting with students, and developing creative ways of teaching their subject matter.

This doesn't mean that private school teachers are inherently better—many, in fact, have years of public school teaching under their belts, and plenty of public school teachers devote countless hours of their own time to their students and classes after school, in the evenings, and on weekends. It simply means that private school teachers have an important resource—more time—that teachers in public schools typically don't.

As with other aspects of K–12 education, however, this difference is more important for some kids than for others—and at certain points in their schooling than at others. In other words, not only is the teaching in private schools not intrinsically superior to that in public schools, it also may not affect a particular student's educational achievement one way or the other—there are individual differences in how students respond to varying educational environments. As always, what's important is to evaluate the needs of your particular child at his or her specific developmental stage and choose a school—public or private—that will be a good fit.