The expansion of private schooling reflects a market response to public school failure and accelerates the inequality that public school failure produces.
Why Private Schools Expand
Private schooling expands when families who can afford to exit the public school system conclude that the public system will not provide adequate education for their children. The expansion is a market signal about public system quality — the private school market grows in proportion to the perceived failure of the public system to serve those with the resources to choose alternatives. The private school expansion creates a specific political economy challenge for public school improvement: the families who would otherwise be the most effective advocates for public school quality are no longer users of the public system and therefore have reduced incentives to advocate for its improvement. Their exit removes the most politically powerful constituency for public school investment from the political coalition that improvement requires.
The Equity Dimension
The private school expansion also accelerates the inequality effects of public school quality divergence. Families that can afford private schooling access higher quality education; families that cannot are left in the public system whose quality is declining partly because the families that could have advocated for it have exited. The gap between them is larger than the gap in educational resources would alone explain — because the exit of the higher-income families concentrates social capital in the private sector and depresses it in the public sector.
The private school is a symptom of a public school system that has failed to maintain the quality that would keep its most mobile users. It is also the mechanism by which the political coalition for public school improvement is dissolved. Both are governance failures with the same cause and the same solution: a public school system that serves all children well enough that exit is not the rational choice for families who can afford it.
Discussion