Perceptions about Independent Education

Last week the London Times had a series of articles about the public (independent) schools in Great Britain.  They have held status as a charitable organization because they provide what we call financial aid and they call bursaries to students to attend their schools. The government is beginning to ask questions about how charitable is charitable - in other words, how much money does a school have to allocate in financial aid to qualify as a charity?  Schools are scrambling to make the point that they are providing charity in many ways, including service to the community performed by their students.  An underlying theme of the articles, and seemingly of the questions being raised in Parliament, is the growing divide between those families who can afford to send their children to schools they choose and those who must use the local schools. 

This dialogue about haves and have-nots, about affordability and status (class) and ultimately about diversity spans the globe now.  It is echoed most recently in a New York Times story over the weekend about endowments in independent schools and drew the parallell to the endowments of places like Harvard.

Like it or not, we still live in a world that holds deeply ingrained perceptions about class, money and access.  Independent schools will continue to fight this prejudice indefinitely but need to be ever mindful that their actions can foster more misperception or mitigate it.  Making known to your community the service that you give, the financial aid that is quietly offered, the importance of diversity to  your school are all steps that you can take long before the question is raised by the government about what you really do.  While there is no Parliament in the U.S. to raise the question, it is on many minds in the public court of opinion.