The Idea of an Essay, Volume 4

194 The Idea of an Essay: Volume 4 Before the outcomes of the public educational system can be considered, there are some statistics that should be observed as a backdrop. For the better part of the United States’s history, public schools experienced an upward trend in enrollment and graduation rates. Available data spanning from 1869-1970 shows public school enrollment jumping from 7.6 million to 45.4 million students, and the same time period saw the number of graduates rise from 22,000 to 2.6 million (NCES, Table 201.10). Perhaps a better reflection, to control for the growth in total population, would be the enrollment as a percent of the total population, which increased from 19.6% to 22.6% during this same span of time (NCES, Table 201.10). To summarize these points of data, public schools experienced generally consistent growth for a period of about one hundred years. However, after 1970, the growth of public schools seems to have stalled in some respects and shrunk in others. While total enrollment has still increased since 1970, it has been at a slower rate than before (NCES, Table 201.10). Additionally, enrollment as a percent of the total population shrunk from 22.6% to 15.9% in 2012, a rate that has not yet been seen in the history of available data (NCES, Table 201.10). Any number of reasons could be the cause of this decline, but the fact remains that, comparatively, fewer students are in the public school today. However, lest these facts be misleading, it should noted that public schools are still by far the largest provider of K4-12th grade education. Even with declining numbers, public schools account for 95.1% of non-homeschool education in the United States and 81.4% among OECD countries. Purely based on reading and writing scores, public schools tend to have the lower rates of literacy than private schools. In a study comparing private and public schools, JaapDronkers and Peter Robert (2003) find that American public schools tend to average scores that are 10% lower than their private school counterparts. Compared to OECD public schools across the world, American public schools are slightly below average, but the difference is a mere 1.59% lower than the OECD average (Dronkers & Robert, 2003). A more recent and tightly focused study on the United States was also conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) to evaluate literacy rates. In this study, the NCES focuses on fourth and eighth grade students in both public and private schools. Much like the study conducted by Dronkers and Robert, the NCES study