As the 2000 Presidential race heats up, both Al Gore and George W. Bush have started to make the reform of primary and secondary American education a major campaign issue.
One of the central issues is the use of vouchers, which allow parents to direct the money the government would have paid for their child's education at a public school to the school of their choice -- be it public, private or parochial.
But what are the real differences between the kinds of education that schools offer students? Is one type inherently better than the others? Does one type of school prepare students better for an Ivy League education?
To find out, The Dartmouth asked some of the people with the most direct experience -- Dartmouth students -- to talk about their own varied educational experiences.
This is the first in a two-part series.
School choices
Within the overall groupings of public and private institutions, there is a tremendous variety of school types, ranging from rural to urban, competitive to caring and structured to free-form.
Many students, of course, arrived at Dartmouth after receiving perfectly good and ordinary educations at high schools with standard educational programs.
Others, however, received their educations in less run-of-the-mill ways.
Brayton Osgood '03 attended Putney School in Vermont, which offers traditional classes complemented by work on the farm around which the school is built, physically and philosophically.
Students at Putney are required to spend a term doing barn chores and another on land-use detail, and were also required to participate in arts activities.
"The idea is they want kids to be educated in more than just a classroom sense," Osgood said. "It made you pretty independent."
Also built around a working farm, but with a different philosophy, is the mountain school of Milton Academy, also in Vermont, which Kate Knight '01 attended.
Students attend the small school for a semester, where the curriculum is basically normal, Knight said, although more integrated and somewhat environmentally focused.
Knight raved about her time at the mountain school, saying, "It's a really intense way of living, a lot of thought about what you're doing and why you're doing it."
The mountain school sends a disproportionate number of program participants to the College. Eight students from Knight's term -- there are less than 50 per semester -- now attend Dartmouth, a far higher percentage than any other school in the country, including big names like New York's Stuyvesant High School.
Melissa Fedders '02 also had an unusual high school education, but in a different sense. She received her high school education by way of correspondence courses with the University of Nebraska while attending the School of American Ballet in New York City.
Students at the school taught themselves from textbooks and other material provided through the mail. Without deadlines and teachers, Fedders said it was often difficult to motivate oneself, and she said she was not as prepared for her coursework at Dartmouth as she could have been.
Although she decided to pursue a college education rather than a professional dancing career, Fedders said that dancing was an educational experience and imparted such attributes as confidence and self-discipline.
There is no way to present the variety of educational experiences Dartmouth students enjoyed in this limited space. Just a few types of secondary educations not previously mentioned include home-schooling, military academies, and one of the more common experiences, single-sex high schools.
Better Preparation?
About 64 percent of students admitted to Dartmouth over the last five years received their secondary education from public schools. Of the remaining students, 30 percent attended private schools and five percent attended received their high school diploma from a parochial school system.
The number of students attending Dartmouth from public, private and parochial schools remain in very similar ratios to those admitted. For example, 65 percent of enrolled students, went to public high schools.
Nationally, however, about 91 percent of high school age children are enrolled in public schools, according to data compiled by the National Center for Education Statistics, a government organization.
Does this mean that private schools offer better preparation for an Ivy League education? Not necessarily. The percentages of admitted and enrolled students from each type of educational system track very closely with each the number of students who apply, Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid Karl Furstenberg said, adding that the statistics are "remarkably consistent" over the last five years or so.
What this means is that a disproportionate number of students from private schools apply to Dartmouth, while the admissions department finds about the same percentage of qualified applicants from public schools as applicants from private schools.
Some would suggest that the discrepancy is a result of the fact that many private schools draw students from different backgrounds than public schools in some areas. Education professor Andrew Garrod said that it is the motivated parents who send their children -- who are also likely to be more motivated -- to private school.
Christine Walker '02, who went to urban East Providence High School in Providence, R.I., would agree. Her school offered just four Advanced Placement classes to 1,400 students in grades 10 through 12.
"There weren't a lot of people who were driven," she said. "I think enough people at my school could have gone on to do better things but they didn't know about it."