ARTICLES PUBLIC AND PRIVATE EDUCATION: CONCEPTUALIZING THE DISTINCTION

Common wisdom and public discourse seem to suggest that there are two types of schools, private and public. Policy debates, media outlets, and com-parisons of outcomes on standardized tests and interscholastic athletic competitions make use of the distinction. This essay argues that while such a distinction can be helpful, it also tends to obscure differences in the social organization of schools. Employing a sociological analysis and providing a historical overview of educational developments, the authors focus on cen-tralization versus decentralization of school controls and discuss the rami-fications of a broad versus a narrow market niche for schools. In this essay, we have two tasks. First, we will conceptualize the widelyused distinction between the public and private sectors of national systems of education by searching for prime environmental and social organizational dimensions along which the two kinds of schools may differ. Second, with-in the terms of this conceptualization, we will evaluate the usefulness of this distinction between school sectors for understanding the degree to which a school produces achievement gains among its students. We will conclud