New York City has many private schools, ranging from secular independent to Catholic and Yeshivas. Most private independent schools have predominantly white student bodies, and some are highly competitive and academically rigorous. They enroll a disproportionately high number of the city’s white students (over 40 percent), though they represent only 14 percent of the whole city’s student body. This contrasts strikingly with the public schools, where almost 70 percent of the students are Hispanic or Black. Still, in the city, one-third of all private school students are nonwhite, and 8.8 percent are Black—the schools understand the problem, and most seek to create a more diverse student body. Ideally, they promote a deep understanding of the complexity of cultural identities and the ways in which they intersect with power and privilege. Of course, they don’t always achieve that. Many of the schools are wealthy, often with substantial endowments and parents who can pay steep tuitions, often exceeding $60,000 a year. In New York City, where tuition is particularly high, many high-income parents can qualify for financial aid.
Statewide, private schools have experienced a 16 percent decline in enrollment since 2000–01; the decline has been less within the city (12 percent) than outside the city (21 percent). Enrollment in Catholic schools within the state has declined by 49 percent, while enrollment in Jewish schools is up by 62.6 percent. Top-ranked independent schools in the city like Brearley, Collegiate, Trinity, and Horace Mann are doing well, with enrollments up over 10 percent. What I plan to explore is the nature of independent schools, who often serve as conduits to the Ivy League.
Private schools defy simple generalization. For the 2025 school year, there are 198 private schools serving 200,000 students in New York City, while there are 359 public schools serving 938,189 pupils. Every independent school has its own unique mission, and students are selected through the school’s own self-defined admissions process. Private schools often boast smaller class sizes and more individualized attention and can offer more diverse teaching methods.
The methods are varied, including traditional, progressive, and specialized. The traditional schools focus on structured curricula and standardized testing and emphasize core subjects like math, science, and literature. The progressive ones encourage experiential learning and critical thinking. They include project-based learning and collaborative activities. Project-based learning involves a dynamic classroom approach that holds that students acquire a deeper knowledge through active exploration of real-world challenges and problems. Students learn about a subject by working for an extended period to investigate and respond to a complex question, like the nature of an urban commune or the problem of immigration.
Another teaching method has been adopted by the Waldorf schools—alternative schools that follow a unique educational philosophy developed by Rudolf Steiner. They emphasize a holistic approach to learning, integrating academic subjects with the arts and practical skills. Waldorf schools are not tied to any specific religion and are based on the belief that there is a spiritual dimension to life.
I taught college and graduate school for 35 years and, in the late 1960s, was involved in an experimental educational program. Some of the courses in the program were structurally bold and adventurous, others more linked to interdisciplinary subject matter and the study of good and great books and films. At first, I was totally, even dogmatically committed to experimentation, but a few years of being involved in the program convinced me that no one method of teaching works better than another. An imaginative, energetic, inspiring teacher can usually make most methods work, though I learned that an experiential emphasis was not easy to realize. It often tended to become too loose and undefined, demanding that students have the capacity to motivate themselves. And given that student-centered, experiential education is committed to reducing the power of the teacher, many classes tend to lose direction, as the students are not clear what their goals are and slough off. However, I have always assumed that if this form of education works, something magical occurs; everybody involved begins to know what they are doing, and learning then becomes more deeply personal and less abstract.
Saint Ann’s School—a private, non-sectarian, pre-K-to-12 school with 1,012 students—is in Brooklyn Heights and stresses learning free of point scores, prizes, rankings, and punishments. My daughter—whose prime interest was in writing poetry and studying literature—was attending arguably the city’s best traditional, elite public high school, Stuyvesant, whose emphasis was on math and science. She felt Stuyvesant would never help her (she was in the middle of the class in term’s of grades) be admitted to a college that would suit her creative needs. So, in the middle of her junior year, she switched to Saint Ann’s.
Whatever reservations my daughter had about the school were mitigated by the fact that it gave her the freedom to pursue her passion for writing poetry and prose, with working poets and writers offering very sympathetic and skilled teaching. At Saint Ann’s, there was no fear of getting bad grades or dealing with intensely competitive fellow students. The school did not offer prizes, but my daughter won several writing awards, including a Presidential medal while she was in attendance. It led to her getting into Brown—a university that also provided a great deal of freedom—and she graduated from there with a B.A. in English literature with honors in creative writing. I am not advocating this loose curriculum and free-form teaching for every student; a more structured and disciplined education may be needed by the majority. Still, when it works, it can be luminous.
