Running Head: The Education System; an Overview of the Public versus Private School DebateAn Overview of the Public versus Private School DebateRicky PortierNational UniversityEnglish 240Professor Reardon10/15/2011An examining of the topical issues in the school system debateIntroduction The field of education has been a source of many debates through the history of scholarship. This is necessitated by the importance of education in society. In most cases, much of the debate centers on policies that can be applied to maximize the benefits accrued from schooling. However, one diversion from this general trend is the intermittent debate on public and private schools and the concomitant issues arising from the two. The main issue is the differences between the two branches of formal education. The differences in the two forms of formal education have been the subject of numerous studies and debates and many concur that it is an age old debate. The debate has been informed by the realization that though the government has a duty to offer education, this did not translate directly into quality. As the government tried to divest from provision of major services such as transport, there was the feeling that even education should be privatized wholly. The developments in technology which the government institutes have been slow in uptake have been a major concern among most scholars. While the private sector in education invested heavily in such modern technological developments, the public schools lagged behind and still used theoretical framework that had been surpassed by time, (Rouse, 1998). One of the earliest researches in the area of private versus public education was done in 1966. Though there have been other studies in the area, this was a comprehensive study that was commissioned by government through the American congress. In the study, a battery of issues was covered to determine student`s performance in public schools. These issues included, per pupil expenditure, class size, teacher`s credentials, quality of school facilities among others. The importance of this research was to show what really affected performance in public schools in order to facilitate policy formulation. The results were varied including the assertion that school resources had little impact on performance, (Coleman, 1966). However, this research was not valued for its results but for the studies that it precipitated pitting Catholic schools which were the dominant private schools and their public counterparts. Shortly after the Coleman study, the Department of education initiated another study this time including more variables such as family background to compare the performance in private and public schools. As expected, the results were controversial as they indicated that students in private schools performed better than their counterparts, (Coleman, Hoffer, and Kilgore, 1982). The results were criticized over their methodology to a point of questioning the motive...