Private Schools Are Just As Bad As Public Schools

Public Schools Perform Near Private Ones in Study

While the spin on this is supposed to raise the status of public schools, careful analysis will show that my post title is a more accurate way of representing the impact of this study. Our schools have a national dropout rate of over 30%. Only 20-25% of our students graduate and go on to finish a college degree of some kind (including associate degrees). The average reading level of our adult population is somewhere around the sixth grade level. Our efforts at meeting the needs of students is so impaired by the burdens of special needs and mainstreaming that it impacts "regular" students in a negative manner... and all because the approach to special education is munged, not because we shouldn't address these needs. The burden that illegal immigrants place on our education system is damaging the whole damn system. The prolonged bilingual education programs around our country are also burdensome because they do not focus on the fundamental learning objective of teaching the common language of our nation... English.

Don't get me wrong. I am in favor of bilingual education. I just do not think that it needs to be in place for more than two years and that it should have an intensive English language component that involves not only the student during class hours, but also parents and other household members during after school/after work hours, much like the programs offered by Jane Addams at Hull House in Chicago and similar programs in New York, San Francisco and elsewhere during the early part of the 20th century. I am definitely in favor of special education, but not the way in which it is currently approached in most states. In Massachusetts the defining characteristics are that too many students are identified as needing special education because the definition of special education is overly broad and the disciplinary measure used in schools is overly weak. However, in Indiana, the opposite is true. Most students needing special education are overlooked and are not screened for special needs unless the parents push for the process... and I do mean PUSH.

But what this study really demonstrates is that the vast majority of private schools are no better than public schools... that certainly undermines the selling points of most private schools. Having taught at both public and private schools, I would argue that the point is fair and the study may need to be done by others to compare the results. My experience at a parochial high school in Northwest Indiana points to students having more of a social experience rather than a focused educational experience. On the other hand, my experience teaching at a high school in Cook County, Illinois, points to a better structure and focus on education in the classroom. Of course, that is only anecdotal reporting, not a genuine study, and we cannot really use anecdotal evidence or even a single study (especially one produced by the federal agency in charge of promoting public education) as real evidence of success or failure in any school. But it does stir a few thoughts... doesn't it?

The Education Department reported on Friday that children in public schools generally performed as well or better in reading and mathematics than comparable children in private schools. The exception was in eighth-grade reading, where the private school counterparts fared better.

The report, which compared fourth- and eighth-grade reading and math scores in 2003 from nearly 7,000 public schools and more than 530 private schools, found that fourth graders attending public school did significantly better in math than comparable fourth graders in private schools. Additionally, it found that students in conservative Christian schools lagged significantly behind their counterparts in public schools on eighth-grade math.

The study, carrying the imprimatur of the National Center for Education Statistics, part of the Education Department, was contracted to the Educational Testing Service and delivered to the department last year.

It went through a lengthy peer review and includes an extended section of caveats about its limitations and calling such a comparison of public and private schools “of modest utility.”

Its release, on a summer Friday, was made with without a news conference or comment from Education Secretary Margaret Spellings.

Reg Weaver, president of the National Education Association, the union for millions of teachers, said the findings showed that public schools were “doing an outstanding job” and that if the results had been favorable to private schools, “there would have been press conferences and glowing statements about private schools.”

“The administration has been giving public schools a beating since the beginning” to advance its political agenda, Mr. Weaver said, of promoting charter schools and taxpayer-financed vouchers for private schools as alternatives to failing traditional public schools.

A spokesman for the Education Department, Chad Colby, offered no praise for public schools and said he did not expect the findings to influence policy. Mr. Colby emphasized the caveat, “An overall comparison of the two types of schools is of modest utility.”

“We’re not just for public schools or private schools,’’ he said. “We’re for good schools.”

The report mirrors and expands on similar findings this year by Christopher and Sarah Theule Lubienski, a husband-and-wife team at the University of Illinois who examined just math scores. The new study looked at reading scores, too.

The study, along with one of charter schools, was commissioned by the former head of the national Center for Education Statistics, Robert Lerner, an appointee of President Bush, at a time preliminary data suggested that charter schools, which are given public money but are run by private groups, fared no better at educating children than traditional public schools.

Proponents of charter schools had said the data did not take into account the predominance of children in their schools who had already had problems in neighborhood schools.

The two new studies put test scores in context by studying the children’s backgrounds and taking into account factors like race, ethnicity, income and parents’ educational backgrounds to make the comparisons more meaningful. The extended study of charter schools has not been released.

Findings favorable to private schools would likely have given a lift to administration efforts to offer children in ailing public schools the option of attending private schools.

An Education Department official who insisted on anonymity because of the climate surrounding the report, said researchers were "extra cautious" in reviewing it and were aware of its “political sensitivity.”

The official said the warning against drawing unsupported conclusions was expanded somewhat as the report went through in the review.

The report cautions, for example, against concluding that children do better because of the type of school as opposed to unknown factors. It also warns of great variations of performance among private schools, making a blanket comparison of public and private schools “of modest utility.” And the scores on which its findings are based reflect only a snapshot of student performance at a point in time and say nothing about individual student progress in different settings.

Arnold Goldstein of the National Center for Education Statistics said that the review was meticulous, but that it was not unusual for the center.

Mr. Goldstein said there was no political pressure to alter the findings.

Students in private schools typically score higher than those in public schools, a finding confirmed in the study. The report then dug deeper to compare students of like racial, economic and social backgrounds. When it did that, the private school advantage disappeared in all areas except eighth-grade reading.

And in math, 4th graders attending public school were nearly half a year ahead of comparable students in private school, according to the report.

The report separated private schools by type and found that among private school students, those in Lutheran schools performed best, while those in conservative Christian schools did worst.

In eighth-grade reading, children in conservative Christian schools scored no better than comparable children in public schools.

In eighth-grade math, children in Lutheran schools scored significantly better than children in public schools, but those in conservative Christian schools fared worse.

Joseph McTighe, executive director of the Council for American Private Education, an umbrella organization that represents 80 percent of private elementary and secondary schools, said the statistical analysis had little to do with parents’ choices on educating their children.

"In the real world, private school kids outperform public school kids," Mr. McTighe said. "That’s the real world, and the way things actually are."

Two weeks ago, the American Federation of Teachers, on its Web log, predicted that the report would be released on a Friday, suggesting that the Bush administration saw it as "bad news to be buried at the bottom of the news cycle."

The deputy director for administration and policy at the Institute of Education Sciences, Sue Betka, said the report was not released so it would go unnoticed. Ms. Betka said her office typically gave senior officials two weeks’ notice before releasing reports. "The report was ready two weeks ago Friday,’’ she said, “and so today was the first day, according to longstanding practice, that it could come out."