Predictably, Diana Jean Schemo and the New York Times found front-page, above-the-fold space to cover a new National Center for Education Statistics report, drawn from 2003 National Assessment of Educational Progress data, that finds private schools only slightly more effective than public when analysts control for income, race, parent education, and such. (The exception is eighth-grade reading where the private-school advantage is marked.)
You can be sure that if the government study had found a wide margin favoring private schools, it would have been covered alongside the shipping news, if at all. But that says more about Schemo and her editors (see here) than about American education.
I've long gotten into trouble with private-school audiences by noting that much of their test-score edge is caused by their choice of students, and students' choice of schools, rather than by their superior educational effectiveness. Private schools, in my experience, are prey to the same daffy constructivist ideas, the same curricular correctness, many of the same mediocre textbooks and much of the same educationist zeitgeist as their public-school counterparts. They are free to be different but in reality they aren't so very different-except that they're all schools of choice and they nearly all charge tuitions, which means their students tend to be relatively more prosperous and from homes where parents care enough both to make a purposeful choice and to shell out money for it. Erase the "selection effect" and private schools may not be academic high flyers. That's more or less what the NCES study shows. (Note, though, that it also has some methodological problems, as Harvard's Paul Peterson explained in the Wall Street Journal on the same day.)
Yet social science is not the real world and the real world never erases the selection effect. Private schools do have higher test scores and that is one reason picky parents who can swing it choose them for their kids-and zillions more tell survey researchers they would do likewise if they could afford it. (It's those zillions more who would take advantage of vouchers if available.)
But test scores and other signs of academic prowess are just part of why parents favor private schools. Indeed, they may be the lesser reason. Private schools have multiple pluses. They are generally smaller, more intimate-and nearly always safe and well disciplined. Many of them attend to character development, values and moral formation as well as cognitive skills and knowledge. Many add religious instruction and prayer to the mix. What's more, private schools are typically welcoming and responsive places from the parent's standpoint, keenly aware that they must please as well as educate their clients. Some of them confer social status and a readymade peer group that suits the parents' sense of who their children are (or wish they were). In part because they're free to hire the best teachers available, certified or not, their instructional staff is often knowledgeable as well as caring. They offer more counseling and individualized attention in areas like college admissions.
All these and more factors go into the durable appeal of private schools. An appeal that will continue to trump any number of government studies.
To repeat, that doesn't mean they're more effective than public schools in a "value added" sense when measured on external tests of academic achievement. Alas, we actually know little about this. Few private schools administer state tests or release their results on the normed tests that many use; and private-school participation in NAEP is spotty. For this they should be ashamed-as they should of their lack of interest in growing, adding more campuses, serving more kids, and pressing for the public dollars that would make that more possible. Thirty years ago, private schools in general and Catholic schools in particular were in the forefront of the quest for federal tuition tax credits and other aid schemes. Today they're far more reticent, sometimes even declining to participate in a voucher program after others enact it. (Some of that is occurring in Ohio today, for example.)
In sum, I have lots of beefs with private schools, their organizations, and their leaders. But they're going to remain popular among those who are able to attend them and the basis of that popularity is legitimate, even if not always visible in NAEP results. That more Americans don't have this option is a national disgrace. The heck with the New York Times.
"Public Schools Perform Near Private Ones in Study," by Diana Jean Schemo, New York Times, July 15, 2006
"Long-Delayed Education Study Casts Doubt on the value of Vouchers," by Zachary M. Seward, Wall Street Journal, July 15, 2006 (subscription required)
The substance of this commentary appeared in the July 17 National Review Online.
