I’ve been “energetically discussing” the latest study of private and public schools on the phone with my buddy, Suze. I thought I would put the discussion up on the blog and let everyone get in on the fight.
According to the Times, “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.”
This test controlled for race and income, unlike previous studies of this kind.
Elizabeth notes that the Deptartment of Education put the findings out on a Friday afternoon in July. She also points out that these findings complicate things for voucher advocates, which is exactly what Suze and I were talking about.
I am not all that surprised by these findings. Even the most gung-ho voucher researchers haven’t really been able to show that voucher students improve their test scores after attending a private school. Maybe there are some slight up ticks in some selection situations, but nothing to write home about.
But test scores may not tell the whole story. Maybe kids benefit in some other ways not measured by test scores. Do they gain certain connections that help them later in life? Do the private schools have better college placement? Do the parents perceive their children to be safer in private schools, because safety is a major reason that parents choose private schools in poorer neighborhoods?
One of the major finding that has come out of the studies of private and public schools by the voucher advocates is that parents of voucher students are very, very, very happy. They are happy that they had a choice, and they are pleased with their schools for reasons that may have nothing to do with test scores.
Should contentment matter, too?
Apt. 11d 
I definitely think that there are a lot more concerns at work than simply test scores, and agree with those you mentioned– safety, connections with alumni, more future career and college possibilities. I think value-based environments, whether religious or otherwise, play a part in what parents want for their kids.
One of the big differences for me as a child going from private to public school was coming into contact with poorer kids than I had ever known before. I think class mobility is at play here too, affecting how parents make these decisions.
Should they be? that’s another question!
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Many of the public schools in this country essentially function as private schools: entry into them is barred by a family’s ability to afford a house in their tony suburb. I wonder how this impacted the public school numbers?
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I’m no fan of vouchers, but I do wonder whether there is a problem at looking at performance overall. Do private schools in poor inner-city neighborhoods perform the same as public schools in those same neighborhoods? If private schools have a fairly consistent outcome wheher next to an open-air drug market and next to a country club but public schools vary widely based on location, the overall outcome could be “public schools score better” but fail to acknowleedge better performance in the areas where they are most needed.
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A significant percent (majority?) of people who choose private schools do so because the private schools teach religion. Knowledge of Jesus’s miracles or which chapter of Leviticus specifies that shrimp is an abomination is not tested by ETS, but is assumedly important to parents who send their kids to these schools. “My kids are doing just (or almost) as well, and are learning religion too!” seems like a perfectly justified reason to want a private education.
On the other hand, some parents choose private school because of better academics. They would be disappointed with “just as well”, especially if they wanted to switch because “just as well” really wasn’t that well at all.
It seems you’d want to disaggregate the religious (or primarily religious) schools to see if that skews the results any.
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I think Jen and Barry have good points. Research in the UK indicates that about 3/4 of a school’s overall test results can be directly predicted based on the socio-economic status of their pupil intake. In the US, I’d bet my mortgage that elite public shools in rich suburbs do far better (in terms of average SAT score or whatever other metric you want to use) than any voucher school in central Milwaukee.
Back here in the UK, parents have some level of choice over their children’s schools, and in inner cities this means that they fight ferociously to get their kids into Local Free School A rather than Local Free School B, because School A has slightly better test results than School B. This sets up a vicious cycle, in which better off parents are more successful at getting their kids into the slightly better school, which, because its pupil intake is becoming wealthier, then proceeds to have even better test results, which makes it even more attractive, etc. So it becomes better and better (by getting easier pupils), while the other school in the neighbourhood gets worse and worse. We don’t have the American system where all inner-city state schools are terrible, but do have one in which two state schools might be within a mile of each other, with one oversubscribed and excellent, and the other a complete disaster.
It’s almost all about the socio-economic status of a school’s intake, rather than public versus private, I think. (That’s even more true in the US, where private schools aren’t on average significantly richer – if at all – than public schools.)
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It seems like it’s awfully easy to use extremes in anecdotal arguments on this subject. Most public schools are neither Scarsdale nor Detroit; nor are most private schools Dalton or, I don’t even know what to make the other end — without making people mad. But I have faith that there are crappy private schools out there.
On the one hand, of course test scores aren’t all we should be looking at. On the other hand, they’re just not totally irrelevant — and they’ve been the chosen measure for our Republican overlords. Hence the effort to hide the results.
Laura, you raise the “safety” issue as an example of what else parents might be looking for in avoiding public schools — beyond better learning, that is. (The codeword in my current metro region is “discipline,” and it’s always got strong racial undertones).
How much of an impression of greater “safety” might be accounted for by private schools’ ability to expel students with far less provocation? Take out the behavior outliers, take out (or send elsewhere) academic underperformers, combine with greater socioeconomic homogeneity, and how much of a difference can be made in classroom environment?
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Here are a few points:
1. Reuben is correct that private American schools are not necessarily richer than public schools. There are tremendous disparities in funding in both the public and private systems. Here in DC, I believe the public system spends about $10,000 per child per year. The private (and very elite) Washington International School in Georgetown charges over 20K a year per child, while St. Anthony’s (preK-8) in NE charges a grand total of $8,500 for four siblings for a year. Thanks to issues like diocesan subsidies, budgeting practice, fundraising, and parental donations/volunteering/etc. it’s hard to do a very precise comparison of the three schools, but we can confidently say that St. Anthony’s has significantly less resources than either WIS or the DC Public Schools.
2. Because of point #1, I would argue that it would be rather more interesting to figure out how much education each school provides per dollar spent. I have no idea how you would measure that.
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How much of an impression of greater “safety” might be accounted for by private schools’ ability to expel students with far less provocation?
I think this is an interesting issue, particularly when you take social class into account. In New Zealand, a guy named Thrupp did a celebrated (at least amongst UK academics!) study concluding that the lower the socio-economic status of a school’s intake, the more time teachers were forced to spend on non-educational issues. (No duh, of course, but it actually is a very good piece of work.) At schools with large numbers of deprived pupils, behavioural issues stole lots of time from education – and, at least in NZ, schools with high numbers of free school meal pupils were not given extra resources to help cope with this.
Unlike the UK, many American private schools have a very high percentage of pupils from low-income households, with all the problems that entails. However, as Emma Jane says, private schools are able to be rid of the most troublesome pupils. It would be interesting to see a detailed study looking at what effect if any this has on the educations of the impoverished kids who remain. (Certainly I can imagine it having a positive effect on their and their parents’ sense of contentment with the school, which I think is valuable in itself.)
On another topic, one set of partially class-based issues that will certainly be important to me should I ever have children are those concerning gender norms and sexuality. I do think that being in a school populated by the children of liberal middle class types would be easier for a boy who is academically inclined or otherwise prone to being bullied, or any child who is gay or doesn’t stick to stereotypical gender norms. In a school with a more working class intake, that might be more problematic, as the accepted gender norms tend to be more rigid (though no more so than amongst conservative middle class types).
I wonder – in the US, it would be perfectly legal to open a private school with an overtly gay-friendly ethos, wouldn’t it? (Perhaps there already are some?) Once you got past the picket lines every morning, it might be quite a wonderful place.
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I would argue that it would be rather more interesting to figure out how much education each school provides per dollar spent. I have no idea how you would measure that.
Yeah,the tricky thing is that, in terms of overall test results, the easiest route for a school is to get more high SES kids and have fewer low SES ones. The UK is trying to address this now through “value added league tables”. League tables are the ratings of schools (mostly by test scores, I think), but the value added tables take into account SES, if I understand them correctly. So a school with lots of deprived kids but average test results would be seen to be adding significant value, and would be rated higher than a school with lots of rich kids and only slightly better test results.
I’d be curious to see how things work in the Netherlands. Voucher proponents hold it up as an attractive model, because there is full parental school choice, with government money following the kid to any school the parents choose. But what voucher proponents forget to say is that topping up is illegal – ie the schools can’t take the government’s money, then charge the parents an additional amount. Even more intriguingly, students are inversely weighted based on SES status, in order to encourage schools to compete for deprive kids. If I recall correctly, there are five bands, with kids from the highest SES quintile being worth X euros to the school, and kids from the lowest being worth 1.9x. It seems a brilliant idea to me, but I’ve not seen any studies on how well it works, and I never find time to really look!
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St. Anthony’s also pays teachers minimal wages, uses nuns and priests to defray labor costs, and isn’t responsible for providing special education services which are significantly more costly than providing a math class with 30 students.
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As a parent of two pre-schoolers in the city of Chicago, simultaneously home to some of the best and worst schools in the US, I can say the safety issue was right at the top of my list for sending my kids to private school. My sister is a kindergarten teacher on the west coast, and it was her description of how No Child Left Behind is gutting her resources, and her stories of ignoring the well-behaved kids in order to discipline the others, that tipped my hand. I’ve seen first-hand at my daughter’s pre-school what happens when you have a couple of out-of-control kids. My kid is quiet, loves to read, takes direction well. She would be the first one to get ignored.
BTW, at this Lutheran school, most of the families don’t seem that religious. (They’re not against their kid attending chapel once a week, but they do not practice in their homes.) To Reuben’s point, the school is also well-known for welcoming the children of gay & lesbian families and has quite a few kids of that demographic.
And so I would question the idea that everyone sending their kids to religious schools does so because learning about Leviticus is very important to them. In Chicago at least there are very few non-religious private schools to choose from. (Interestingly, the ones that do exist are significantly more expensive than the church-based schools.) As an aside, the folks I know who are that into religion are often home-schooling.
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Here in the UK, the Church of England schools are, I strongly suspect, more gay-friendly (at least in cities, I can’t speak for the shires) than are the non-denominational state schools. CoE schools will have an ethos of inclusiveness and openness, whereas the inner city schools tend to espouse those values in terms of race and ethnicity (which is a Very Good Thing) but then allow rampant homophobia. (In part because being homophobic is seen by some as being a “natural” part of Muslim and African/Caribbean culture, and some adnimistrators aren’t willing to impose liberal values on non-white cultures, for fear of seeming insensitive. Sigh.)
Re getting into an inner city CoE school (which would also have loads of African/Caribbean kids, but be a bit more forceful re having an inclusive ethos, if only because liberal middle class parents would demand it), the only way is to go to church every sunday for three or four years. (CoE schools are free, but massively oversubscribed, so they are allowed to pick church goers over non-churchgoers, even though they are publicly-funded schools!) Lots of parents pretend to be religious from the time their kid is about six months old until they are four and get accepted into the good CoE school – then they never go to church again. We have friends who have done it, and the guardian had a piece on the phenomenon in the last week or so.
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Reuben,
I live in Virginia (which is probably the most gay-hostile state in the union on paper). One of the big-name expensive private schools in Richmond is openly gay-friendly (to the point where it has lost considerable alumni and community support for it’s aggressiveness.)
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I hereby raise a toast to that school.
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Hear hear!
My take on private, public and public charter schools is pretty simple: more choice is better. If all the schools are about the same on average, that’s fine. In any given neighborhood the choice can make a difference.
For example, there is a charter school in our district that offers a dual language track K-6. The school is very attractive to immigrant families who like the Spanish and Portuguese language tracks. It is also attractive to english-speaking families who want their kids to get a second language.
It’s not better than the local elementary school, just different.
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Sorry, I’ve been so bad about moderating this excellent discussion on my own blog. Been a busy couple of days.
Let me see if I can address a couple of the comments.
Reuben Comment #1 — One of the interesting things about this recent study is that it did control for socio-economic status. It compared poor private schools with poor public schools. However, the latest round of comments about isolating a study to particular neighborhoods is really interesting.
Emma Jane — re: the safety issue. In my old neighborhood in NYC, the safety issue was really important not only for whites, but for Dominicans who were worried about keeping their girls away from the boys. They sent their girls to a Catholic school, which had a 100% Dominican population, to make sure that their little girls didn’t get pregnant too early. They sent their boys to the local public school. Safety can also be code for morality or virginity or whatever.
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I’ve been thinking about this issue of choice (and the content that it brings) a lot here in my neck of the woods (pacific northwest city with “school choice” as a centerpiece of its planning).
I started looking at how these choices work within our “choice” system in the public schools (where you can choose other schools, with distance between your house and school determining who gets to go). If you look at the patterns, it seeemed clear that people use that choice to move to higher SES options. In fact, our fully choice schools (we call them alternatives) have substantially lower diversity and higher SES than the reference schools the students came from. In the case of alternative high schools, that makes them the least diverse of all our high schools.
In our system, choice decreases diversity (I mentioned SES, and I think that is mostly what parents are concerned about, but in America SES is confounded with race). Before a set of court cases (one of which will be argued before the supreme court next season), the system used race as a criterion in making assignments, effectively undoing the racial segregation effects of parental choice. Pending the status of the court cases (and the political will of the city), this race tiebreaker has not been used for the past 5 years.
My conclusions: when parents have choice (in the system), with vouchers, or through wealth (to buy houses in a less diverse neighborhood or attend private schools) on average, they chose to decrease the diversity of their children’s school. So, where does that leave me? opposed to choice. When it is a matter of public policy (school assignments, vouchers,) that’s easy to apply. I would also like to reduce the ability of the wealthy to excercise this option, but am less clear about non-coercive means of doing so.
Regarding UK info — we here in the pacific northwest also receive “value added” scores for our schools, in addition to the absolute test scores; we also have choice, though it is modified by distance to the school; we also weight funding based on the SES of the students (so schools get less money from the state if they serve a higher SES population). But, the growing trend is that the higher SES schools do private fundraising, to provide money for basic needs. For example, high SES elementary schools in the system raise as much as 200,000 to subsidize their school (middle class schools raise closer to 40,000)
Long, and possiblity contentious post, since I’ve come out against choice (like Hirshman :-). I think the questions are worth discussing though, and look forwarding to hearing from those with more accurate knowledge.
bj
PS: A disclaimer — my own kid will start at a private school in the fall, a choice that I can make because I can use our “wealth” to make that choice. But I still wouldn’t be opposed to efforts to have tried to prevent me from making that choice.
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bj,
I’m a big fan of eduwonk.org, and one of his big insights is that our society is moving in the direction of more and more choices, and public education is not going to be able to survive and thrive on a one-size-fits all model. We have dozens of kinds of toothpastes, coffee concoctions, and lots of fast food options (of rapidly increasing quality), millions of blogs, and tens of thousands of movies readily available, and (barring major catastrophe) things are going to keep on going in that direction. Trying to nostalgically freeze public schools as they were decades ago (you’ve got one neighborhood public school, take it or leave it) is ultimately not going to be beneficial to the public system, and may cripple or kill it. For one thing, the more families who leave the system because it doesn’t meet their needs, the less public support there is going to be for financially supporting the public schools that fewer and fewer people are using. In fact, there is some danger that trying to fossilize the system will bring about the sort of general collapse of the system that is the usual argument against vouchers/school choice.
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bj,
I realize that Washington DC is an outlier in many ways, but I’d like to note that the “diversity” argument doesn’t work well here. I was having a lot of trouble finding the right number, but one site I was looking at said that DC public schools are 83% African American and 10% Latino. So, the public system isn’t all that diverse to begin with.
Fundraising is really a wild card in these discussions of school funding. Although it would be theoretically possible to equalize state funding of schools, there’s no realistic way to forbid families from pouring resources (time and money) into their children’s schools. And that’s without mentioning individual tutoring, etc. Equality is a mirage.
On a personal note, we’re sending our daughter to pre-K at a DC public school this fall. It’s a dysfunctional system as a whole, but I’m willing to give the public system a chance–I’d like to get something for our tax money.
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Amy: I am not in favor of the status quo (and agree that turning back the clock, which included segregation by government mandate as well as segregation by choice won’t work). But, my amateur analysis of the Seattle system suggest to me that choice isn’t going to be the answer. Choice is allowing a few schools to thrive, but I don’t see how it’s helping the Seattle system as a whole.
Frankly one of the reasons I’m feeling more and more comfortable about my personal choice of private school, is that I’m starting to feel that the few schools (the ones people in my SES send their kids to) may be thriving at the expense of the others, and that many of the battles seem to center on getting resources for your kids school, at the expense of other schools if necessary. I’d rather take my self out of the system than argue that public money should be spent to meet my kids needs first.
What I’d like to get for my tax money is a decent education for the kids whose parents can’t buy it (or work the system) for them.
bj
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I’m terrible, posting three times on this thread, but Seattle’s system is different from DC’s; Seattle’s system is acceptable, not dysfunctional, and it has true diversity (40% white, 20% African American, 15% Latino, and 20% Asian, 5% other & rounding error). But within those averages, we have schools that are 98% AA and 2% AA, schools that are 98% White and 2% White, schools that are 1% Asian and 60% Asian. We have schools that have 3% of the students eligible for free lunch and ones where 97% of the students are eligible.
I wonder what the underlying statistics are within the DC system? And how does that map to the “good schools.”
I’m obsessing about this, because I realized that my list of “good” schools in Seattle had almost 100% overlap with these SES factors & race, without my realizing it.
bj
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I’m just starting to get into the DC school scene, which seems to be on the mend (creeping gentrification and nowhere to go but up), but traditionally the NW has been home to the “good” schools. So, if you click through the demographics at exploredc.org, there are a lot of schools that are 97 and 98 percent minority. Meanwhile (going from a bunch of random websites), in our “good” neighborhood, the elementary school is 52% white, 31% AA, 5% Asian, 11% Hispanic, 1% Native American. That school feeds into a middle school that is 28% white, 50% AA, 9% Asian, 14% Hispanic, and then into a high school that is 17% white, 57% AA, 9% Asian, 17% Hispanic. There’s another neighborhood high school (right smack next to a ritzy private school) which is 87% AA and 9% white. So while quite a few white families send their kids to the public schools initially, even in good areas there’s a steady exodus over time, whether by going private or leaving DC.
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DC would play out the same way, bj. The “good schools” in DC all have a proportion of white students. The “best schools” are all in the whitest and wealthiest part of the city. DC allows students to go to school out of boundary, which creates diversity in the “best schools” which would likely be disproportionately white without the addition of these students.
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Michael,
That’s quite right. DC also has some sort of new private school voucher thing going on, but I’m not sure exactly how it works. I expect that that program also has the effect of increasing racial diversity at the private schools that are accepting voucher students.
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I find the above fascinating and would like to add the following:
We live in London and have a very good state C of E school close to us that has comparable results for pupils aged 7 and 11 to our local private schools. However, far fewer pupils from this school go on to attend a grammar (state selective school) or good private school (ie the best schools in our area) at the age of 11 than those pupils from the local private schools.
It seems that many pupils/parents don’t feel they can/want to get into the selective school system. (The local CorE school also does not tutor children in how to pass entrance exams like the private schools do). I think that this can reduce the horizons of a whole class as a whole.
The two things that I think a private school gives children here are extra confidence, due to the high level of personal attention and wide range of extra curricular activities; and dreams of achieving higher things. Our local school has got the academics down; if it could just give these two things I think we’d be onto a winner!
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