Are Private Schools Better Than Public Schools? New Book Says ‘No’

Cross Posted from The Washington Post's The Answer Sheet

It is often assumed that private schools do a better job educating children than public schools, but a new book, “The Public School Advantage,” which is being published this week, shows this isn’t the case. Here’s a piece the authors, Christopher Lubienski, a professor in the Department of Educational Organization and Leadership at the College of Education at University of Illinois, and Sarah Theule Lubienski, professor of mathematics education in the College of Education at the University of Illinois. The Lubienskis looked at two huge datasets of student mathematics performance and found that public school students outperform private school ones, when adjusted for demographics.

By Christopher and Sarah Lubienski:

Greater school choice for families and greater autonomy for schools leads to greater academic outcomes, right?  Maybe not.  Using two nationally representative datasets, we recently conducted one of the most comprehensive studies ever performed of school type and achievement in mathematics—a subject widely held to be the best measure of in-school learning.  We analyzed instruction and performance for over 300,000 elementary and middle school students in 15,108 public, charter, and private schools.  What we found surprised us.  Students in public schools actually outperform those in private schools.

Choice and autonomy are now touchstones of U.S. education reform.  Since over two decades ago, when John Chubb and Terry Moe famously argued that “choice is a panacea” and reported that more school autonomy led to better school outcomes, policymakers have been enamored with devolving authority away from school districts and creating options for families.

The number of charter schools in the United States is growing, with almost 6,000 such independent, largely autonomous schools of choice.  At the same time, the market share of private schools —non-government schools that, unlike charter schools, are “not supported primarily by public funds” — is declining, creating demands for subsidies on the grounds that the 30,861 private schools do a better job of educating children.

Since 2012, states have adopted or expanded 28 voucher, tax credit or similar programs to subsidize families choosing private schools, and the charter school movement is growing with bipartisan support. These efforts are based on the popular notion that autonomy from state regulation allows schools to respond to parents’ preferences for quality education options.  Autonomous schools have the freedom and incentive to adopt more effective practices in areas such as curriculum, pedagogy, staffing and management. Thus, the logic goes, they get better results.

However, our analysis of nationally representative samples of Catholic, Lutheran, conservative Christian, and other private schools — a total of 1,355 private schools — raises serious questions about that logic.  We found that once we account for the fact that private schools serve families with more advantages associated with academic success—things like money and highly-educated parents—we find that public elementary schools are, on average, simply more effective at teaching mathematics.  Indeed, demographic differences more than explain any apparent edge in the raw scores of private school students, and by the time they reach middle school, public school students score ahead of their demographically similar, private school peers, with differences ranging from a few weeks to a full grade level, depending on the type of private school.

Given public education’s considerable challenges, these findings are remarkable, and cut at the heart of the current reform movement.  Yet they are starting to be echoed by other researchers at the Educational Testing Service, Notre Dame and Stanford universities. How should we understand these patterns?

Current school reform efforts elevate the idea of autonomy, positioning parents as expert choosers and schools as autonomous competitors that embrace effective instructional methods to attract students.  This market model for education is neat, appealing, and quite possibly wrong. 

Private schools have more operational autonomy, sure, but this autonomy is too often used to maintain outdated strategies that may align with parental preferences but are not particularly effective for educating students.

For example, private school students are more likely than their public school counterparts to sit in rows, complete math worksheets and believe that mathematics is “mostly memorizing facts”—a narrow view that captures neither the breadth of the discipline nor the reasoning that is central to it. In contrast, public schools have moved beyond traditional, repetitive exercises, and more often ask students to solve complex, real-world problems and to learn geometry, data analysis, and early algebra ideas, in addition to basic arithmetic.

This difference can partly be explained by the fact that public school teachers are more likely to be certified and to receive ongoing training in the field, keeping them current on research-based instructional standards and resources supported by professional entities such as the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and the National Science Foundation. Private school teachers are rarely impelled to receive such training. And despite much criticism, teacher certification and up-to-date instructional practices are actually positive correlates of achievement, and the fact that these are more prevalent in public schools helps explain the public school advantage.

These patterns highlight some of the downsides of autonomy, especially in more competitive conditions where schools may try to play to popular demands instead of embracing professional expertise.  In fact, it is not at all clear that parents choose schools primarily on the basis of academic effectiveness.  School uniforms, the demographics of a school, and sports programs are easier to observe, and parents often consider these, along with religious values, to be more important than the quality of academic instruction, as consistently shown in studies of parents’ school-choice behaviors from places like the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education at Columbia University. As schools are cast as competing businesses in current reforms, families may be influenced by image over academic substance, just as fast food marketing successfully focuses on fun and not nutrition.  Professional models for education avoid this need to play to mass consumer demands, instead focusing on evidence and expertise.

It would be overly simplistic to say that parents are poor choosers when it comes to schools, since they work with the information, options, and priorities that they have.  Instead, it appears that more autonomous schools—the private and charter schools so often credited with innovation—are doing a poor job of choosing effective educational strategies, of working on behalf of students, rather than parents.  We agree that there are serious problems facing public education.  But private models for public education do not appear to be the answer.

By Chris Lubienski and Sara Lubienski

Of Vouchers, Integration, and Misleading Statistics

In less than a week, I will give a presentation to an audience at the University Council for Educational Administration’s Annual Convention. My presentation, entitled: “Dis-Integration: School Vouchers and Racially Isolated Private Schools, Legal and Policy Considerations,” makes the claim that school voucher programs, while legal under federal and some state laws, violate the principles of integration. In other words, we should scrutinize school voucher programs a little more closely because of the concerns of creating segregated schools. The threat that school voucher transfers to private schools could possibly result in decreased integration is based in part on the work of Sean Reardon and John Yun. In 2002, Reardon and Yun published, Private School Racial Enrollments and Segregation. In their work, Reardon and Yun found that private schools were just as or more segregated than public schools. This was particularly the case for Black students enrolled in Catholic schools (this matters a lot latter when talking about New Orleans, Catholic schools and school vouchers). Reardon and Yun’s work can be found here.

On October 2^nd, while preparing for my presentation, I encountered an article in the online version of the New Orleans newspaper. The article stated that the Louisiana school voucher program, known as the Louisiana Scholarship Program, yielded a positive net effect on integration in the state of Louisiana. The report, published by Education Next, stated that the Louisiana school voucher program increased integration at the schools that voucher students left and had no net effect on the schools that voucher students entered. The report implies that the United States Department of Justice has no statistical support in intervening in the educational affairs of the state of Louisiana. The report alleges that the Louisiana Scholarship Program not only increases integration, but does so in nearly every case. Specifically, the authors cite that the Louisiana Scholarship Program increases integration in 90% of all transfers. Juxtaposing the arguments of Reardon & Yun and Egalite & Mills causes most observers to pause and consider that: greater segregation (this time in private schools) combined with parental choice doesn’t usually equate to greater integration. I, therefore, sought to understand the parameters of the study conducted by Egalite and Mills.

It is worth mentioning that both studies can be reconciled. It is more than possible that parents of Black students might use the Louisiana Scholarship Program to withdraw their children from predominately Black public schools and enroll the students in predominately White or racially mixed private schools. Egalite and Mills don’t actually discuss this matter. What do Egalite and Mills tell us about the Louisiana Scholarship Program? The answer is a resounding, “not much.” The methods section of the study reveals that the authors looked at a mere 841 students out of 4,954 students. The authors justifiably exclude some students, but the exclusions end with the authors’ sampling a mere 17% of the population, the supermajority which live in the New Orleans metropolitan area. The study, therefore, says more about the impact of the Louisiana Scholarship Program in New Orleans than in the entire state of Louisiana.

I will continue to prepare for my presentation. The work of Egalite and Mills doesn’t particularly shunt my beliefs that school voucher programs can harm school integration efforts. That one voucher program, in one unique city/metro area, improves racial integration does not mean that the same can be said in all jurisdictions. Because of the uniqueness of New Orleans, it is not absolute that the effects of students transfers using the voucher program is generalizable to even other cities in Louisiana.

by Steven Nelson

Low Hanging Fruit: On Apple Picking and the Opt-Out Movement

This weekend my family and I took our annual trip to an apple orchard in Indiana.  Last year’s drought lead to a lackluster venture, so we were not sure what to expect this year.  The first row of trees that we saw were the Golden Delicious, which appeared to be mostly picked-over, so I hoisted my son on my shoulders hoping that he could grab a few of the remaining apples toward the top of some trees.  When that method proved unsuccessful, we trekked deeper into the orchard and found plenty of apples--$40 worth in fact.  My kids had little problem picking from the trees with apples dangling off branches at eye-level…

In practice and principle, I usually have no problem with low-hanging fruit.  Yet, I do have a problem with high stakes testing opt-out movement.  The opt-out movement, which has taken the form of activist, teacher and parent protests--as well as a call to students--encourages students, families, and communities to not take part in high stakes testing that is, at this point, a ritual in all public schools.  While I vaguely remember the California Achievement Test I took as a student in Tennessee in the mid 80’s, administration and preparation for the ISAT ruled the teacher-ly lives of the faculties I worked with from 2004-2010.  There was a palpable loathing of testing by the teachers and administrators, but again, this was ritual – questioned, but not neglected.  The students’ range of emotions went from out-right apathy to antipathy.  That is to say, I get it; I am considering not sending my son, now a 3^rd grader--the first grade where students must take the battery of tests (new for Common Core data points this year)--to school during the days of test administration.  

Yet, taking my son out of school for the tests, even if 6% of the parents across all states nationwide did the same, doesn’t fully address the problem.  Although Diane Ravitch thinks that such an action would be devastating for corporate reforms, high stakes testing is not the lynch-pin of corporate reform and should not be understood as such.  To put it another way, if our nation’s biggest issue--as reflected by schooling--is poverty, what does ending high-stakes testing actually do to move us toward solving this problem?  What of privatization and unionization, or the overall business-oriented discourse in education?   Does fixing the testing dilemma begin to approach any of these issues in a substantive manner?  Test reform is visible and easy (in the greater picture of these larger issues) - and thus, the “low-hanging fruit.” But, if the low-hanging fruit of testing was done away with after a prolonged fight, would there remain any political will to even begin discussions about our social systemic issues, or, as Auden Schendler suggests, would “nobody ever get the ladder?”  To go one step beyond: while, as noted above, I loathe high-stakes testing, but the administration of these tests: (a) allow us to name some of the problems; and, (b) are the devil we know.

Out of the testing movement, the language of “gaps” was born.  While this often makes headway for cultural deficit arguments, it also makes similar space for the counter-argument to be made.  It brings to the fore the disparate outcomes and growing chasms in public schooling.  It has birth an entire literature that digs deeply into the systemic problems we face. Presumably, this could be achieved in other ways.  However, these tests, which are but one means by which schooling has been disrupted by economic interest, are the devil that we now know.  In this era and style of governance, what new spaces will be mined, and exploited, in the absence of testing?  This is not an argument to laud high-stakes testing, yet it is not the holy grail of educational issues, but the overflow of other problems. 

Personally, I wonder if keeping my son home come testing time sends a dangerous message about challenges and participation within democratic processes.  My wife and I remain reticent about making such a choice, as we believe there is space for additional choices and approaches not yet evident. As we noted on our walk through the orchard, there were apples that were a little more challenging to reach – tucked into branches, obscured by leaves – neither low-hanging nor beyond our reach.       

by Paul Myers