NY Times Article on Public vs. Private Testing

[BDURHAM]

a FREE Membership is required to read the article, which probably

won't stay up very long.

 

Link to NY Times Article

 

I am listing the article for those who cannot connect.

There are some very interesting conclusions in this study.

 

July 15, 2006

Public Schools Perform Near Private Ones in Study

By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO

WASHINGTON, July 14 — 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, also found that conservative Christian schools lagged significantly behind 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 his 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.

 

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."

[BDURHAM]

Don't have time to review it,

but if someone does, I'm

putting a link to the entire

study.

 

Link to Entire Study

[lazarus]

i am reminded of a "recruiting" trip i made with one of my kids.

the college had a weekend for parents & their kids being offered scholarships.

at one point they had all us parents in an auditorium

playing up all the good things about accepting the scholarship...

all the leaders in math, science, and engineering that came from the school,

94% of the incoming freshmen graduate within 5 years,

etc, etc.

at the end of the program, the very first question was;

"to what do you attribute the 6% who do not graduate?"

 

do you suppose that we could replace those incoming freshmen with any random 100 from UT, of which maybe 40% will graduate in anything, ever, and 5 years later 94% of them would come out as engineers and mathmeticians?

(or would 94% of them quit before finishing a semester?)

 

does this make UT a failure? hardly; graduates from UT (and schools like it) make up the backbone of our country. and they are plenty well represented by leaders in math, science, and engineering.

they just dont cherry-pick the kids that are guaranteed to succeed.

[BDURHAM]

Laz,

 

The privates have a natural screening test. Most

actually test for grades and aptitude, and simply

having to pay tuition is a screening system in and

of itself.

 

What I found interesting in the summary of the study

is that there was not a great deal of difference in the

results of the private vs. public. The weakest scores

from the privates were the conservative Christian

schools.

 

I would assume that the conservative Christian schools

do not always have academic or aptitude tests, or at least

a high bar in this regard, and they are more focused on

environment than academics. I'm generalizing of

course, but by definition, the conservative Christian

schools are skewed in a different direction.

 

The private high school and university I attended had

high academic standards and charged a lot of money.

These schools don't eliminate all the problems, but

the standards are much higher. The grading standards

were much higher as well. An A or B at a public does

not necessarily equal an A or B at a private.

 

But do I believe that public school graduates are as

educated and as bright as the best of the privates?

Yes. The average student who is at a private school

that has a high standard on academics will usually

test higher than the average student at a public school.

 

If I am reading it correctly, this test the average is a lot

more closer than I would have thought.

[fromthetop2]

Very intriguing study.

 

What it also says to me is that children of like socio-economic situations tend to score similarly in testing and education, whether or not they attend public or private schools.

[FadePattern]

Often times conservative christian schools have rules that educators must be a member of a paticular church to teach in them. That greatly restricts the number of available teachers and perhaps cuts out some qualified teachers because of their religious beliefs (or non beleiefs whatever the case might be) Also private schools generally do not pay as much as public schools and this could also affect the quality of instruction in some schools. PLEASE realize that I m just making general observations and do not mean to incluse all privates in my hypothesis.

[tnsddeveloper]

Another thing that you might want to read is the "Caution in Interpretation" section of the study itself. It basically said that the study is "observational" and is not a randomized experiment. In a few other sections, it is also mentioned that while they backed out data from incompatible or unwanted comparison groups within public schools, they were unable to do so from private schools - potentially making the findings skewed.

 

Goes to show that there really aren't big differences in kids anywhere.

Edited July 17, 2006 by tnsddeveloper

[cbg]

Remember that the New York Times is a very liberal newspaper so you have to take the results with a grain of salt. While it is JMO I would guess that the "Prep School" (Baylor, GPS, McCallie, Harpeth Hall, etc...) students would do very well when compared to any school. US News & World Report has made the claim several times that Catholic education is the best education value for your money in the United States but again that is only one publication and who knows if the information was slanted. I have felt for several years that the top 5% of the public school students could do well if you put them in the basement of a one room school house. For the most part those students are self motivated and their parents/guardian are very aware of what they are doing in the classroom. The problem with the public schools are the "middle of the road students" that need some extra attention and a swift kick in the britches every so often. The public schools are so large and have so many students in each class it's often difficult for the teachers to get the know their students and have a personal relationship with them and their family unless you are a young male middle school student in McMinville (that's a joke). To help the majority of students the public schools would improve their test scores if they would have no more than 15 students per class and have the teacher teach no more than 4 one hour class periods per day.

[silverpie]

Also note that the study only measured results at grades 4 and 8. Thus public and private high schools were not measured at all, only elementaries and middle schools/junior highs.

[uncfan13]

McCallie, Baylor,GPS and CCS last year had a combined 20+ Merit Scholar Semifinalists and even more honerable mentions (or whatever the runnerup designation is). Hamilton County public schools combined had one. Last year wasn't an abberation but only the last year in a very long trend. I imagine the numbers would be similar in Davidson and Shelby counties for elite private schools versus public. I don't think it's a healty situation but it is what it is. I bet Knox county has different results because of different demographics.

 

I don't doubt the NYT study but that's not our experience in Hamilton County.

Edited July 18, 2006 by uncfan13

[red56]

McCallie, Baylor,GPS and CCS last year had a combined 20+ Merit Scholar Semifinalists and even more honerable mentions (or whatever the runnerup designation is). Hamilton County public schools combined had one. Last year wasn't an abberation but only the last year in a very long trend. I imagine the numbers would be similar in Davidson and Shelby counties for elite private schools versus public. I don't think it's a healty situation but it is what it is. I bet Knox county has different results because of different demographics.

 

I don't doubt the NYT study but that's not our experience in Hamilton County.

 

 

 

Elite is the key word here. MBA and Harpeth Hall fit in with the schools mentioned above.

[tnsddeveloper]

McCallie, Baylor,GPS and CCS last year had a combined 20+ Merit Scholar Semifinalists and even more honerable mentions (or whatever the runnerup designation is). Hamilton County public schools combined had one. Last year wasn't an abberation but only the last year in a very long trend. I imagine the numbers would be similar in Davidson and Shelby counties for elite private schools versus public. I don't think it's a healty situation but it is what it is. I bet Knox county has different results because of different demographics.

 

I don't doubt the NYT study but that's not our experience in Hamilton County.

There was 2 NM Scholars (both Dr's now) and 4 semi-finalists in my class of less than 30 when I was a senior - 21% of the entire class. There was 3 total semi-finalists in all the public schools in the county combined that same year.