That report from the Department of Education turns out to be pretty interesting – especially when you look at a few comparisons between public schools and private schools.
One interesting point is the fraction of students in the public schools with either learning disablilites (LD) of some kind or who are learning English as a second language (ELL). These students are more difficult to teach (in terms of time and money) than a non-disabled student who is from an English-speaking home. The data below was for fourth grade reading, but the percentages are similar for the other groups the study examined.
| School type | Percent LD | Percent ELL | Percent LD/ELL |
| Public | 14% | 10% | 22% |
| Private | 3% | 1% | 4% |
So the next time someone says that private schools seem to have a lower average cost per student (and they must therefore be running much more efficiently as a result), remember that they’re educating different students. They simply don’t take the more costly students!
Here in South Carolina, we’ve got a bunch of small private fundamentalist religious schools. The Department of Education report breaks these apart from private schools in general in a few places. Here’s the money quote:
For math scores,
the initial difference between Conservative Christian schools and all public schools was substantially smaller (5.1 points) and not significant. The average difference in adjusted school means between Conservative Christian schools and all public schools was -7.6 points (i.e., a higher average school mean for public schools) and was significantly different from zero.
In other words, fundamentalist schools don’t do a significantly better job at educating students in math even if you don’t recognize the fact that they don’t have as many LD/ELL students. When you do account for student factors, you see that these fundamentalist schools do demonstrably worse than the public schools.
So why is it that we want vouchers here in South Carolina, again?