Kellie sent me a link today to a news story describing a new study comparing public and private schools.
Students at independent private schools and most parochial schools scored the same on 12th-grade achievement tests in core academic subjects as those in traditional public high schools when income and other family characteristics were taken into account, according to the study by the nonpartisan Center on Education Policy.
That’s probably not what the South Carolina voucher lobby wants to hear, but anyone with any education experience at all knows that there are simply lots of factors that go into student success. Trashing schools because they’re “public” (and have a different mix of students than the top-tier private schools) isn’t useful.
Oddly enough, there actually was one kind of private school that outperformed others:
[…] the only kind of private schools that had a positive impact on student achievement were Catholic schools run by holy orders such as the Jesuits. Such schools have more autonomy from the church than most Catholic schools, which are typically run by a diocese and are overseen by a superintendent in the local bishop’s office.
Score one for the Jesuits?