New Book Demonstrates the Superiority of Public Schools
By Bill Cole.
As another school year has started, one thing is certain, a vocal coalition of education reformers, market-based advocates and policymakers will continue extolling the virtues of school choice initiatives, such as private school vouchers and charter schools. These groups enthusiastically note that students in independent schools have better academic outcomes compared to their public school peers. They argue that independent schools have autonomy from bureaucracies and unions, which keep public schools from performing as well as private schools. They claim that creating a market of school options will provide competition that will motivate public schools to innovate and to perform better in order to hold on to their student body. They contend that it is somehow cruel to deprive more needy families an opportunity to attend such superior schools in the private sector. The problem with all of this soaring rhetoric is that none of it is supported by the preponderance of the research.
To begin with out-of-school factors such as socioeconomic status, parental involvement and other social supports have been shown to play a substantially larger role on student academic achievement than in-school factors. In-school factors obviously still have a significant effect on academic outcomes and to that extent interesting findings are being uncovered. In their extensive research study, the husband and wife team of Christopher Lubienski and Sara Theule Lubienski, both professors of education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, found that public schools generally yield better academic outcomes than their private school counterparts. In their book, The Public School Advantage (see excerpt here) they use a complex statistical analysis involving hierarchical linear modeling on an enormous data set of students and their standardized test scores. The researchers also crucially controlled for out-of-school factors in reaching the conclusion that public schools affected greater improvements in student academic outcomes than did New Book Demonstrates the Superiority of Public Schools - Living in Dialogue: