public school-private school study in the news - USM Forum -- Message Board

Date: Jul 17, 2006

public school-private school study in the news

Date: Jul 17, 2006

qwerty wrote:

The papers are reporting a study that compares public v private schools that concludes that public school students perform as well or better than private school students, with some notable exceptions. The NYTimes reports the story here: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/15/education/15report.html Can anyone out there who works in this field and has genuine expertise comment on this? Given the high number of private schools in Mississippi, this would seem relevant from a policy perspective.

Notice that the article cites "conservative Christian schools" for the worst academic performance, espeically in math. Perhaps relevant to Mississippi?

Date: Jul 17, 2006

dey dun need edukashun to figur out wha to gib da church

Actually quite sad. Here is the link to the original report with the base data. The conservative Christian academies place last in almost every category. http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2006461

Date: Jul 17, 2006

I'm confused about the basis of this report -- bearing in mind that I'm not a professional educator. In the Executive Summary, they mention "estimates" -- it's not clear to me as a lay person where their numbers come from. Is this based on test scores from a test all private schools give?

Date: Jul 17, 2006

LVN

One needs to be a statistician not an educator to understand the methodology. To describe this in a nutshell, since private and religious schools are not bound by the No Child Left Behind ruling of W (though Charter Schools are) a different instrument was used. In this case "instrument" is a standardized test independent of the state tests administered for W's initiative.

The test was administered to 350,000+ students, representing roughly 7% of all public school students in the 4th and 8th grade at that time. The same proportion of students was tested for both reading and math. In the detailed methodology the authors show that the sample set used has a resonable distribution across the identified types of educational settings (Table 4 in Appendix A) but there is a a lower percentage of non-public school students tested. For Conservative Christian Schools (self identified as such) the testing rate was about 2.5% of all enrolled for reading and 1.5% for math. Most religious schools shy aware from standardized tests, though in the last 10 years major faith based universities (ie Oral Roberts University) do expect the SAT test after ETS removed any reference to evolution.