JohnTierneyOnPublicVsPrivate < Kitchen

19 Jul 2006 - 14:33

John Tierney on public vs private schools

Thanks to a new federal report comparing public and private schools, there’s no doubt that public schools have one huge advantage: the leaders of their unions are unrivaled masters of spin.
They didn’t merely celebrate the report’s release on Friday, they complained that the Bush administration tried to bury it by releasing it for the weekend. They spun so well that the report was treated as a public-school triumph that “casts doubt on the value of voucher programs,” as The Wall Street Journal described it.
But if anything, the report from the Education Department did just the opposite. It concluded, after compensating for socioeconomic differences and other factors, that public-school students score slightly better on tests in fourth grade, while private-school students score slightly better in eighth grade. Given a choice, would you rather be ahead in the fourth inning or later in the game?
But even if you ignore that trend, even if you focus on the overall similarity of the scores in both types of school, that’s still bad news for public schools. Their students ought to be scoring higher if you believe in the unions’ favorite prescription for improving education: more money.
Most private schools are not places like Exeter or Dalton. They’re Catholic parochial schools and others on lean budgets. According to federal surveys, the typical private school’s tuition is only about half what a public school spends per pupil.
The public schools are spending more even if you exclude their expenses for special education, buses, lunch programs and central administration, as William Howell and Paul Peterson found in a study of New York elementary schools. The political scientists calculated that the public schools were still spending twice as much per pupil as were the Catholic schools in New York.
General Motors would not celebrate the news that its $40,000 Cadillac performed almost as well as a $20,000 Honda. It would not have its dealers put up signs reading: “Why Pay Less? Our Cars Are Nearly As Good.”

My best friend's husband used to say their family motto was, "Why pay less?"

Their two kids, may I add, were superbly educated in Catholic schools in Los Angeles. Their son is going to Occidental, I think; their daughter will enter Yale come fall. The top tuition they paid - and this is for Catholic schools in Los Angeles, where costs aren't low, may finally have hit $12,000 or perhaps even $14,000 in the last two years of their daughter's high school education. This was the most elite Catholic girls' high school in the city - the equivalent of Exeter or Andover. Their daughter blew away the SAT on her first try with no tutoring; this year she's doing the same thing with her AP calculus course, again with no tutoring and no help from home. She's a very bright girl - both her parents are super-smart (dad writes sci fi!). But she has been superbly educated for far less money than kids here in my town, where per-pupil spending at the high school level rises to $21,000.

Their son took college calculus last year - again, this is with no tutoring or "help with homework" at home. My friend said he found it difficult, but he did fine. Both of their kids learned all the math they needed to learn at school.

Eduwonk's take is here. He also makes this observation, which is something we've talked about at ktm:

One thought: Keep an eye on math scores more than reading scores when trying to see what effect schools are having on learning. That's because reading today is more linked with social capital than math is. In other words, kids learn about reading in a variety of ways but mostly get math in school.

He cites Hirsch's new book The Knowledge Deficit as his source. (I'm ordering it today.)

Eduwonk also links to Kevin Drum, who sees the statistics as more damning to public schools than others:

PUBLIC vs. PRIVATE....The Department of Education has released a new report on the quality of education offered by public schools vs. private schools. The release was timed for Friday and, according to the New York Times, "was made with without a news conference or comment from Education Secretary Margaret Spellings."
If this suggests to you that public schools came out OK in this new study, you'd be right. Basically, it was a review of NAEP scores in math and reading that was controlled for things like gender, race, English proficiency, poverty level, etc. Here are the average scores for public schools compared to private schools:
4th grade reading: +1.1 points.
4th grade math: +4.1 points.
8th grade reading: -5.7 points.
8th grade math: +0.6 points.
This obviously suggests that private schools haven't discovered a magic bullet for educational reform, despite what their supporters might sometimes claim. Still, I don't think this report is exactly cause for breaking out champagne among public school champions.
First, there's that 8th grade reading score, which is a whopping 5.7 points (about half a grade level) below that of private schools. That's a big difference.
Second, these scores confirm a widely-reported and disturbing trend: public schools seem to do OK at the elementary level, but student scores start to drop significantly in secondary school. In this study, the delta between public and private schools dropped 6.8 points in reading and 3.5 points in math between 4th and 8th grades. If the study had been extended to 11th grade, I suspect that decline would have continued.

Unfortunately, Drum then goes on to conclude that the reading & math wars are beside the point:

I don't have any answers here except for a guess: namely that the pedagogy wars don't really matter much. Phonics vs. whole word? New math vs. old? Open classrooms vs. strict discipline? Without disparaging the people who work hard trying to figure this stuff out, it seems as if practically any of these approaches can succeed or fail depending on how well they're implemented.

Sorry, Kevin Drum, that is disparaging. Disparagement is disparagement.

Reading scores are more predictive of success in college than math scores^* (and see Michele Hernandez). Drum's perception is that private schools are doing significantly better at teaching reading.

Private schools, I think, are far more likely to teach to mastery - and far more likely to teach actual content, as opposed to process ("learning to learn") and character. (Question: do we have data on pedagogy & "core knowledge" in private versus public schools?)

So Drum's reading of the data would seem to tell us the reading and math wars are precisely what matters.

Another take on private versus public school spending:

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, per pupil spending in religious and independent schools averages $4,600, versus $6,857 in public schools. The real difference is actually higher (for reasons I’ll explain) but even this conservative $2,257 figure, multiplied by the number of American public school students (47.6 million), implies that there may be more than $100 billion in unnecessary spending for public schools. Reduce that, and the state and local budget deficits evaporate. There would be no [town and city] budget crisis were public schools operating with the same efficiency as private schools.

source:
Magic Bullet by Lewis Andrews

update 8/2/06

oops

Bad data, bad study. (pdf file)

The Harvard study released yesterday called the earlier report's analysis "flawed" and said that its findings were unreliable because it underreported the number of disadvantaged students in private schools.
The government report — which fanned the flames of the school voucher debate when it was released last month — compared the scores of fourth- and eighth-grade students from nearly 7,000 public schools and 530 private schools on the National Assessment of Educational Progress test. When factors such as race and wealth were taken into account, students in public schools scored the same or better than students at private schools, the government report said.
The study was conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics, a research arm of the U.S. Department of Education, using scores from 2003 tests.
"This new study does a good job of showing the defects of the U.S. Department of Education study," a Manhattan Institute scholar, Jay Greene, a professor at the University of Arkansas, said.
[snip]
Just days after the report was published, a government professor at Harvard, Paul Peterson, who is also the editor of "Education Next," a journal on education policy, raised questions about the methodology of the report.
While the earlier report counted the number of poor students based in part on how many received free lunch and other subsidized federal programs, Mr. Peterson, who wrote the study released yesterday, said that it was an inaccurate measure of poverty in part because it is more difficult for private school students to apply to those programs.
"You have an undercount of disadvantaged students in the private schools," Mr. Peterson said about the federal study.
[snip]
Mr. Greene said that to accurately compare students at public and private schools researchers must randomly place students at those schools so that the backgrounds of the two groups are the same. He said that eight studies conducted over the past decade using similar random methods have all found that private school students perform better.
source:
Report Ranking Public School Students Above Private School Students Said ‘Flawed' ($)
By DEBORAH KOLBEN - Staff Reporter of the Sun
August 2, 2006

And, from the Sun's editorial ($):

Mr. Peterson has concluded that the earlier report used a faulty method for sorting out these other factors. For example, when measuring family poverty, which tends to have a significant impact on educational results, the Department of Education relied on statistics on participation in Title I, a federal program for disadvantaged students. However, Title I money is more widely available to public schools. If at least 40% of a public school's students qualify for free or reduced school lunch, the entire school can get Title I money. Even the regular students in such a school were counted as "disadvantaged" in the earlier study, effectively giving such a public school a pass if it failed to educate its better-off students.
Private schools, meantime, face more hurdles to receiving Title I aid and many don't, or receive much less than the public schools.
[snip]
Despite its grand name, even what sounds like a comprehensive study of education turns out to be open to conflicting interpretations. Mr. Peterson makes a case that the earlier study got it wrong, but we doubt his latest report will be the last word on the debate. That debate won't do a thing to help those low-income parents who can see, plain as day, that their local public schools are not teaching their children to read. Whatever conclusions one draws from Mr. Peterson's report, he has performed a valuable service in reminding everyone that statisticians will never agree on the meaning of test scores. Only vouchers can free individual children from the tyranny of dueling data.

I'm very tired of dueling data.

In education as in every other realm parents should be the deciders. Not the schools, not the pundits, not the NGOs.

The concept of "doctor's orders" disappeared years ago. These days parents consult physicians. We seek their expertise; we respect their knowledge and competence. Most of the time we take their advice.

But it's up to us. We are legally and morally responsible for our children, and the final decision about medical treatment rests with us.

It's time for educators to stop giving orders and start giving expert counsel. Whether or not our children will be taught using century-old progressive techniques should be our call, not Lucy Calkins'.

^* I don't know who this author is, apart from the fact that he appears to be a constructivist (scroll to bottom of screen), or whether we can trust his statistics. That caveat aside, Elert writes that, "Ford and Campos found average predictive accuracies of 16% for SAT-Verbal, 12% for SAT-Math, and 25% for high school record. But when Slack and Porter redid the arithmetic they found actual values of 14%, 10%, and 27% respectively." refs: Ford, Susan F. & Campos, Sandy. Summary of Validity Data from the Admissions Testing Program Validity Study Service. New York: College Entrance Examination Board, 1977 & lack, Warner V. & Porter, Douglas. "The Scholastic Aptitude Test: A Critical Appraisal." Harvard Educational Review 50 (1980): 154-75.

Public Schools Perform Near Private Ones in Study by Diana Jean Schemo July 15, 2006
Comparing Private Schools and Public Schools Using Hierarchical Linear Modeling (pdf file)

-- CatherineJohnson - 19 Jul 2006

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I would like to add that private schools have financial vehicles that are unavailable to public schools. A private schools operating costs are not covered by tuition alone. Donations from alumni and parish members are critical for keeping the school operational but the most important piece is an endowment. Taking advantage of the market to produce income available for expenses helps ensure the costs to the consumers (parents) do not increase to tremendous levels.

Private markets drive efficient use of resources. The tax and spend scheme of public schools illustrate the effect of availability of money and monopoly.

-- SeanPrice - 19 Jul 2006

hi Sean!

Do we have anyway of knowing what the elite private schools spend per pupil?

btw, this is something that's probably not widely known....Catholic Schools aren't supported by the church.

The schools support the church, not the other way around; the schools have to send money to the church.

At least, that was the case in my friend's K-8 Catholic school in the Valley, which wasn't a super-chi chi Catholic school. They ran that school on a shoestring AND they had to send money to the church.

-- CatherineJohnson - 19 Jul 2006

"I would like to add that private schools have financial vehicles that are unavailable to public schools. A private schools operating costs are not covered by tuition alone."

Nor are the real operating costs of public schools covered by the usual per-pupil amount reported to citizens. That amount nearly never includes any funds for capital expenditures, which are normally funded by separate bond issues.

Private schools are required to arrange for their own land and buildings without recourse to such hidden* public funds.

* "Hidden" in the sense of "ignored in the normal reporting". Teachers' unions would really like you not to remember that these funds aren't included.

-- DougSundseth - 19 Jul 2006

"I don't have any answers here except for a guess: namely that the pedagogy wars don't really matter much. Phonics vs. whole word? New math vs. old? Open classrooms vs. strict discipline? Without disparaging the people who work hard trying to figure this stuff out, it seems as if practically any of these approaches can succeed or fail depending on how well they're implemented."

So says Kevin Drum. But how do you implement a math program without content well? Answer: By supplementing it. What do you supplement it with? Answer: With content. How you teach that content can vary which I think is what Kevin is getting at. I would bet that if you have to get a large amount of content into the heads of your students because of very sound state standards, the chances are fairly good that teachers will rely on direct transmission of information. But what do I know? I'm just one of the disparaged who's not yet ready for prime time on the Eduwonk traveling circus.

-- BarryGarelick - 20 Jul 2006

I have tried, unsuccessfully, to stuff a bunch of ideas into my initial comment but I must say that the comparisons of tuition to per pupil spending is probably good but not necessarily complete. I have no data just experience attending private schools.

One major point I was trying to address is really an aside to the main post which is that the interesting differences between public and private schools are the financial vehicles available to each. My private school has funds for scholaships, capital purchases, and other activities which kept tuition down despite building a new library and sports complex.

I guess I am wondering what causes the difference in apparent cost to parents? Teacher unions? Endowments and private funds? Pixie dust? Time to get out my Pareto Chart. (If I had the desire to do real research)

-- SeanPrice - 20 Jul 2006

But how do you implement a math program without content well? Answer: By supplementing it. What do you supplement it with? Answer: With content. How you teach that content can vary which I think is what Kevin is getting at. I would bet that if you have to get a large amount of content into the heads of your students because of very sound state standards, the chances are fairly good that teachers will rely on direct transmission of information. But what do I know? I'm just one of the disparaged who's not yet ready for prime time on the Eduwonk traveling circus.

boy, no kidding

I don't radically disagree with Kevin Drum, in the sense that there are probably fantastically good constructivist teachers out there. A fantastically good teacher is a fantastically good teacher, period.

I do think that no matter how good you are you can't teach kids as much using a "strong" constructivist approach as you can with a direct instruction approach.

My guess is that a fantastic constructivist teacher who was committed to students learning a great deal would end up using direct instruction for a number of topics, and discovery for others.

-- CatherineJohnson - 20 Jul 2006

Sean do you have a sense of what per pupil spending is in high-end private schools?

I haven't been able to track it down.

I did find some data on teacher salaries at elite private schools (don't remember where it is at the moment, but I've got it...)

-- CatherineJohnson - 20 Jul 2006

A good teacher can make nearly anything work. A bad teacher can make nearly nothing work. Curriculum has little to do with the success (or lack of success) of either. (Though incentive structures, including the disincentive of using a stupid curriculum, can bias the retained population of teachers toward good or bad teachers.)

Where curriculum matters most is in the middle. (An economist would probably speak of a marginal effect.) If a curriculum reduces teaching efficiency by (say) 5% for a teacher who has to work at 96% efficiency to succeed, that teacher will fail. There is a similar effect on the other side of the divide, where a good curriculum might allow a marginally failing teacher to succeed.

Certainly, the curriculum isn't the only such marginal effect. Variations in teacher support systems (mentoring by better teachers or competent administration, for instance), variations in student support systems (families, mostly), variations in teacher training, and differences in student genetic aptitude can have similar effects.

We know (or at least think we know) that there has been a general decline in the success of schools over the last several decades in teaching basic material to students. The question, then, is the relative magnitude of such effects and their change over time.

My sense is that there has been little systematic change in genetic aptitude. Kids aren't generally more stupid today than they were 50 years ago. I haven't researched this, so it's based on anecdotal information, but it's based on lots of anecdotal information.

By all accounts, teacher education is poor, but my mother, father, and aunt describe their Ed. school experience nearly 50 years ago in similar terms. (I was advised to avoid Ed. school at all costs when I was in college.)

Teacher support systems, similarly, don't seem systematically worse recently. (Institutional attempts to improve them may have had the usual institutional effect, of course.)

Student support systems are the usual culprit, but I actually remember the standard for student support from my childhood, and it largely amounted to looking at report cards with the occasional admixture of hectoring. I certainly don't recall the sort of broad-based tutoring industry that we see in upper-middle-class school districts now. Yet these same districts have experienced declines following much the same curve as lower-class districts.

Another possible culprit might be the reduction in the teacher talent pool with the addition of more viable choices of professions for women. This certainly seems a feasible cause, though the monetary benefits for teachers have certainly risen relative to similarly educated persons in other fields. As Catherine noted, there is no shortage of applicants for positions, at least in decent areas. Again, though, the results arising from those decent areas have declined precipitously.

The big change, as I see it, has been to the curriculum. I'll not recapitulate all the problems that we've been discussing here for months except to say that the consensus around here is that curriculum (to include popular teaching methods) is substantially worse now than when we were kids. My sense is that the efficiency delta caused by curriculum is far greater than the 5% example number I used above.

I'd certainly be willing to hear any counter-arguments, but at this point, they would fall into the "extraordinary claims" category, so please be sure to provide extraordinary evidence.

-- DougSundseth - 20 Jul 2006

Naturally, immediately after finishing that long comment, I see Catherine's post, TeacherPayPodgurskyAndHoxby, which lends more weight to the talent pool explanation. I'd recommend that you consider that data, since she did the research that I didn't.

-- DougSundseth - 20 Jul 2006

A good teacher can make nearly anything work. A bad teacher can make nearly nothing work.

I really agree with that.

I DO think it's possible this statement isn't true (!) - but it's one of those observations that, until I see serious evidence it isn't true, I believe it.

We've had a couple of genius teachers.

They really are miracle workers.

-- CatherineJohnson - 21 Jul 2006

Kids aren't generally more stupid today than they were 50 years ago. I haven't researched this, so it's based on anecdotal information, but it's based on lots of anecdotal information.

The irony is that kids may be genetically (probably genetically/environmentally) smarter than they were 50 years ago. (Flynn effect)

-- CatherineJohnson - 21 Jul 2006

I actually remember the standard for student support from my childhood, and it largely amounted to looking at report cards with the occasional admixture of hectoring

I love it!

I had zero help with homework when I was a kid.

I don't remember having homework, actually.

My siblings all seem to have had homework, so I must have had some, too.

-- CatherineJohnson - 21 Jul 2006

I certainly don't recall the sort of broad-based tutoring industry that we see in upper-middle-class school districts now. Yet these same districts have experienced declines following much the same curve as lower-class districts.

Absolutely.

I didn't grow up in an affluent school district; I grew up in a small town in central IL. My mom says our high school was dreadful.

My sense is that Christopher knows no more than I did at his age.

That's not quite right; he probably knows a lot more about science than I did.

But even with his Phase 4 Top Tier Accelerated Math extravaganza, I'm sure he knows no more math than I did at his age.

If we hadn't done constant reteaching at home, he'd know less.

-- CatherineJohnson - 21 Jul 2006

He does know that a fraction is a division problem, something I didn't learn til last year.

But he only knows that because I told him.

-- CatherineJohnson - 21 Jul 2006

I have to learn more economics - and it's one of the subjects I wish all kids (and adults) would learn. (I had gotten started on it, but was sidelined by the need to relearn math.)

I bring this up because statements like these are counterintuitive, or at least non-obvious:

If a curriculum reduces teaching efficiency by (say) 5% for a teacher who has to work at 96% efficiency to succeed, that teacher will fail.

I learned a variant of this principle back when I first wrote an article on adult ADHD.

ADHD is extremely confusing for parents & teachers, because a child with ADHD "can pay attention when he wants to."

Parents and teachers see this, then assume that since the child can pay attention when he wants to, he should pay attention when he needs to.

It doesn't work that way.

One of our child psychiatrists explained it to me this way: a normal child may have to spend 80% of his mental energy to pay attention, where the ADHD child has to spend 95%.

Nobody can keep up an expenditure of 95% 24 hours a day.

The ADHD child's attention span is going to give out long before the typical child's.

That's a pretty crude way of putting it, but I found that it worked well for me - and for other parents when I framed the challenge in these terms.

It also makes sense of "hyperfocus."

Kids with ADHD get hyperfocused; they're compelled to pay attention to something; it hooks them.

Well, of course, anything in the environment that "pulls" your attention is making it possible for you to pay attention using fewer mental resources.

-- CatherineJohnson - 21 Jul 2006

This principal - that you can't exert maximum will every waking moment - is incredibly helpful in terms of trying to figure out how to get things done.

Dieting, for instance.

I personally can't exert maximum diet willpower from here to eternity.

I can't even exert maximum diet willpower from here to eternity on my kids' behalf.

I fell off their wagon!

That's why I'm hoping the Shangri-La diet works to reduce appetite.

I definitely can exert enough willpower day in and day out to get 3 people to drink olive oil in a free-and-clear 2-hour window (no food one hour before, no food one hour after).

If swilling down olive oil in isolation really does work to reduce appetite, I have enough frontal lobe resources to get these kids thinner.

-- CatherineJohnson - 21 Jul 2006

Last, but not least, I was completely blown away by the Hoxby-Leigh study.

That's the kind of non-obvious insight economics comes up with - the kind I love, the kind that is obvious once someone has explained it to you.

It simply never occurred to me that of course teaching would become more attractive to some people as society & the teaching profession underwent the changes of greater job opportunities for women and wage compression in teaching.

-- CatherineJohnson - 21 Jul 2006

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Title:	John Tierney on public vs private schools
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John Tierney on public vs private schools

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