In a Chinese folk tale, a foolish peasant obtains three hundred taels [a weight measure] of silver. Worried that they will be stolen, he buries them. Still unable to put this mind at ease, he places a sign above them which reads, “There are no three hundred taels of silver buried here.” The silver is, of course, then stolen by his neighbor, Ah-Er.
Like the foolish peasant, the US Department of Education has gone to such lengths to bury a report it commissioned to the Educational Testing Service, Comparing Private Schools and Public Schools Using Hierarchical Linear Modeling, that it inevitably raises questions about what it has to hide. The report compares the academic performance of public schools and private schools on the National Association for Educational Progress assessments, statistically controlling for variables such as socio-economic status, gender, race and ethnicity, English language learning, and learning disability. [That is what the ‘hierarchical linear modeling’ part does.] It finds that when educating students of a similar background, public schools perform as well or better than private schools in fourth grade reading, in fourth grade math and in eighth grade math. Only in eighth grade reading did private schools do slightly better.
This report follows a similar study by University of Illinois professors Christopher and Sarah Lubienski, Charter, Private, Public Schools and Academic Achievement: New Evidence from NAEP Mathematics Data, which reached the same conclusion. The Center for the Study of Privatization in Education at Teachers’ College published that report in January 2006. We discussed the Lubienski study on Edwize.
Comparing Private Schools and Public Schools was delivered to the Department of Education last year, and it proceeded to engage in months of review, all timed for a convenient public release — on a summer Friday, the slowest news cycle of the entire year, without a press conference or even a comment from the Secretary of Education. Unable to dispute the report’s findings, the Department downplays them as of “modest utility” which will not have any effect on its policy. [“Don’t confuse us with any facts.”] The Department has also delayed the release of the part of the report which compares public district schools and charter schools, without providing any explanation.
Today, there is a page one New York Times account of the report, “Public Schools Perform Near Private Ones In Study,” which takes note of the Department’s attempts to bury the report. Our colleague at the AFT’s NCLBlog are given credit for predicting the Department’s release strategy two weeks ago.
Comparing Private Schools and Public Schools was commissioned by former National Center for Educational Statistics head Robert Lerner, a Bush appointee, during the controversy over performance of public district schools and charter schools on the NAEP assessments. At that time, the AFT released a study, Charter School Achievement On The 2003 National Assessment Of Educational Progress, with another set of data the Department of Education was trying to bury. The AFT report showed that the raw NAEP scores of students in public district schools were better than those of students in charter schools. Charter school advocates complained that the comparison was an unfair ‘snapshot’ in time which failed to take into consideration the student body served by charter schools, or the progress they were making. This argument had merit, even though it was made by the very same people, such as Checker Finn, who had specialized in using unfair ‘snapshot’ data to attack public district schools. Comparing Private Schools and Public Schools was designed to overcome the limitations of raw data, but in providing a fair point of comparison for charter schools, they had to extend the same frame of reference to public district schools.
It was interesting to see the reaction to the Lubienski study, which showed charter school students doing much better in comparison to private schools, but still slightly below public district schools, once the student demographics were statistically controlled. Rather than taking this as a validation, those in the ranks of charter schools supporters who have been the most ideologically doctrinaire and antagonistic to public district schools, such as Jeanne Allen of the Center for Educational Reform and Caroline Hoxby, attacked the study. [Recently, Rick Hess criticized the double standards employed on just this issue by Allen’s Center for Educational Reform in a New York Daily News op-ed.] Others remained conspicuous by their silence. Charter school advocates who are prepared to recognize the significance of this report will have in their credibility, as men and women prepared to put small ‘t’ truths before capital ‘d’ dogma, who are genuinely interested in providing the best education to children living in poverty and children of color.
