PRIVATE SCHOOLS BETTER FOR BLACKS

A recent analysis of national test score data suggests private schools do a better job than public schools of closing the achievement gap between black and white students as they progress from fourth to 12th grades.... Closing the achievement gap between black and white students has been one of our nation's overarching goals for half a century. However, there remains a gulf of more than 200 points between the SAT scores of white students and black students, and black children trail their white peers by significant margins on every subject tested by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).

One aspect of the very familiar achievement gap, however, is almost universally unknown: how it differs between public and private schools. This disparity can be documented by using a U.S. Department of Education database to compute the average NAEP test score differences between black students and white students in both public and private schools.... there is a sizeable achievement gap between black and white fourth-graders in both public and private schools. It is also clear the private-sector achievement gap is narrower in the 12th grade than the fourth grade for all of the core NAEP subjects. Public schools, by contrast, see a larger gap in both writing and mathematics at the 12th-grade level than at the fourth. Averaged across subjects, the public school racial achievement gap is virtually unchanged between fourth and 12th grades. By contrast, the gap in private schools is an average of 27.5 percentage points smaller in the 12th grade than the fourth.

The achievement gap closes faster in private schools not because white private school students lose ground with respect to white public school students as they move to higher grades, but because black private school students learn at a substantially higher rate than black public school students.....

Economist Derek Neal has found that black students attending urban private schools are far more likely to complete high school, gain admission to college, and complete college than similar students in urban public schools.

Similarly, in a study comparing graduation rates of all Milwaukee public school students (of all income levels) with those of the low-income participants in the city's private school voucher program, Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Jay Greene found the voucher students were more than one-and-a-half-times as likely to graduate as public school students. More remarkable still, Greene found this to be true even when he compared the voucher students with those attending Milwaukee's elite group of academically selective public schools.

More here




PRIVATE TUTORING TAKES OFF IN BRITAIN

(Post lifted from the Adam Smith blog)

New research by the London Institute of Education suggests that more than one pupil in four receives private tuition at some stage in his or her career, reports John Clare, Education Editor of the Telegraph.

When Tony and Cherie Blair sent their state-educated sons to be privately tutored, they were not so much setting a trend as climbing on a rapidly accelerating bandwagon.

Despite the availability of free state education, people are spending 50 million pounds a year on private tuition, and the market is growing. The reason is not only a natural desire of parents to give their children a good start. It is, according to some, a move born out of despair. Bill Fleming, founder of Top Tutors, puts it succinctly:

"Poor teaching, high staff turnover, too many temporary teachers, disruption in class - there are loads of reasons why state school parents come to us," he says. "Their children can't keep up, the curriculum has not been covered and so on."

Many parents must be grateful that there is a remedy to hand for the deficiencies of state education. But a possible reason for the success of private tuition is that it barely registers. When Labour politicians send their children to a private school there is the usual outcry; but private tutors don't count. They can be hired discreetly, without the P-word being mentioned.

Parents in general might wish that state schools did the job anyway, but they have seen years of campaigning and oceans of cash leave standards still far below acceptable levels. Private tuition gives them a solution. It cuts through the Gordian knot and gives them a way of raising the achievement level of their own children. It's a pity the state school system leads them no other recourse, but they prefer their children better educated than it seems able to manage.





TESTING WITHOUT CHOICE IS LARGELY POINTLESS

Although most reformers and education experts agree there is reason to be concerned about the quality of U.S. secondary education, there are a variety of opinions about whether rigorous high school testing is the right solution. Some groups, such as the Gates Foundation, advocate making schools smaller. Others recommend making the high school experience more relevant and individualized. Efforts to make it easier for high school students to enroll in college courses while still in high school also have been suggested. Advocates of school choice, however, argue that unless a reform program creates real market competition among private and public schools, no amount of testing or remediation will do much to improve low-quality public schools.

Moreover, they say, choice allows competing solutions like those mentioned above to be tested in the education marketplace, with parents choosing the solution they think is best for their child. As John Merrifield, author of School Choice Wars, has pointed out, "school choice would raise productivity by exploiting educators' comparative advantages, by paving the way for smaller schools, and by creating better matches between students and educators."

During his first term, Bush sought to incorporate parental choice into the NCLB bill. Although most of the choice provisions were stripped out before the bill was passed, Bush was vocal about his support for school choice. The president also pushed hard for a pilot voucher program for children in the District of Columbia, which successfully passed Congress last year as part of the 2004 appropriations bill.....

Education researchers disagree about how effective NCLB has been in improving the nation's elementary and middle schools. Each state designs and administers its own achievement tests; hence, it is easy for states to report results showing a high number of students as proficient. Only 30 percent of America's fourth-graders scored at or above the "proficient" level on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, yet all but eight states claimed "proficiency" levels above 50 percent for fourth-graders on their own achievement tests. The width of that gap casts doubt on the validity of states' reports about proficiency.

More here

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

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