Comments (17)

• George Gaskell

  The study analyzed only math and reading scores. It did not account for all of the other myriad factors on which parents make decisions related to their kids' schooling, such as --

  athletic opportunities
  social activity
  traditionalism
  moral instruction
  religious instruction/orthopraxy
  level of discipline
  presence of uniforms
  absence of uniforms
  arts instruction
  classical curriculum
  free-form curriculum
  military curriculum
  advantageous social contacts
  convenience/proximity to home

  
  I imagine that every parent would have a different ordering of these preferences. I imagine every student would too, to the extent to which he or she can express such things. Such preferences probably even change over the course of a school year, or from year to year.

  In a public setting, people might pretend that math and reading scores are the main, if not sole, criterion on which all educational services are to be judged. That sounds good. But voluntary payment for services is the acid test. Preferences can never be truly expressed but for the existence of alternatives. Only when people must voluntarily choose from among existing alternatives are their preferences even knowable. Talk is cheap. How people actually spend their time and money is what matters.

  It is just like a governmental agency to dictate what the sole criterion for school performance shall be for everyone. We know what's good for you, they say, so pay up and quit complaining. Typical.

  Like any socialist enterprise, schools can't calculate. They can't judge whether their services are better or worse, in terms of meeting their customers' preferences. They don't care about their customers' preferences. The entire governmental system is designed to insulate them from their customers' preferences.

  The results of their inability to calculate are obvious -- low quality, high costs, corruption. How many people would pay for these schools if they did not have to? The quality of the services they provide is so poor that many parents would not even bother to require their kids to attend, if there weren't a criminal penalty against truancy. In economic terms, that means that the school doesn't even meet the parents' reserve price -- the price at which the consumer is willing to forego the product or service altogether, much less choose another one.

  Published: August 8, 2006 8:26 AM

• Daniel M. Ryan

  One ancillary point: Internet socializing makes "school shopping" much more practicable than it used to be. The school-hopping kid will be less estranged than one in the past.

  Published: August 8, 2006 8:38 AM

• Harry Valentine

  The US DOE study has no credibility whatsoever. The DOE and state education authorities are the same agencies that control the state schools and regulates the private schools. Any state funded study that purports to study the difference between the two types of schools will invariably involve a conflict of interest. The people doing the study will be on the payroll of the regulating agency and to secure future lucrative contracts from the agency, they'd better damn provide the agency with a testimonial that attests the competence of the agency's officials and bureaucrats.

  What government agency is going to hire "neutral,independent and impartial" consultants who will suggest that the agency has mande a mess??? The DOE and state education authoriies have made one hell of mega-mess of the education of America's youth.
  

  Published: August 8, 2006 10:14 AM

• David C

  During my first year of high school. I went to a college-prep boarding school (yes room AND board) which was ranked in the top 10% under testing. The funny thing was, back then the school was costing my parents about $2500 per year while at the same time "ghetto high" about 20 miles north (in LA) was costing the tax payers about $3000 per student. Once, someone told me that I was stuck-up because I went to a private school. Some nerve, their education cost more than mine did - and technically my parents paid for theirs too (in taxes several times over).

  Any parent who spends a few days at a private high school and then a public one will know this study is a fraud.

  Later I transfered down to a private school in San Diego. I remember every week there was a news story about a drug bust at another high school. It was the talk of the town. The school 6 blocks from my parents house had over 100 arrests. Would anyone like to guess how many of those schools were private schools? (hint none)

  Don't even get me started on the bully problem.

  Published: August 8, 2006 10:44 AM

• billwald

  Why the emphasis on reading and math and not history and the literary arts?
  
  The govt uses public education to keep the kids off the streets and for job training to fill the local job market. Most parents use govt education for day care and job training so the kids can pay their own way.

  People who want their kids to get an education to put them in a position of leadership send them to private school thus I have read that a third of govt school teachers send their kids to private schools - in Seattle, half the teachers do.

  People who don't want their children to be contaminated by science and atheists send their kids to religious schools. My denomination is big on "Christian" (Protestant) schools. From what I can tell, the children with highly educated parents do well and the rest are on a par with public school kids.

  Our 5 kids to public schools and did well. If we were starting life over we would home teach and/or send the kids to a private school, not a religious school.

  Published: August 8, 2006 11:00 AM

• David Spellman

  Being an excessively liberal minded person, I talk tough against government indoctrination in the public schools. I let my son drop out of high school when he turned sixteen, and now he attends college. He loves it. He was making abyssmal grades and creating trouble (mostly challenging the propaganda) in high school. Now he makes great grades, enjoys what he is learning, and is motivated. All it took was giving him freedom and responsibility.

  As the article points out, the issue is not whether compulsory education supported by coercive taxes produces superior results. The issue is compulsion and coercion. If the rank and file believed that it was better to live free even in poverty, they would be free and not impoverished. Intellectual and material poverty is begotten by slavery. It doesn't matter whether it is the bondage of taxation and regulation or simply being driven by a whip.

  Government education is intrinsically evil no matter what the outcome. It is incompatible with a free society. And yet it is one of the most widely embraced social maladies. When I argue against public education, people look at me dumbfounded. Despite all their complaints about how and what their children are taught, they believe axiomatically that the system is right and the problem is that the schools simply aren't teaching what they want. Duh! So why not abandon the system that isn't doing what you want and choose an alternative more to your liking?

  But what is the main defence of public education I hear? Many apologists have framed it as public schools perform an important function of socializing children to participate in society. In other words, it is a propaganda machine to brain-wash our children into being effective thralls of the state. When we strip away the untenable arguments about learning, that is the final refuge of the edutocracy. That is the main argument promoted against home schoolers. The fear mongers say "Educate your child outside the system and they will be forever dysfunctional!" Please, let us be so cursed.

  Published: August 8, 2006 11:25 AM

• Eric

  As always, any standardized test measures only the ability to take the standardized test. That it is often portrayed as a measure of how well one will succeed in other pursuits depends on how closely releated these other pursuits are to the taking of the tests. The SAT is a useful measure of how well individuals will do at taking SAT like examinations which are given in Colleges.

  In todays world, which is more useful: The ability to commit to memory a small amount of facts, or the ability to know how to retrieve the same, and orders of magnitude more, information using a computer to querry for the results. Just knowing how to pose a question in a forum is a skill that I doubt would be tested for in a DOE study.

  Published: August 8, 2006 1:27 PM

• Curt Howland

  Glorious comments! Mr. Spellman hits the nail square on the head as to the primary objection to non-coercive government schooling: "Socialization". I run into that objection every time I talk to someone about home schooling that isn't already considering it.
  

  Yet what do I see happening? Homeschooled kids are constantly busy with other people. They are playing, working, dealing with the community, since their "sit down" work lasts only a few hours each day. Parents don't complain about academic performance, they talk about being tired from running the kids to all their activities! Socialized? How about I lock the kids into a room, interacting with only people in their arbitrary age group, with one absolute tyrant preaching to them every day, for 6-8 hours a day? That's not "socialization", that's brainwashing.
  

  And no jest, the "bully problem" needs to be shouted from the highest windows at every opportunity! People _don't_ talk about bullying!
  

  Let's talk money. This is an economics board, right?
  

  The American national average is more than $10,000 per public school student per year, taking all the education budgets from local through federal. That is a couple years old, so the "No Child Left Behind" might have taken that price tag up quite a bit while I wasn't looking.
  

  A couple days ago, I was looking for the "Robinson Curriculum" for an argument on this subject I was in, one of those entrepreneurial scientists that this article suggest might do more than just "recommend". Indeed he did. $200 for the entire K-12 program, except math books (at $50/year approx).
  

  Yet what I found was yet another curriculum, by people who had decided that the Robinson program was getting a bit dated, called A2 (or A-squared). It's $100, and features some improvements while keeping the basic pacing of the original. http://www.hstreasures.com/a-squared.html
  

  Sure enough, entrepreneurial innovation is happening even in this under-utilized field.
  

  There is one problem that I haven't seen addressed: Many of the established home-school programs are christian based. It makes perfect sense, since these are pre-organized people who would quickly object to the ever changing systems foisted upon public schooled children. But it does alienate folks like me who don't have invisible friends.
  

  I wonder if this has anything to do with the fact that religion is still a relatively free market? Hmmm...

  Published: August 8, 2006 1:51 PM

• Nat

  From the summary: "A new study suggests that private schools are not inherently better that public schools. Surprised? Enough people were such that the study, funded by the US Department of Education..."

  And in other news, foxes have determined that they are best suited for guarding henhouses.

  Published: August 8, 2006 2:45 PM

• PublicKids

  Its not the education that private schools provide...its the access. Private schools have vast networks of admissions staff employed at top universities, and so private school students have the ability to move to the head of the list by virtue of connections. The education is the same for undergraduate at UC Berkley as it is at CSU Dominquez Hills, but I can guarantee you that students and faculty at Berkley are far and away more well connected to graduate schools and employment. It's not about education anymore, its about securing a space for rich kids on the "education escalator".

  Published: August 8, 2006 4:45 PM

• banker

  Why would someone send their children to a private school for several thousand dollars a year versus a public school that has already been paid for thru taxes?

  If public schools were equal or better than private why would people choose private schools?

  Does the report even address these issues?

  Published: August 8, 2006 6:29 PM

• Mark Anderson

  I have a problem with the methodology of the U.S. Department of Education's study. The idea that one can measure the quality of education based upon test scores is absurd. Just look at the many WRONG answers on economics tests that are called CORRECT, pursuant to prevailing orthodoxy.

  All a test score tells you is how well somebody answeres the given questions. Only the market can truly decide what a quality education is, and this needs be without coercion.

  Published: August 8, 2006 6:59 PM

• Mark Anderson

  I also forgot to point out one other big fallacy in the empirical method. The narrow definition of education, i.e., that which is accredited by the government. This is a huge cultural problem as well, as people become more concerned with WHERE one learns, as opposed to WHAT one learns. Education need not be limited to a government accredited location. I receive education every time I visit Mises.org. Would not students who visit sites like Mises.org and learn from that need to be tested as well?

  Published: August 8, 2006 7:06 PM

• TGGP

  I'm wary of those who decry standardized tests (they test something other than "the ability to take tests"). The NEA loves to do that in order to avoid accountability.

  Published: August 8, 2006 10:52 PM

• Philip Dimon

  As school full of autistic rain men would have produced the highest rated scores according to this government study. Their results are completely worthless.

  Published: August 10, 2006 9:36 AM

• Dana

  While most public schools now focus almost fully on reading and math, most private schools still have a pretty full curriculum. I would argue that even if the study were fully valid and reliable, that the private schools do a pretty good job of it, considering the number of subjects they teach. When I taught, we had to teach math 90 minutes a day and language arts 180 minutes. After lunch, PE and normal interruptions, there was rarely more than ten minutes left over for anything else.

  Also, a simple look at the numbers raises some interesting question. In 4th grade math, the public schools have 4.3 point advantage. This is nonexistent in 8th grade with a difference too small to be statistically significant. In 4th grade math, the difference is too small to be statistically significant. In eighth grade, the private schools have a 7.3 point advantage in math. So what does that really say? That in early years, the students have similar abilities, not such a huge disparity as some claim (that private schools have better students to work with to begin with), but in time, the private schools do more with them?

  Hard to say, but I wonder what the scores in 12th grade would be. In studies where individual students have been tracked after leaving the public school for a private one, remarkable improvements have been seen. Even by the state's own meausres.

  Published: August 10, 2006 10:27 AM

• James Stanfield

  Jim Fedako's discussion concerning the concept of quality in education, very much refelects my recent research findings concerning the growth of independent schools amongst the Kikuyu, in Kenya during the 1930s and 1940s. After establishing an Education Department in 1911, the British colonial government decided to introduce a system of quality inspection whereby all schools (missionary and independent) would be inspected to ensure that the school met the governments specific quality guidelines. According to the government a quality school was one which employed qualified teachers, followed the government curriculum and was housed in suitable school buildings with adequate basic facilities.
  The prescribed curriculum for African children focused on developing basic literacy skills combined with agricultural and technical training. Swahilli was to be the language of instruction with English only introduced in the last year of primary school. However for the Kikuyu, they favoured a more academic education with English being the language of instruction. This resulted in the peculiar situation of an independent school which focused on academic subjects taught in English, being defined by the government as low quality. For the Kikuyu, they were not concerned if their teachers had any qualifications or if the school buildings were deemed inadequate. They were better than having no school at all. Instead a quality education for the Kikuyu was one which was relevant to their particular needs. At that point in time they wanted to learn English and receive an education which was similar to the one received by European children.

  In fact over half a century later not much has changed. Both UK an USA governments continue to pour internatonal aid into helping countries across Africa to introduce state controlled education systems, just like our own. Again, what is taught is usually deceided by education experts in Kenya with little or no regard to what parents actually want their children to learn. This international aid may therefore delay any real developments in education across Africa for the next 100 years.

  Published: August 11, 2006 4:38 AM