Harvard professor Martin Feldstein used to tell students in his
introductory economics class that economists agree on 99% of the issues
in the field. From the nature of monopolies to the basic laws of
inflation, Feldstein asserted, economists of all political stripes are
in accord on the same principles. He claimed that what we read about in
the popular press are the 1% of economic issues where the data support
no clear-cut conclusion.
I’m pretty sure Feldstein was exaggerating the 99-1 split in economics,
but I have often thought that education research shows precisely the
opposite ratio of agreement to disagreement. Education experts seem to
concur on almost nothing. Research in the field is so politicized and
contradictory that you can find almost any study to support your view.
If economics is a 99-1 science, education is a 1-99 circus.
Still, I was intrigued to read of a well-designed study released today
by the Center on Education Policy that challenges decades of research on
the advantages of private schools. “Contrary to popular belief, we can
find no evidence that private schools actually increase student
performance,” said Jack Jennings, the center’s president and a former
staffer in the Democratic-controlled House, in a press release.
“Instead, it appears that private schools simply have higher percentages
of students who would perform well in any environment based on their
previous performance and background.”
The study suggests vouchers for private schools are unnecessary because
— once you control for socioeconomic status — students at private
schools aren’t performing any better than those at public schools. The
study says that it is “the kinds of economic and
resource advantages their parents can give [students]” — as
well as the level of parental involvement in their kids’ education —that determines success or failure in high school. That’s a message the
teachers’ unions and Democrats in general love: The problem isn’t in the
schools; it’s with social inequality.
Except that’s not exactly what the data shows. It’s true that
controlling for socioeconomic status eliminates most of the
public-school/private-school differences in achievement-test scores in
math, reading, science and history. But even after you control for SES,
Catholic schools run by holy orders turned out to perform better than other schools studied. True,
as the study says, there are only a small number of religious-order
schools. But the data suggests that the type of school a kid attends does
affect how well he will do — and that we could learn something from
how holy orders run their schools. The Center on Education Policy,
however, is an advocacy group for public schools, so it didn’t look into
why holy-order schools are succeeding where others fail.
The center also downplays another finding: While controlling for SES
eliminated most public school/private-school differences in
achievement test scores, it did not eliminate differences in the
most widely used test of developed abilities, the SAT.
