<p>WASHINGTON, July 14 The Education Department reported on Friday that children in public schools generally performed as well or better in reading and mathematics than comparable children in private schools. The exception was in eighth-grade reading, where the private school counterparts fared better.</p>
<p>The report, which compared fourth- and eighth-grade reading and math scores in 2003 from nearly 7,000 public schools and more than 530 private schools, also found that conservative Christian schools lagged significantly behind public schools on eighth-grade math.</p>
<p>The study, along with one of charter schools, was commissioned by the former head of the national Center for Education Statistics, Robert Lerner, an appointee of President Bush, at a time preliminary data suggested that charter schools, which are given public money but are run by private groups, fared no better at educating children than traditional public schools.</p>
<p>The two new studies put test scores in context by studying the childrens backgrounds and taking into account factors like race, ethnicity, income and parents educational backgrounds to make the comparisons more meaningful. The extended study of charter schools has not been released.</p>
<p>Students in private schools typically score higher than those in public schools, a finding confirmed in the study. The report then dug deeper to compare students of like racial, economic and social backgrounds. When it did that, the private school advantage disappeared in all areas except eighth-grade reading.</p>
<p>The report separated private schools by type and found that among private school students, those in Lutheran schools performed best, while those in conservative Christian schools did worst. </p>
<p><Reg Weaver, President of the National Education Association, the union for millions of teachers, said the findings showed the public schools were “doing an outstanding job” and that if the results had been favorable to private schools, “there would have been press conferences and glowing statements about private schools.” </p>
<p>“The administration has been giving public schools a beating since the beginning” to advance its political agenda, Mr. Weaver said, of promoting charter schools and taxpayer-financed vouchers for private schools as alternatives to failing traditional schools."></p>
<p>When Reg Weaver opens his mouth, everyone should laugh. Crying is reserved for the times we wonder how Weaver-like thieving political puppets who have not stood in front of a class in decades still have an audience.</p>
<p>hereshoping, xiggi, lets ignore the messenger for a moment. Where is the evidence that public schools are doing such a bad job? Where is the evidence that another model, charters? private? are doing a much better job? Even slightly better?</p>
<p>The truth is, I’m not sure we really know what makes some schools better than others. I’m not even sure we know how to identify “better” schools. At most, we seem to identify schools with “better” students and call them better.</p>
<p>Don’t misunderstand, I’m no great fan of how the ed unions have developed a system with weak accountability, one where it can be difficult to dump poor performers. But that doesn’t mean any alternative is better.</p>
<p>I think it MIGHT be interesting to look at the schools that have the highest differences between expected scores (based on income, parents’ educationbs, etc.) and the actual scores and see what those schools have in common, whether the schools are public or private. Although depending on how difficult the test is, this might have limited utility. For example, if the testing is too easy, then it possibly cannot be used to distinguish anything useful about schools with many stidents who are expected to score highly, because they CANNOT possibly over-achieve.</p>
<p>It also might be interesting to find out if bright or lower achieving students are affected differently by schools. For example, I would suspect that the score discrepancy (or whatever you want to call the difference between the predicted score and the actual score) might depend on how strong the student is compared to the student body. If, for example, a student who attends a school that includes many other students who are brighter than he is (or at least likely to score higher on these tests, based on the various parameters in the study) experiences a greater score discrepancy, then there still may be value in allowing public school students to choose to attend private schools, even if on average they do not create any corrected “discrepancy.”</p>
<p>On the other hand, it may alternately be the case that there is no statistically significant effect of attending a more or less “challenging” school. Recall that some studies show that post-college achievement (e.g. income) depends on the best college you were accepted to (which is at least indirectly a measure of how smart you were before you attended college), rather than the one you actually attended. The same might be true for elementary and high schools. A K-12 child’s achievement (as measured via test scores) may be largely determined by genetics and parental involvement, rather than the school attended.</p>
<p>Even independent of the public/private issues, I would be interested in finding out which categories of students are most helped by attending a more or less challenging school.</p>
<p>“xiggi, lets ignore the messenger for a moment. Where is the evidence that public schools are doing such a bad job?”</p>
<p>NMD, you’re absolutely correct. </p>
<p>Actually, I am not surprised that the differences are minimal … because the study covered classes through 8th grade only. It would be interesting to see a study that covers 9-12 in the US, followed by a comparison to the international yardsticks. If I am not mistaken, the US remains competitive until the last years of elementary school. </p>
<p>Could this be a coincidence that this pattern follows the years where parents find it harder if not imposssible to continue to provide assistance to their children? </p>
<p>Lastly, would it not be a mistake to consider the world of private schools to be a homogeneous group. Among private schools, there are some that operate at 50% of the funding of public schools and others that have access to 2 or 3 times the revenues of public schools.</p>
<p>Xiggi, regarding the international comparisons, have you heard the rebuttal that those comparisons compare a cross section of all US students (OK, not the drop outs!) against an elite subsegment in these other countries? </p>
<p>I understand that the US is not competitive beginning in 7th and 8th grades, partly because of the curriculum. In the US, these two grades are essentially review and the focus is on social skills and personal development. In other countries, the pace of teaching is ramped up in 6th grade. I began learning both Latin and English in 6th grade, and added Greek in 8th grade. In my sons’ school it was a major accomplishment to get Spanish taught at 7th grade (it had been taught in 8th grade previously). As well, classes are taught by specialists beginning in 6th grade. Here, classes are usually taught by generalists who serve as homeroom teachers. Our school tried to get around this by hiring one person with a trong math background as one of the homeroom teachers. </p>
<p>These are issues that cut across the private/public/charter divides.</p>
<p>I did, however, check on one point of comparison used in the John Stossel report. Some critics did allege unfair competition as the school in Belgium had to selected to “make the point.” The school in Belgium was indeed an open public school. Actually the school seems to offer a range of specialties including vocational and athletic programs. The American school was in New Jersey. I believe it may be Monroe High, but that is speculative.</p>
<p>But this begs the question: why are Belgian schools better? Better trained teachers? A more rigorous and coherent curriculum? Less student mobility? More homogeneous student body? Fewer discipline problems? Longer school year? More homework? It could be any or all or none of these things.</p>
<p>The best study I’ve seen indicates that scores among 10th graders are inversely correlated with length of school year/hours in the classroom. Countries with the highest mathematical scores on the TIMSS-R were Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Flemish Belgium, all with among the shortest school years in the survey.</p>
<p>Who needs high school anyway? Most children graduated by eighth grade in the US back in the 1800s. They were quite educated; so much, in fact, that many knew calculus and proficient in Latin.</p>
<pre><code> Let us put this into perspective. What is high school now in the 21st century? Prom, sports leagues, homecoming? My friends, high school is nothing more than a social training ground with progressive learning. Perhaps we should focus on college prep, rather than the social scene which plagues the American school systems. Compared to most other developed nations, US Schools are nothing more than laughable jokes. APs and IBs are considered elementary by our European and Asian counterparts. Why? A decrease of actual learning, social rather than academic.
Well, at least we have good universities in the good ol US of A!
<p>Marite, I hope to find out more about the precise questions you’re asking by visiting the school in Belgium in the next future. The response might be complex. For instance, the French speaking part of Belgium scores more or less like France, while the Flemish speaking part of Belgium scores higher. </p>
<p>Mini, I am surprised that Belgium is considered to have fewer school days. Clicking on the link to the web site of the school in Belgium and navigating to the calendar would indicate a pretty high required attendance with eight classes a day. The daily classes seem to be from 800 AM to 4PM.</p>
<p>Mini:
The French school year runs from October to end of June. I suppose this means it is shorter by American standards, but the amount of “school time” that is wasted in American schools is unbelievable by French standards. See also Xiggi’s comments about the length of the school day. </p>
<p>In 1892, Harvard College assumed that entrants would know Latin, Greek and French, but only algebra. No further math or knowledge of history or science was required.</p>
<p>You must admit, however, that one room school houses were vastly superior to modern day schools.</p>
<p>newmassdad,
You are bascially admitting that the educational system at that time was outstanding. Surely, it is not the fault of the schooling back at that time that the illiteracy rate was so high. America was a vastly agrarian nation as you said. Today, most children do not spend eight hours a day on a tractor on the family farm, thus where does the problem stem? Why are not OUR eighth graders that advanced.</p>
<p>Marite,</p>
<pre><code> I apologize for my superficial mistake; however to be trilingual is outstanding, especially as an eighth or ninth grade entering college freshmen at Harvard. Hmmm…the same question is still in existance?
As George W. Bush says, "Is our kids getting educated?" I concur with Mr. Bush and would appreciate some comments here.
<p>An 8th or 9th grade entrant to college? Where do you get that idea?</p>
<p>No. It just means that learning priorities in 1892 were very different from those of 2000. 100 years of history, for one, had not happened. Nothing to know about WWI, WWI, Communism, the Holocaust, etc…
Nothing to know about DNA, Relativity, and so on. </p>
<p>Also, the number of people who had an education that went past 8th grade was tiny. It remained very small until the GI Bill. The one room school could not accommodate the learning of most people today. It certainly could not accommodate my children. Even so, the teacher to student ratio was much much better in those one-room schools than they are in today’s schools even those that are not overcrowded.</p>