As a follow-up to my previous post comparing public school and homeschool students, here's another interesting study comparing schooling methods. This time research involving public, charter, and religious private schools was compiled and studied, with interesting results.
The conclusion of the researcher conducting the meta-analysis? "To the extent that neither traditional public schools nor charter schools are succeeding on a broad scale, it appears that the best hope for American education is religious private schools. Not only are they considerably more economically efficient, but their students also achieve better academic and behavioral results."
Again, this is a highly charged topic and a very personal decision that each family must make for itself. But it is interesting to me that home schools and private religious schools are consistently outperforming public schools in every measurable area--including "the big three" of academic performance, behavior, and socialization--while spending significantly less per student.
Here's the article:
within Education
May 30th, 2013 http://www.thepublicdiscourse.
The conclusion of the researcher conducting the meta-analysis? "To the extent that neither traditional public schools nor charter schools are succeeding on a broad scale, it appears that the best hope for American education is religious private schools. Not only are they considerably more economically efficient, but their students also achieve better academic and behavioral results."
Again, this is a highly charged topic and a very personal decision that each family must make for itself. But it is interesting to me that home schools and private religious schools are consistently outperforming public schools in every measurable area--including "the big three" of academic performance, behavior, and socialization--while spending significantly less per student.
Here's the article:
Today on Public Discourse,
William Jeynes presents the results of his recent meta-analysis showing
that students perform best academically and behaviorally when they
attend religious private schools.
The Data Are In: Religious Private Schools Deserve a Second Look
by William Jeyneswithin Education
May 30th, 2013 http://www.thepublicdiscourse.
A
recent meta-analysis of 90 studies on religious private schools,
traditional public schools, and charter schools shows that students
perform best academically and behaviorally when they attend religious
private schools.
An
inquisitive elementary school student asked his teacher, "Is it wrong
to steal?" The teacher replied, "I don't know. What do you think?" This
incident in a major midwestern public school alarmed thousands of
parents, and reminded myriad others why they value religious private
schools: these schools are usually guided by a moral compass for
academics and behavior that public schools patently do not offer.
I recently conducted a meta-analysis of
more than ninety studies on education, and the results suggest that
perhaps it is time for America's leadership and the general public to
take a second look at religious private schools. At the risk of
immodesty, let me be frank. The study is hugely important because it is
the first published meta-analysis to compare the three primary types of
American schools: religious private schools, traditional public schools,
and charter schools.
A
meta-analysis statistically combines all the relevant existing studies
on a given subject in order to determine the aggregated results of the
research. This meta-analysis yielded results that surprised many by
indicating that students from public charter schools did no better than
their peers in traditional public schools. In contrast, youth from
religious private schools performed better academically than their
counterparts in both public charter schools and traditional public
schools, even when the results were adjusted to account for
socioeconomic status, selectivity, race, and various other factors.
These
findings are especially noteworthy when one considers that over the
last four or five years, the general public has been enamored by the
presence of public charter schools, which has really obscured the
consistent vital contributions of faith-based schools, particularly in
the inner city.
Other
social scientists, most notably James Coleman, made names for
themselves by conducting analyses that demonstrated that pupils
attending faith-based schools had a scholastic edge over those that did
not. But the school climate has changed considerably since these
scholars undertook those analyses. The most notable change, especially
since the early 1990s, has been the rise of public charter schools.
Public
charter schools became more popular in the early 1990s, concurrent with
greater consideration of school choice programs that would include
religious private schools. Since that time, the debate over which school
model works best has become more complex, as educators and politicians
have considered the possibility that schools should be allowed to
compete more with each other so that they improve across the board.
Perhaps the most notable of these arguments was propounded in 1990 by John Chubb and Terry Moe in their work Politics, Markets, and America's Schools.
They posed a rhetorical question: Why do educators and world leaders
admit, almost universally, that the United States has the best system of
university education in the world but only a mediocre system of public
elementary and secondary schools?
American
universities dominate world rankings of universities that have been
regularly disseminated out of China, Great Britain, and Germany over the
last twenty years. Most of us recognize, for example, that to be able
to say one is a graduate of Harvard is almost equivalent to saying that
one attended the best university in the world. The only real competition
that Harvard, Princeton, and Yale receive for the top slots has
generally come from Cambridge and Oxford in England. Equally convincing
is the fact that universities such as Columbia, Chicago, MIT, Stanford,
Duke, and Dartmouth are usually among the world's top 6 to 15
universities.
Chubb
and Moe argue that American public schools, by contrast, lack good
reputations because elementary and secondary schools compete so little
with each other. They insist that private schools should be allowed to
compete with public schools. Nevertheless, although Presidents George
H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton endorsed the idea of competition, they
focused nearly all their education reform efforts on establishing and
expanding charter schools.
Chubb and Moe warned that these steps alone couldn't yield the competition level necessary to improve American education.
They
argued that private schools need to be included in any choice
initiative because, for example, half of America's National Merit
Scholarship winners attend private schools. They averred that including
private schools would not only enable myriad American students to attend
some of the nation's finest schools, but would force public schools to
improve, after their fall to a complacent state resulting from their
decades-old near-monopoly on education. In spite of these warnings,
federal and state governments pumped about 2 percent of the education
budgets to charter schools.
Today
when politicians and educators refer to school choice, they almost
always refer to choice in the public arena. Five years ago such a
scenario seemed very unlikely, because in his State of the Union address
President George W. Bush called for a White House Education Summit that
would gather a number of leading education academics in the country to
reinvigorate the nation's policies on non-public education. Bush himself
was the keynote speaker, which suggested how important he believed the
gathering to be. But despite his determination to incorporate the
summit's recommendations, when he left office the nation all but totally
rejected his new emphasis.
With
this scenario in mind, the results of the meta-analysis are all the
more intriguing. The meta-analysis included ninety studies. The results
indicate that attending private religious schools is associated with the
highest level of academic achievement among the three school types,
even when sophisticated controls are used to adjust for a variety of
factors, including socioeconomic status, race, gender, and selectivity.
Examining
results from all ninety studies, I found that the average academic
outcome for religious school students was .28 of a standard deviation
unit higher than for traditional public school (TPS) students, while the
average for charter school students was only .01 of a standard
deviation unit higher. If one converts these numbers to percentiles, the
average academic outcome was 11 percentage points higher than that of
TPS pupils, while charter school attendees scored about the same as
their TPS counterparts.
Translated
into more tangible numbers, students who attend private religious
schools attain educational levels that average about twelve months ahead
of those attending regular public schools. Even when the meta-analysis
employed sophisticated controls, which included measures for
socioeconomic status, selectivity, gender, and race, youth who attended
faith-based schools achieved at levels seven months ahead of both TPS
and public charter school students.
One
of the most intriguing results of the study is that the racial and
socioeconomic achievement gaps are roughly 25 percent narrower in
religious private schools than in public schools. This finding is
particularly interesting when one considers that over the years the
government has spent hundreds of billions of dollars to bridge the gaps,
with only limited success. Higher expectations for students, and school
leaders' insistence that pupils take demanding courses, could help to
explain these circumstances in faith-based schools.
The
meta-analysis focused primarily on scholastic performance, but it also
examined student behavior. The results indicated that youth from
faith-based schools maintained even a larger edge in behavior than they
did in school academics. That is, pupils from religious private schools
exhibited fewer behavioral problems, even when socioeconomic status,
selectivity, race, and gender were also controlled for. This translates
into fewer gangs, lower levels of drug abuse, and greater racial harmony
than one typically finds in public schools.
Many
people, even this researcher, expected public charter school students
to perform somewhere in between the levels achieved by students
attending faith-based schools and those attending traditional public
schools, given that they were trying to mimic certain aspects of private
religious schools.
To
the extent that neither traditional public schools nor charter schools
are succeeding on a broad scale, it appears that the best hope for
American education is religious private schools. Not only are they
considerably more economically efficient, but their students also
achieve better academic and behavioral results.
The
nation should therefore rethink its strategy of espousing charter
schools and overlooking the benefits of faith-based education. It may be
time to extend school choice to include the private sector. Because
religious schools are so much more efficient than public schools, states
would save money by implementing programs that pay for children to
attend these schools instead of more expensive public ones. The
meta-analysis calls into question the current trajectory of school
choice that emphasizes only public school choice, without due diligence
in pursuing the inclusion of private religious schools.
William Jeynes is Professor of Education at California State University, Long Beach.
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