Sunday, July 16, 2006

More on U. S. Department of Education study

The release of a report that erases the myth that private schools provide a far better education than public schools appears to have been delayed for about a year to give Bush administration officials an opportunity to prove it was faulty.
An article in Saturday's Wall Street Journal said the report was scheduled to be released in spring 2005 "but was held up so outside reviewers could assess the methodology," Arnold Goldstein told the Journal. Goldstein is described as a "statistician in charge of disseminating reports at the National Center for Education Statistics." Goldstein said it was delayed "because of other priorities and the necessity to give it a different kind of review than is usual for other reports."
I would guess a different kind of review was necessary because the report goes smack in the face of the Bush Administration's rationale for its push for vouchers as a means to improve American education.
The Journal, which can hardly be called a bastion of liberalism, said, "The report, which examined test scores in reading and mathematics among fourth and eighth graders, casts doubt on the value of voucher programs that give students public money to attend private schools. Although voucher proponents contend that private education is often superior to public schooling, the federally commissioned study found that better test scores by private school students can largely be attributed to differences in the students themselves, not their teachers and institutions."
Remember, this is a study conducted by the Education Department. When the results turned out differently than it had anticipated, it was released, one year late, with little or no publicity.
We hear a lot about how the Administration never admits that it is wrong about anything when it comes to its conduct in the war on terrorism. Apparently, it never admits it's wrong about anything, including its gung ho attitude that private schools are superior...well, simply because they're private schools.
This study is not a one-shot finding either, as the Journal article notes. "The findings confirm a study of the same data, released earlier this year, by researchers at the University of Illinois."
(Note: Though most people who read this blog already are aware of this, I teach at a public school.)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Good insights, Randy. I might add that some parents favor private schools due to the parents' willingness to invest and be involved in their kid's education. Ideally, they join with other like-minded parents and feel as though they at least have some control to form a strong educational community. Some public schools have strong communities of involved parents, some don't. Certainly some private schools vary in this quality as well.

Anonymous said...

Media Miss Mark on Education Study


In an article titled "Long-Delayed Education Study Casts Doubt on Value
of Vouchers," the Wall Street
Journal reports: "Students in public schools perform just as well as
their private-school peers when test scores are adjusted for race,
socioeconomics and other factors, according to a long-delayed study
released Friday by the U.S. Department of Education." In "The School
Choice Movement's Greatest Failure," a recent post on Cato's daily weblog, Cato@Liberty, Andrew Coulson, director of Cato's
Center for Educational Freedom, argues that the Journal's headline is
wrong because the point of voucher programs is to create a competitive
education industry, and the existing population of U.S. private schools
does not constitute such an industry. He concedes that it is a failure
of the school choice movement as a whole that the media don't yet
understand why.


http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2006/07/16/the-school-choice-movements-gr
eatest-failure/