Do private schools do a better job teaching math?
This new study by Lubienski and Lubienski suggests the answer is a resounding, if not surprising, no. Past studies, including the most recent NAEP, have shown that private schools produce higher achievement than public schools in mathematics, even when the fact that private schools serve a different population of students is taken into account. However, those studies used a fairly crude measure of students’ socio-economic status (SES) based only eligibility for free or reduced lunch. Lubienski and Lubienski created a more sensitive measure of SES that included other factors such as parents’ education and income. Using this measure, they found that within all SES classifications (low, mid-low, mid-high, and high) that public school students’ achievement in math was higher than that of students in private schools, in fourth and eighth grades.
Paradoxically, overall mean achievement in math is higher for private schools than public, an example of Simpson’s paradox. This counterintuitive result appears to be due to a higher concentration of high SES students in private schools rather than better teaching. Lubienski and Lubienski’s data suggest that, in fact, public schools do a better job of teaching math than private schools.
Posted in Research, Uncategorized | Comments (0)
No Comments »
No comments yet.
RSS feed for comments on this post.
Leave a comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.