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Good News for Public School |
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 Dot
May 11, 2005
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News about public schools is usually so depressing. I've
become accustomed to hearing about funding crises, overcrowding and
dilapidated buildings so imagine my surprise when I saw the headline
"Public schools: Do they outperform private ones?" online at the
Christian Science Monitor (
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0510/p11s01-legn.htm).
Some
researchers from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign culled the
raw data from standardized tests of 28,000 fourth and eighth-graders
from public and private schools.
They found that, taking into account socioeconomic status, public school students actually outperformed private school students. The differences were small (anywhere from 1-9 points) but it still shows that public schools are doing something right.
The private schools still have higher overall scores but the findings absolutely fly in the face of conventional wisdom.
Let's get one thing straight. Researchers
are not suggesting that public schools are outperforming private ones;
they are saying that many of the students who succeed in private
schools come from wealthy families and educated backgrounds and so are
already more likely to succeed than their peers.
Of
course this study has been met with skepticism from the private school
world but a similar study was conducted in Latin America a few years
ago and, guess what, their results were the same. No matter what
everyone else thinks, I am glad to hear something good about public
schools.
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