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May 25, 2008Public schools as good as private schools in raising math scores |
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From EurekAlert! - Breaking News: Students in public schools learn as much or more math between kindergarten and fifth grade as similar students in private schools, according to a new University of Illinois study of multi-year, longitudinal data on nearly 10,000 students. "These data provide strong, longitudinal evidence that public schools are at least as effective as private schools in boosting student achievement," according to the authors, education professor Christopher Lubienski, doctoral student Corinna Crane and education professor Sarah Theule Lubienski. Combined with other, yet-unpublished studies of the same data, which produced similar findings, "we think this effectively ends the debate about whether private schools are more effective than publics," said Christopher Lubienski, whose research has dealt with all aspects of alternative education. This is important, he said, because many current reforms, such as No Child Left Behind, charter schools and vouchers for private schools, are based on that assumption. Both studies were based on fourth- and eighth-grade test data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The conclusions of the husband-and-wife team seemed "crazy radical" at the time, Sarah Lubienski said, and generated significant controversy. (Unlike literacy, math is viewed as being less dependent on a student's home environment and more an indication of a school's effectiveness, Sarah Lubienski said.) After adjusting for demographics and initial kindergarten scores, they found that achievement gains between kindergarten and fifth grade were roughly equal. "It is worth noting," the researchers write in analyzing their results, "how little variation school type really accounts for in students' growth in achievement ...
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