Friday Afternoon Follies: Education Department Seeks To Bury Pro-Public Schools Report
The U.S. Department of Education found itself in a tight spot recently: A new report had just come out indicating that public school students perform as well or better than their private school counterparts. Obviously, these findings did not please the Bush administration, which is wedded to vouchers and other forms of tax aid to private schools.
Desperate Education Department staffers tried a common administration tactic: The “Friday dump and run.” Department staffers released the report late on Friday afternoon with no fanfare and ran home for the weekend.
The administration might have hoped that would bury the report, but it did not work out that way. The New York Times ran a front-page story about it the next day, highlighting the curious fact of its Friday release.
Observed The Times, “Its release, on a summer Friday, was made without a news conference or comment from Education Secretary Margaret Spellings. Reg Weaver, president of the National Education Association, the union for millions of teachers, said the findings showed that public schools were ‘doing an outstanding job’ and that if the results had been favorable to private schools, ‘there would have been press conferences and glowing statements about private schools.’”
Ironically, while the Education Department issued no press releases or public statements about the report, its Web site highlights fawning comments about Catholic schools Spellings made July 15 to the Notre Dame Alliance for Catholic Education.
It’s too bad Spellings was too busy cooing over Catholic schools to read the report. She might have learned some interesting things. The report compared fourth- and eighth-grade reading and math scores in 2003 from nearly 7,000 public schools and more than 530 private schools. It was conducted under the auspices of the National Center for Education Statistics, an arm of the Education Department, and a private group, the Educational Testing Service. It went through a long peer review process.
Among the report’s core findings:
* Fourth graders attending public school did significantly better in math than comparable fourth graders in private schools.
* Students in conservative Christian schools did significantly worse in eighth-grade math than public school students. In eighth-grade reading, children in conservative Christian schools scored no better than comparable children in public schools.
* Among private religious school students, those in Lutheran schools performed best; those attending conservative Christian schools did worst.
* Private schools have the same problems public schools do in trying to help underprivileged kids. The report noted that, generally speaking, private school students tend to do better on standardized tests than public school students. But it also noted that when students were compared on the basis of race, economic background and social background, the private school advantage evaporated except in the area of eighth-grade reading.
This is not the first study to find that public school students are keeping pace or even outdistancing their private school peers. The public schools’ ability to compete is even more impressive when you consider the fact that the playing field is uneven. Public schools must by law educate all youngsters, including those who have learning disabilities, who do not test well or who present disciplinary challenges. Private schools are free to cherry pick students. They can expel or deny admission to any child for any reason. Yet even with that advantage, many of them cannot out-perform public schools.
What effect will this report have on the Bush administration and voucher advocates in Congress? We already know the answer to that: It will have no effect. Just days after the report was issued, voucher advocates in the House and Senate called a press conference to announce they will introduce legislation to establish a nationwide voucher plan to get kids out of “failing” public schools.
Education Secretary Spellings, who could not be bothered to say one kind word about public education last week, was quick to issue a statement today lauding the new voucher effort.