Private schools aren't better at educating kids than public schools, study says

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Despite evidence showing otherwise, it remains conventional wisdom in many parts of the education world that private schools do a better job of educating students, with superior standardized test scores and outcomes. It is one of the claims that some school choice supporters make in arguing that the public should pay for private school education.

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University of Virginia researchers who looked at data from more than 1,000 students found that all of the advantages supposedly conferred by private education evaporate when socio-demographic characteristics are factored in. There was also no evidence found to suggest that low-income children or children enrolled in urban schools benefit more from private school enrollment.

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The new study was conducted by Robert Pianta, dean of Virginia's Curry School of Education and a professor of education and psychology, and Arya Ansari, a postdoctoral research associate at the university's Center for Advanced Study for Teaching and Learning.

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Kids who come from homes with higher incomes and parental education achievement offer young children - from birth through age 5 - educational resources and stimulation that other children don't get. These conditions presumably carry on through the school years, Pianta said.

Pianta and Ansari used a longitudinal study of a large and diverse sample of children to examine the extent to which attending private schools predicts achievement and social and personal outcomes at age 15.

They started with data from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development's Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development. That was a 10-site research project that followed children from birth to 15 years with a common study protocol, including an annual interview and observations at home and school and in the neighborhood. In that years-long study, there were 1,364 families that became study participants, with ethnicity and household income largely representative of the U.S. population, though Pianta and Ansari looked at 1,097 of those children for their analysis.

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A 2013 book, "The Public School Advantage," by Christopher A. Lubienski and Sarah Theule Lubienski, describes the results of a look at two huge data sets of student mathematics performance, that found public school students outperform private school ones when adjusted for demographics. Pianta and Ansari refer to this book in this part of the report:

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