The data doesn't support our argument so we will bait and switch our terms

Humph. I used to love the Atlantic Magazine and still subscribe to it but they seem to have fallen victim to click-bait mania. It used to be that their articles were well edited and substantive. Now there are more and more that are simply intended to be provocative.

This morning's instance is Are Private Schools Worth It? by Julia Ryan. There are lots of pros and cons to the private versus public school discussion and it is one of those debates that doesn't have a clear answer - you end up having to make an educated guess based on the circumstances of the child, their likely future development, the trajectory of the school, etc.

This article had the subtitle, "A new book argues that public schools are actually academically superior." So, a provocative and counter-intuitive thesis and the prospect of some substance. The article is actually an interview of the authors of The Public School Advantage: Why Public Schools Outperform Private Schools by Christopher A. Lubienski and Sarah Theule Lubienski.

The intro to the interview makes it all sound so plausible.

Studying the National Assessment of Educational Progress and the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, they have found that, when controlling for demographic factors, public schools are doing a better job academically than private schools. It seems that private school students have higher scores because they come from more affluent backgrounds, not because the schools they attend are better educational institutions.

NAEP and ECLS are pretty good sources. This sounds promising.

Christopher A. Lubienski summarizes their findings.

We already know that scores for students in private schools tend to be higher. The question is, is that because they’re from more affluent families…or is that because the schools are doing better? If you go back for a generation the research suggests that there is a private school effect, that even when you control for background factors, private schools seem to be more effective, particularly for certain populations, at boosting their achievement.

So what we did, controlling for these background factors, we actually found that the opposite appears to be true and that there is actually a public school effect. Which was a surprise… We were not expecting that at all, but then digging deeper into the data, using multiple data sets, that actually held up. And since that time, other researchers—people at the Educational Testing Service, Notre Dame, and Stanford—have looked at these data sets and come to similar conclusions.

Hmmm. Very interesting. I attended private school and my wife attended public school. Over the years we have had occasion to compare and contrast experiences. From those anecdotes and from my non-random sampling of my classmates and other private school friends, the professor's findings seem inconsistent. At both high school and the universities I attended undergrad and grad (Most Competitive and Ivy League respectively) it was simply assumed that private high school was disproportionately effective. At high school and also at university there was always debate about from whence the margin of contributive excellence arose; was it from selectivity, from better teachers, from better facilities or from more competitive peers. The most common consensus I have perceived from peers is that at least half the value of the education arose from the student body itself rather than any of the other factors.

Only about 10% of children attend private schools but they usually represent 25-35% of the student body in the most competitive universities. But there is an important distinction to be made in the definition of private schools and that is between religious schools and secular schools. There are certainly some blurred lines but in general the 25-35% attending the most competitive universities come from secular schools (or with only historical vestiges to their long ago religious foundations) and which are about 15% of the private school population. About 55% of private schools are Catholic, and another 20% conservative Christian, Baptist, or similar and a further 10% other.

It is no disparagement to acknowledge that the secular schools tend to be primarily focused on education (and university admission) whereas most the religious schools have at least a dual goal of education and religious instruction. The key point is that about 1.5% of the US student body attend private secular schools and they are dramatically overrepresented in most competitive universities, suggesting that in fact there is some very substantial contribution to educational excellence.

But the professors want to make the case that public schools (with a singular focus in education) are superior to private schools despite the apparent effectiveness of private schools.

There is actually a fair amount with which I can agree, particularly that American public schools are dramatically better than the simple averages indicate (see US Education: Expensive and ineffective? Not so fast). But the crux of the Lubienski's position is that public schools educate more effectively than private schools. And that is where they become disgracefully misleading. What they have actually found is that public schools seem to produce more effective educational results than religious schools.

Most of the schools in your study are religious schools. What about private schools that serve purely academic purposes? Are they also underperforming?

STL: Actually, that was not a category in any of the data that we worked with. There’s this category of “other private” that doesn’t fit into Lutheran, Catholic, conservative Christian, et cetera, but that’s really a catch all-category. A very small sample. So we weren’t able to study that.

CAL: And from a policy perspective, that’s less useful because when you look at for example, voucher programs. The largest sector of schools that are accepting vouchers are Catholic, even though Catholic schools have declined a bit in terms of their market share. They are still the biggest player in the private-school sector.

So the headlines and the whole discussion is seemingly about comparing effectiveness of academic private schools to academic public schools when in fact they are comparing dissimilar institutions, academic public schools to religious private schools. In answering another question, they even acknowledge that this is not an appropriate comparison because:

A lot of parents are choosing schools based on religious values and not on boosting the achievement of their children.

This would seem almost academic malpractice. It seems that the Lubienski's are seeking to defend the reputation of public schools particularly in regard to competition for resources from Catholic schools accepting vouchers. Fine, if that is the argument they want to make, it appears that they have the data to make that argument.

What they don't have is the data to answer their original question regarding the private school effect. They don't have the data to compare like institutions (private academic schools versus public academic schools) and yet their whole discussion is in the context of academic to academic comparisons. In other words, there is no data whatsoever to support the article's claim (and apparently their book's claim) that "public schools are actually academically superior."

Click baiting on the magazine side and either incredible sloppiness or intentional deception on the side of the academics. Cognitive Pollution.