For years, research from the National Center for Educational Statistics backed the assumptions that private primary education is more effective than public education — until University professors Sarah and Chris Lubienski adjusted these results to take student demographics into account. 

“The finding surprised me,” Sarah said. “When we compare apples to apples, so when we equate students and schools on demographics such as parent education level and income, we find that mathematics achievement is higher in public elementary schools than in private schools.”

The Lubienskis recently published these findings in their book, “The Public School Advantage: Why Public Schools Outperform Private Schools.”

Sarah did not intend to compare public and private education initially, she said. She stumbled onto a negative estimate of achievement for private schools while she was analyzing mathematics instruction methods. The discrepancies intrigued her, and she started to use the National Assessment of Educational Progress and the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Class of 1998-1999 to conduct studies on public and private education, she said.

“I began to collaborate with my husband on this work because he is interested in education policy, which includes movements to privatize public schooling in various ways,” Sarah said. “We used a series of models, which allowed us to examine achievement in public and private schools both before and after adding demographic and instruction-related variables.”

Sarah and Chris concluded that public schools were actually performing better in mathematics, according to students’ math scores, when demographics were taken into account. In one example taken from the fourth grade, the Lubienskis’ research showed that before factoring in location and demographics, Catholic schools’ achievement coefficient, or score when compared to public schools, was 9.5. After controlling for demographics and location, the coefficient dwindled to -7.2. From this data, they developed ideas as to why this trend might be occurring.

“We found that private school teachers tend to use more traditional, perhaps outdated methods,” Sarah said. “In math class, private school teachers are more likely to have their students sit in rows and complete math worksheets. Their elementary math curriculum tends to be more traditionally number-focused and less likely to encompass other important strands of mathematics, such as statistics, measurement and algebra.”

Chris Roegge, executive director of the University’s Council on Teaching Education, said that another one of the issues with many private schools is that teachers are not always required to be licensed, whereas in public schools, the state requires teachers to be certified.

“If a person is not licensed, then none of these guarantees — in terms of the academic qualifications and having been through a program and shown some proof through these various assessments — a baseline level of teaching competence,” Roegge said.

Through their analysis of public and private schools, Sarah and Chris found that national education requirements might play a role in improving public education.

“Private schools have more autonomy, and that is often assumed to be a good thing,” Sarah said. “But one downside to that autonomy is that private schools are less likely to hire certified teachers and to keep teachers up-to-date on the latest developments regarding how children learn and what they need to learn.”

Chris said he expects that the effect of their research will be reflected in a change in educational policy.

“We don’t necessarily expect our research to have an impact in schools so much as an influence on education policy regarding school governance, privatization, charter schools and vouchers, for instance,” Chris said.

This policy change would mean a reversal of today’s educational reform going on in the U.S., Chris said.

“Our findings really call into question the primary assumptions of the current school reform movement, which has been embraced by both democrats and republicans, that choice, autonomy and competition should be primary levers of school improvement,” he said.

MaryCate can be reached at [email protected].