Posted on 01/28/2006 4:35:25 PM PST by Deek1969
WASHINGTON, Jan. 27 — A large-scale government-financed study has concluded that when it comes to math, students in regular public schools do as well as or significantly better than comparable students in private schools.
The study, by Christopher Lubienski and Sarah Theule Lubienski, of the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, compared fourth- and eighth-grade math scores of more than 340,000 students in 13,000 regular public, charter and private schools on the 2003 National Assessment of Educational Progress. The 2003 test was given to 10 times more students than any previous test, giving researchers a trove of new data.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
If you tweak the numbers you can usually get what you want. All I know is that my 4 y/o grandson was counting and doing basic adding and subtracting last year and has a good concept of counting money this year.
Oh my God, here we go. The Red Star Times is now pandering for the disasterous government school system. No surprise. Notice how the only traction they could get was on MATH, and I am not sure I even believe that -- haven't we learned already when it comes to the NYT...and thier hard-left ilk??
Not buying it. Nope.
Typical NY Fishwrap spin. So a few private schools didn't do as well as a few public schools in math. What about the other subjects? Lets hear the whole story.
In the mean time, NY Fishwrap has dropped a couple more rungs on the ladder to hell.
NYT = article contents irrelevant.
Well, that's all I needed to read...
DIANA JEAN SCHEMO == NEA Press office.
4th grade private school to 8th grade public?
The study found that while the raw scores of fourth graders in Roman Catholic schools, for example, were 14.3 points higher than those in public schools, when adjustments were made for student backgrounds, those in Catholic schools scored 3.4 points lower than those in public schools. A spokeswoman for the National Catholic Education Association did not respond to requests for comment.
Apparently the results are due to some fancy adjustments. The real scores directly contradict the headline and the initial couple of paragraphs.
"government-financed study"
Government educated number crunchers, probably, too.
private school students are also trailing public school students in the following topics:
gay indoctrination
the proper method of using a condom
your right as a child to an abortion
the glories of socialism
the wonders of multiculturalism
and why everything is Bush and/or Americas fault!
The above was cut and pasted from the beginning of their "study".
TRANSLATION: The private shcools did have much higher test scores, but after we changed the numbers, the public schools won... just like we wanted them to do.
What's the point of doing the study, if you're just going to "make adjustments" to negate the results?
However, it's never been proven that income is why kids do better. Most likely it's because private school parents have higher expectations.
So they have just proven that if you handicapp the scores of children whose parents care more about them, the disadvantaged public school kids score just as well.
Junk science.
Busted by post 11. We are kind of slow today:')
private school students are also trailing public school students in the following topics:
gay indoctrination
the proper method of using a condom
your right as a child to an abortion
the glories of socialism
the wonders of multiculturalism
and why everything is Bush and/or Americas fault!
My son was in a private Christian school for k-2, and their math was awful. He didn't even learn any multiplication in 2nd grade.
The public school has been better for him. He's skipped 6th grade math, and he has 100% on 7th grade pre-algebra. At the end of this year, he'll be able to take a test to see if he can skip 8th grade math. He'll be 12 and taking algebra 1. That's much better than I did in school. I know the public high schools around here all have AP classes for 2 years of calculus.
My girls are in 3rd grade, and at a new public school. I'm very disappointed with the math at the new school.
Next year, I'm either sending them to a charter school or homeschooling them.
This doesn't fly because there are kids from poor families in private schools. Another family member may be paying. Thee parents may be working there for a scholarship or have two jobs etc. The days of private schools are for rich kids is long gone.
"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."
I think it's more parents than school. In private schools the parents set standards. Home school parents do too. I'm glad your son has done so well.
A: "The study, by Christopher Lubienski and Sarah Theule Lubienski"
Q: How many pollack's does it take to "f" up a government study?
"Comparable"?
339,950 students were from private and charter schools and 50 students were valavictorians from public schools. That I might believe.
good post and summary of the situation...
In which inner cities do public school children score better than their neighbors who are attending private Schools?
In which exclusive suburbs do public school students score better than their private school counterparts?
They gave the public schools an almost 18 point handicap. I wonder if they bowl?
Agreed and adjusting the raw results downward is fallacious and misleading.
Imagine what would happen if Olympic events were scored based on adjusted scales to compensate for advantages of birth, country, and economics. It deprives the talented with the ability, and the desire of their earned accolades. It excuses mediocrity and failure.
It is no mystery or secret that parental involvement is essential for most students' success in school. This is true of private and public schools. But it is also true that given the opportunities and attention most private schools offer, given equally involved parents and a positive home environment, that students who do well in either school system also do a lot better in private schools. One kid I knew at my high school built robots as a hobby. If he had attended a public school here in Hawaii, his hobby would've suffered from lack of access to teachers and advisors who were able to teach and assist him in and outside of class. I believe he was admitted early to MIT.
Public schools push kids to conform to the norm. Liberal teachers dislike exceptional students.
I suspect that people with high incomes also tend towards high IQs, and are also better educated. They probably put a premium on educating their children, and the children tend to have higher IQs through heredity.
Two of my kids are gifted and one is special needs. What I have found in my area (San Jose), is that the private schools around here teach to kids that are average. The private schools do a great job at that. There are a few exceptions, and those schools costs around $20k/year.
The public schools in my neighborhood do a good job of teaching average and gifted kids, but not special ed kids.
Other public schools outside my neighborhood do a good job of teaching average and special needs kids.
Our old school did a good job of teaching average, special needs, and gifted kids. However, our district closed it because our district is stupid. Now, I can't find another school to match our old school.
I will say that lots of the problems of the school we are going to now are caused by the parents/kids. Lots of the kids are hispanic and don't speak English as a first language. Also, the kids move around a lot. So far, my kids' class this year has seen at least 4 or 5 kids leave, and 4 or 5 kids come in. The new kids are far behind the other kids. I feel very sorry for my kids' teacher this year. Also, the behavior of lots of these kids is just horrible. There's only so much a teacher can do.
Of course, our district closed our good school and created a lot of the problems that we are dealing with, and the district wants more money.
A lot of schools, public and private, rely too heavily on calculators starting in the early years, instead of memorizing math facts in those same years. I believe this puts students at a great disadvantage when they reach higher math.
When Sister Helen Patricia taught math and geometry at Bishop England High School, everyone did better at math. Without a doubt, the finest teacher I ever had in high school, college, or grad school.
The teachers here will tell you that they feel that God has placed each child in their class for a reason. Awhile back I took my grandson to school. We were a little early. I couldn't find a teacher anywhere except where the kids were being gathered in the gym. I was told the teachers start off their day in prayer. That impressed me.
I think this more then says it all.
"when adjustments were made for student backgrounds, those in Catholic schools scored 3.4 points lower than those in public schools."
I bet some liberal adjustments were made. I would love to see what basis they used to make adjustments since it was +14.3 before the data was adjusted.
Oh and I feel all kids are gifted, even one's with special needs:')
If you don't know how hierarchical linear modeling, or for that matter, linear regression work, you shouldn't pretend to have the expertise to comment on the methodology of this research.
When trying to isolate the effects of a particular variable---here, private versus public schools---from the effects of potential confounding characteristics, like parent's income and education, race, neighborhood, and so forth, *the* method used in observational studies throughout all disciplines of science is called regression. Hierarchical linear modeling is a sophisticated variant of the same. The people who conducted this study know a lot more about what they are doing than you do. In particular, they are trying to use methods that *reduce* bias by including these controls. They aren't just making changes willynilly, but according to formulas widely accepted in statistics for many year.
And if they hadn't controlled for these potential confounding variables, they would be guilty of bad science. Accusations of "junk science" here just reveal the ignorance of the posters, and the stupidity of lay people passing judgment on studies they haven't read using mathematics they don't understand in fields they know nothing about.
The hilarious thing is that the findings here match in many ways the traditional conservative line on schools, which is that it is very hard to find policy interventions that have an effect on student performance rivaling that caused by parental and neighborhood factors. But those findings rely on regression analysis, too...
So they Bell Curved the results?
My daughters' teacher at the public school listens to the Christian radio station as she sets up for school. She says it helps her prepare. I've been real hesitant to pull my daughters out of school this year to homeschool them because I really like their teacher. She's a fine Christian lady. The Christian schools around here don't pay as much as the public school, and I wish they would. My girls' teacher would be great for a Christian school.
At my kids' old school, all of their teachers and their speech therapist were Christians. I never had to worry about strange curriculum getting into the classroom. They didn't have Bible curriculum, but they had Christian role models. The speech therapist would help my girls memorize their Bible verses for church.
I guess God knew I couldn't handle homeschooling back then, so He placed us in a public school full of Christians. He must think I can handle homeschooling now because, it seems that is what He is calling me to do.
I'm not defending this particular study -- without reading the details of how it was done there's no way I can tell whether it was done honestly or in order to slant the results -- but there *are* legitimate reasons to "make adjustments" to the raw numbers in a study.
The raw numbers are often meaningless without some analysis. The reason is that the whole point of a study is to determine the effect of variable "X" (in this case, the type of school a student goes to) when "all else is equal". That is, you're trying to determine the effect of school type *alone*. The problem with raw numbers is that it's seldom the case that "all else" is actually "equal" -- the raw numbers probably won't tell you the effect of the school type alone, because there will be *other* differences between the student body at school A and the student body at school B beyond just which school they're attending.
So when done *right*, "adjustments" are made to balance the raw data to produce results more indicative of what the scores would have been like if the student bodies of each school had actually been directly comparable on an equal basis (*aside* from school type). Done *wrong*, of course, one can produce just about any result desires in advance. Such fakery will be obvious to anyone looking over the actual study and actual data, and there will always be people who do doublecheck it and raise an alarm, but for the most part most people see just the press release and take it at face value, and whistleblowers don't get as much coverage or can be written off as "partisans" just trying to dismiss the "results", so bogus studies are often used for PR value with little risk of being exposed in a big way.
A classic case of the same thing in reverse -- when raw numbers were used to imply a bogus result when adjusted numbers showed the *real* story -- is one of the anti-gun lobby's favorite studies to cite (Sloan JH, Kellermann AL, Reay DT, et al. "Handgun Regulations, Crime, Assaults, and Homicide: A Tale of Two Cities." N Engl J Med 1988; 319: pp. 1256-62) used the raw firearm homicide rates of Vancouver and Seattle to "prove" that the Canadian anti-gun laws had "worked", because Vancouver had a significantly lower rate of firearm homicide than Seattle. However, when I actually read the study and looked over the raw data, it turns out that the *real* difference in homicide rates between the two cities was due to a very different socioeconomic/ethnic demographic between the two cities -- when you compared just *similar* subpopulations (i.e., Seattle whites versus Vancouver whites, blacks versus blacks, etc.) Vancouver actually had the HIGHER firearm homicide rate (versus Seattle) in each group! To get a *real* appreciation for the difference that the firearm laws might have made *apart* from socioeconomic variables, you'd have to adjust the raw data by weighting the homicide rates of the subpopulations in a way that combined them into a final number which represented the firearm rates that each city would have if each city had actually had the *same* demographic breakdown (i.e., equal numbers of each distinct socioeconomic group). Even that would still have contributions by other factors (such as cultural differences between US and Canada, etc.), but at least it wouldn't be as bad an indiator as the raw numbers were, unbalanced as they were by different percentages of different socioeconomic/ethnic groups...
So yeah, there are legitimate reasons to adjust the raw data, and when done right it gives a better indicator of the real situation than the raw numbers will. the number of people
quote from article
"Though private school students have long scored higher on the national assessment, commonly referred to as "the nation's report card," the new study used advanced statistical techniques to adjust for the effects of income, school and home circumstances. The researchers said they compared math scores, not reading ones, because math was considered a clearer measure of a school's overall effectiveness."
so basicly if you are rich, go to a good public school, and have an intact family ... you might get a decent education in at least math at your public school ...
ROFL!
I suspect that is the weasel word here. Trouble is, the students who go to private school are NOT comparable with those stuck in government schools.
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