Posted on 05/05/2021 6:18:06 AM PDT by Kaslin
Here is one demonstrable fact about the difference between Catholic and public schools: Students who study at Catholic schools do better in reading and math.
We know this because students who attended Catholic elementary schools in 2019 tested better in mathematics and reading than students who attended public schools.
The latest issue of the Digest of Education Statistics, published by the U.S. Department of Education, includes the average reading and math scores that fourth and eighth grade students achieved in the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, tests that were administered in 2019.
Table 221.32a from this digest shows the average reading scores.
Fourth graders in public schools, it says, scored an average of 219 (out of a possible 500) in the NAEP reading test. Catholic school fourth graders scored 235.
The Catholic-school fourth graders won.
The same table shows that eighth graders in public schools scored an average of 262 in the NAEP reading test, while Catholic school eighth graders scored an average of 278.
The Catholic schools won again.
The same pattern held in the math scores reported in Table 222.32a.
Public-school fourth graders scored an average of 240 in the 2019 NAEP math test, while Catholic-school fourth graders scored an average of 246. Public-school eighth graders scored an average of 281 in math, while Catholic-school eighth graders scored an average of 293.
It did not matter whether the schools were located in a city, a suburb, a town or a rural area. In every location for which the digest had sufficient data on Catholic schools, it showed that the Catholic schools beat the public schools in reading and math.
In reading, Catholic-school fourth graders outscored public-school fourth graders 234 to 213 in cities, 236 to 225 in the suburbs, and 237 to 216 in towns. In rural areas, there was not enough fourth-grade data on Catholic schools, but the average score of 219 from rural public school was less than the scores for Catholic schools in cities (234), suburbs (236) or towns (237).
Catholic school eighth graders outscored public-school eighth graders in reading 277 to 257 in cities, 280 to 266 in suburbs, 275 to 258 in towns, and 281 to 263 in rural areas.
In math, Catholic-school fourth graders beat public-school fourth graders 243 to 235 in cities, 250 to 244 in suburbs, and 243 to 237 in towns. Again, the digest did not publish a math score for Catholic-school fourth graders in rural areas, but the 240 scored by rural public-school fourth graders was lower than the Catholic-school scores for cities (243), suburbs (250) and towns (243).
Catholic-school eighth graders beat public-school eighth graders in math by 291 to 276 in cities, 297 to 286 in the suburbs, 290 to 276 in towns, and 293 to 282 in rural areas.
Public schools did not consistently lose to Catholic schools in reading and math because they lacked funding. According to Table 236.75 in the digest, public elementary and secondary schools in the United States spent $13,834 per pupil in the 2016-17 school year.
The District of Columbia, according to the digest, spent $30,115 per pupil on its public schools that year. New York led all states, spending $24,377. Idaho spent the least -- at $8,599 per pupil.
In that same 2016-17 school year, according to a page on the website of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, "The average per pupil tuition in parish elementary schools is $4,400, which is approximately 74.7% of actual costs per pupil of $5,887."
"The secondary school mean freshman tuition is $9,840, which is about 70.6% of actual costs per pupil of $13,939," says the USCCB website.
"The difference between the per pupil cost and the tuition charged is obtained in many ways, primarily through direct subsidy from parish, diocesan or religious congregation resources and from multi-faceted development programs and fundraising activities," says the USCCB.
Taxpayers pick up the full cost of the public schools.
In fact, parents who send their children to Catholic schools pay twice. First, they pay taxes to subsidize the education of other peoples' children in government-run schools, and then they pay tuition to fund their own children in the Catholic school.
But there is an obvious way to improve the academic performance of children who are currently stuck in government-run schools: Give them a chance to go to a private school -- whether religious or secular.
Local governments can accomplish this by giving parents of every school-age child a voucher equal to the cost of educating that child in a local public school. Then those parents can choose whether to redeem that voucher at a government-run school or a private school.
President Joe Biden opposes school choice.
His campaign issued a statement to Politifact last July that said: "Joe Biden opposes the Trump/(Betsy) DeVos conception of 'school choice,' which is private school vouchers that would destroy our public schools. He's also against for-profit and low-performing charter schools, and believes in holding all charter schools accountable. He does not oppose districts letting parents choose to send their children to public magnet schools, high-performing public charters or traditional public schools."
The fact that Biden believes school choice "would destroy our public schools" indicates he does not believe they could compete on a level playing field with Catholic and other private schools.
The test results prove he is right.
So, why does he want to keep children imprisoned in schools that could not survive if their parents had freedom of choice?
I bet Protestant schools do too.
Catholic schools MUST be racist. Gov gonna have to shut that stuff down🤣🤣🤣 /s
In Rochester NY, a Dem stronghold, the high school graduation rate in the very BEST high school is about 45%. I won't tell you the demographics. Absolutely disgusting. This was my hometown.
Any school beats public (government run) schools.....period,
also stunning news: Rain is wet.
Nuns take a lot of abuse in the popular culture. Yet if you attened Catholic schools back in the day by the time you finished the 8th grade, whoever you were, you were able to read, write, do arithmetic and knew right from wrong. Good to see that at least some of that tradition continues.
I see that where I live. The local Catholic school consistently beats all the public schools in standardized test scores - even the one near the university that the children of faculty/staff are more likely to attend. Part of the success I presume is parental dedication.
Private schools can get rid of chronically disruptive students. Public schools do not have that luxury.
That does not completely explain the difference in scores, of course. But it is big part of the explanation. Nevertheless I won’t let public schools off the hook. Public schools CAN develop ways to deal with chronically disruptive students. But that would take a measure of courage, something that most public school administrators just don’t have.
go figgur
Is anyone surprised?
Let’s not be dolts... private schools get to choose their pupils, not everyone gets in. The children have parents who care and want to pay for education, because its important to them. So already they are culturally different. It’s apples and oranges, one of my kids went to private school the second transferred to public school in third grade. Because I’m a parent who cares about education, my daughter got a better public school education than my son who went to private schools. My daughter graduated with 10 AP exams and had enough credits to begin her junior year at the beginning of University.
Yes, I can attest to that. I was taught for 12 years by Franciscans. They were so dedicated. (These days, the order is dying, which is just as well considering what they have become.
Sadly, though, we have no teaching orders left.
Taxpayers pick up the full cost of the public schools.
The local Catholic school that my daughters attended was 98 percent tuition funded. There was a nominal payment from the four sponsoring parishes for students enrolled in that parish, but it didn't amount to much. (In addition, a lot of the students weren't Catholic, and the non-Catholics didn't get the parish bump.) And of course, there were efforts to scholarship low income kids. That was about it for non-tuition funding. This is typical for private schools, secular and non-Catholic as well as Catholic. The notion that such schools have big endowments is mostly nonsense. A very few elite schools may have endowments, but they are outliers. The funding is overwhelmingly tuition, supplemented by whatever parents can raise through the incessant fundraising campaigns.
There are many excellent public schools. These are generally found in upscale jurisdictions that are insulated from SES problems by zip code and mortgage payment. They are also often found in small towns and rural areas with reasonably solid demographics. A town with one high school is apt to have a solid public school system, because when everyone's kids go to the same school, the community leaders will make sure that it adequately serves their own children. That doesn't mean the schools will be great, but at least some academic and disciplinary standards will be maintained.
That said ... the national NAEP figures are an important starting point, but they don't get to the crux of the problem, which is rooted in housing patterns. Housing is largely stratified geographically by price. Areas with large concentrations of very low-income people tend to have a lengthy list of correlated problems. Some of these have to do with the academic potential and performance of the kids. Show me a school dominated by kids being raised by single moms in Section 8 housing or the projects, and I'll show you a school to which no middle class parent would send a child. The national NAEP averages mask the worst of the problem cases, but these are the schools that have caused the meltdown of urban public education in so many cities. They are also the schools that drive the demand for private schools in mixed-income and gentrifying areas.
Having had my kids in both private school and public school, from my experience the curricula are quite a bit different too. A lot more is demanded of the private school students. When we had to make the decision to go public, our kids found public schools way more easy and a lot less demanding than the private school. One is now heading off to Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University this fall and the other is at bootcamp in the USMC.
> Let’s not be dolts... private schools get to choose their pupils, not everyone gets in. <
Bingo. I taught for a number of years at a blue-ribbon private school. Great kids and great administrators...but lousy pay. Anyway, if a student disrupted a class, he got one warning. If it happened again, he was gone. Not for the day, but forever.
Later on I taught in an urban public high school. I’d match my honors class kids there against any kid from any private school.
But the mainstream class kids...those kids are the real victims here. Even one disruptive student in those classes could stop any learning (oh, the stories I could tell you). And as I noted in my post #9, most of the administrators were too cowardly to take action to correct the problem.
Public schools segragate continually disruptive students in special schools......Alternative HS etc....
Not a factor especially in the lower grades.....
I was not happy about that, but I learned reading and math.
My daughter attended suburban New Jersey public schools and her education was fine. Lots of gifted/talented and AP courses.
It depends on the school system and who is doing the educating.
> Public schools segragate continually disruptive students in special schools......Alternative HS etc.... <
Not any more, at least from my experience. The urban school district where I taught did away with that practice maybe 25 years ago. Too many parents complained that the “rights” of their disruptive kids were being violated. So now those kids remain in mainstream classes, free to disrupt learning whenever they feel like it.
And when the bad scores come in, the teachers get all the blame. I know of one school where the principal simply fired all the untenured teachers in the school after the scores were announced. That was his “solution” to the problem. (A friend of mine was one of the fired teachers.)
Oh, and out-of-school suspensions are being minimized too. Principals are now being graded on the number of suspensions they hand out. So if you’re a principal and you want to keep your job, you had better not be suspending very many kids.
> Not a factor especially in the lower grades..... <
Sadly, it is. I have friends who teach elementary school. A good potion of their time is spent not teaching, but trying to control the one or two kids who would rather run around the room than sit down and listen. And these kids are, by and large, not emotionally disturbed! They’re just doing things they know they can get away with.
The whole mess is maddening.
Catholics shouldn’t crow about how much BETTER they are at teaching but cry over how BADLY the rest of the kids are being taught!
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