[Fai Mao]

I bet Protestant schools do too.

[The Louiswu]

Catholic schools MUST be racist. Gov gonna have to shut that stuff down🤣🤣🤣 /s

[Sacajaweau]

Am I supposed to be surprised??

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.

[wny]

also stunning news: Rain is wet.

[allendale]

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.

[posterchild]

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.

[Leaning Right]

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.

[PGalt]

go figgur

[JesusIsLord]

Catholic Schools Beat Public Schools in Reading and Math

Is anyone surprised?

[Katya]

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.

[sphinx]

"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.

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.

[Sooth2222]

In 1959, my parents extracted me from my failing New Jersey urban public school and handed me over to Catholic nuns.

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.