The New York Times has reported that "an Education Department report says public school students 'performed as well or better in reading and mathematics than comparable children in private schools.' According to CT Online, "it also found that students in conservative Christian schools lagged significantly behind their counterparts in public schools on eighth-grade math. … The report separated private schools by type and found that among private school students, those in Lutheran schools performed best, while those in conservative Christian schools did worst.
What conservative Christians schools? asks Ken Smitherman, president of the Association of Christian Schools International (ASCI). The complex hierarchical linear modeling strategy, he notes, 'created a computerized model student in a conservative Christian school that in reality does not exist. It is purely hypothetical.'
Were these 'conservative Christian schools' the kind of schools that join ASCI, or the kind of insular church-run school that doesn't play well with others? And if you're a conservative Lutheran school, then where do you fit? The study won't say. 'For several years ACSI has been working to persuade NCES to give the Association of Christian Schools International its own category, as it does the Lutheran and Catholic schools,' Smitherman complains. 'With the current categorization we are unable to find out even how many schools tested are ACSI, members or even which ACSI member schools participated in the testing. NAEP [National Assessment of Educational Progress] does not report individual school test results back to the schools, so it is an extremely difficult position to speak to.'
The methodology is problematic too, notes Times columnist John Tierney. 'The best way to compare schools is not to simply look at test scores one year, because it's impossible to account for the students' intrinsic advantages and disadvantages, and their varying motivations for choosing one type of school over another. Researchers can try to control for factors like family income and ethnicity or race, but these are crude measures.'
Joe McTighe, Executive Director for the Council for American Private Education, puts it this way: 'Sacramento is one of the sunniest cities in America; Seattle is one of the cloudiest. But let's overlook that fact for now and instead compare the weather in both cities by neutralizing any advantages Sacramento might have. We'll discount all those extra sunny days, disregard above-average temperatures, and ignore the below-average rainfall. Not surprisingly, our filtered comparison yields a suspicious finding: that Sacramento's weather is just as bad as Seattle's.'
NAEP's studies consistently show that 'All categories of Christian schools reported reflect higher average scores than the public schools,' Smitherman notes. But there's ample room for improvement, he says. 'The results reported for conservative Christian schools are the lowest of the private school sector. This has been stressed to our membership for the past several years.' Whether that membership is actually dragging down the numbers is impossible to tell. Sometimes when someone complains that they can't do the math, it's because the numbers aren't there."
