The Public School Advantage: Why Public Schools Outperform Private Schools

By Christopher A. Lubienski and Sarah Theule Lubienski

Nearly the whole of America’s partisan politics centers on a single question: Can markets solve our social problems? And for years this question has played out ferociously in the debates about how we should educate our children. From the growth of vouchers and charter schools to the implementation of No Child Left Behind, policy makers have increasingly turned to market-based models to help improve our schools, believing that private institutions—because they are competitively driven—are better than public ones. With The Public School Advantage, Christopher A. and Sarah Theule Lubienski offer powerful evidence to undercut this belief, showing that public schools in fact outperform private ones.             
For decades research showing that students at private schools perform better than students at public ones has been used to promote the benefits of the private sector in education, including vouchers and charter schools—but much of these data are now nearly half a century old. Drawing on two recent, large-scale, and nationally representative databases, the Lubienskis show that any benefit seen in private school performance now is more than explained by demographics. Private schools have higher scores not because they are better institutions but because their students largely come from more privileged backgrounds that offer greater educational support. After correcting for demographics, the Lubienskis go on to show that gains in student achievement at public schools are at least as great and often greater than those at private ones. Even more surprising, they show that the very mechanism that market-based reformers champion—autonomy—may be the crucial factor that prevents private schools from performing better. Alternatively, those practices that these reformers castigate, such as teacher certification and professional reforms of curriculum and instruction, turn out to have a significant effect on school improvement.             
Despite our politics, we all agree on the fundamental fact: education deserves our utmost care. The Public School Advantage offers exactly that. By examining schools within the diversity of populations in which they actually operate, it provides not ideologies but facts. And the facts say it clearly: education is better off when provided for the public by the public.  

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Nov 7, 2013
• ISBN: 9780226089072

Book preview

Christopher A. Lubienski is professor in the Department of Education Policy, Organization, and Leadership at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is coeditor of The Charter School Experiment: Expectations, Evidence, and Implications and School Choice Policies and Outcomes: Empirical and Philosophical Perspectives. Sarah Theule Lubienski is professor of education and associate dean of the Graduate College at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2014 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2014.

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-08888-4 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-08891-4 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-08907-2 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226089072.001.0001 (e-book)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lubienski, Christopher, author.

The public school advantage : why public schools outperform private schools / Christopher A. Lubienski and Sarah Theule Lubienski.

pages ; cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-226-08888-4 (cloth : alkaline paper) —

ISBN 978-0-226-08891-4 (paperback) —

ISBN 978-0-226-08907-2 (e-book)

1. Academic achievement—United States.    2. Public schools—United States.    3. Private schools—United States.    4. Education—United States.    I. Lubienski, Sarah Theule, author.    II. Title.

LB1556.5.L93 2014

371.010973—dc23

2013017873

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

The Public School Advantage

WHY PUBLIC SCHOOLS OUTPERFORM PRIVATE SCHOOLS

CHRISTOPHER A. LUBIENSKI AND SARAH THEULE LUBIENSKI

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

CHICAGO AND LONDON

To our children, and other people’s children

CAL & STL

Contents

Acknowledgments

Preface

Authors’ Note

1. Conflicting Models for Public Education

2. The Theory of Markets for Schooling

3. The Private School Effect

4. Achievement in Public, Charter, and Private Schools

5. The Effectiveness of Public and Private Schools

6. Understanding Patterns of School Performance

7. Reconsidering Choice, Competition, and Autonomy as the Remedy in American Education

Appendix A: Details about National Assessment of Educational Progress Data and Analyses

Appendix B: Details about Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998–99 Data and Analyses

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

The authors gratefully acknowledge the contributions of several individuals and organizations in completing this project. A number of scholars provided valuable help and feedback on this work at various stages, including (in alphabetical order) Henry Braun, Eric Camburn, Chris Forman, Jerry Janczy, Jin Lee, Matt Linick, Jane Loeb, Martha Makowski, Bekisizwe Ndimande, Joe Robinson, Marcus Weaver-Hightower, and Peter Weitzel. Corinna Crane gave valuable research assistance throughout the earlier stages of this project and allowed us to draw upon her dissertation findings as part of a chapter of this book. We are also grateful for the feedback offered by graduate students at seminars we led at the University of Illinois, as well as discussants and participants at academic conferences where this material was presented. Our editor at the University of Chicago Press, Elizabeth Branch Dyson, offered the necessary enthusiasm and guidance critical for the completion of this project. Sarah would personally like to acknowledge her gratitude to Jan and Sy Ellens, who generously paid for her to attend a Christian high school—reminding us that there are other reasons besides test scores that people attend different schools. Finally, we note that this work was completed with the support of the National Center for Education Statistics (NAEP Secondary Analysis Grant R902B05017) and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Of course, these individuals and organizations are not responsible for the interpretations or analyses, or any errors of fact, in this book.

Portions of Chapter 4 were drawn with permission from Sarah T. Lubienski and Christopher Lubienski, School Sector and Academic Achievement: A Multi-Level Analysis of NAEP Mathematics Data, American Educational Research Journal 43, no. 4 (2006): 651–98.

Preface

We are living in a historic era where the irresistible power of markets is eroding established boundaries between the public, private, and civic sectors. Markets now shape many areas of life previously thought to be beyond the purview of private sector arrangements—the traditional state responsibility of incarcerating criminals and the civic duty of national defense are being shifted to for-profit companies; the right to put pollution into the atmosphere is determined by emissions markets; life-forms are being patented.¹ Around the globe, policymakers increasingly draw on market mechanisms to redefine social policy, introducing consumer-style choice to citizens using public services, encouraging competition between state and for-profit organizations, or privatizing public entities, for instance. Many argue that markets should be used as a model not only for economic transactions, but for understanding and organizing traditionally non-market endeavors. For instance, market ideals like consumer choice serve as standards for assessing public services such as public schooling, or for evaluating optimal access (or lack thereof) to public goods like clean air. Even interpersonal relationships are understood through the lens of market assumptions: predicting human or animal behavior in mating markets, conceiving of marriage as a series of economic-style transactions, or assessing the economic value of the name a parent gives to a child.²

While free markets can be credited with alleviating poverty for untold millions, they also have threatened the world economy with catastrophe. Nevertheless, understanding that communism was an inherently failed system, and that even moderate state socialism appears to produce stagnation, we continue to move in the direction of deregulation, diminishing—for better or for worse—state oversight and participation in many areas of life. Instead, we seek to quantify, measure, and assign value to mundane things in order to incentivize behaviors for organizations and individuals in pursuit of market goals of efficiency and effectiveness. Thus, market arrangements have come to be, often implicitly, elevated as the optimal, if imperfect, approach to organizing and assessing key areas of life: health care, security, knowledge production, and education.

This current global trend stands in stark distinction to the era starting in the mid-twentieth century, when nations accelerated their efforts to build a better welfare state. Following the disaster of the Great Depression, policymakers designed state institutions to address areas of perceived market failure. In the postwar consensus, governments on the liberal/left side of the spectrum expanded state programs in health, safety, nutrition, and education. When conservative/right governments assumed power, they tended not to dissolve those programs, but instead, at most, diminished the rate of their growth. Yet in the last three to four decades, state provision in developed countries came to be associated with economic stagnation and even moral decay. In the Western market democracies, the postwar consensus was supplanted by a remarkable new consensus in the policy arena.

It is now a widely accepted truism that the private sector is preferable to public. This is a notion that is obviously true in many private consumer markets. But is it also the case with previously nonmarket endeavors, such as universal education? Politicians seem to think so. While they argue endlessly about seemingly arcane issues, they appear to embrace the idea that using private-style organizational models, especially in areas such as public education, represents the best approach to solving difficult problems.

Indeed, this new consensus is perhaps most apparent in discussions on how to reform schools—an area of remarkable bipartisanship in an era of intractable ideological differences and gridlock. While the political parties battle over the size and role of government around a number of key issues, they have found common ground on the idea of rolling back the direct state control of education governance for more effectively educating the next generation of citizens. This area of consensus reflects a widespread view that the current state of U.S. public schooling is leading to endemic failure³ and that the fix can be found in applying market mechanisms to the structures of American education—how schools are governed and operated, how educators are trained and compensated, and how students are placed in particular schools.

Since the inception of choice-oriented reforms in the early 1990s, both major American political parties have continuously embraced such measures, differing not in principle on the issue but only in the extent to which the idea would be advanced through specific programs (ironically, giving voters little choice on the question of school choice). With the exception of general—but hardly universal—Democratic opposition to sporadic Republican proposals to expand the number and scope of voucher programs, policymakers accept the idea that choice and competition in education will lead to greater innovation and better outcomes. Presidential candidates, senators and congressional representatives, state governors and lawmakers, mainstream think tank figures, philanthropists, and opinion makers in the media have largely promoted the expansion of school choice for families, and especially disadvantaged students, believing that the resulting competition will force schools to be more effective and generate better academic outcomes.

The question is, will it? While there has been an apparent consensus of policymakers and idea shapers, is there a similar consensus around the evidence? The idea of choice fits squarely into the American vocabulary of values and appears to create better options and outcomes in many areas of American life. Yet, while we know that competition between Apple and Microsoft creates better technology for consumers, should we force PS 97 to compete with the higher performing Excellence Charter School and Our Lady of Perpetual Help School? Certainly, families often appreciate the opportunity to pull their children from an underperforming neighborhood school and send them instead to a higher scoring charter or private school. But does that competition lead to better outcomes? Are those private and independent schools—as policymakers assume—necessarily better? In fact, these questions have been central to an ongoing debate in American education, a debate in which there has been much heat but surprisingly little light. While assumptions abound and often guide policymakers and parents, the debate has often been characterized by a failure to use evidence, an abundance of unsupported assumptions, and an excess of ideologically inspired misinformation. Here we offer evidence that provides illumination.

On a Tuesday morning right before the beginning of the 2004 school year, the front page of the New York Times reported on a study of achievement in charter schools in the United States. Questions about these new schools reignited a controversy that had long been dormant.⁴ Charter schools are one of a number of reform models that embrace autonomy, choice, and competition to improve America’s public schools. In a field plagued by continuous reform, charters themselves are a relatively fresh model of schooling, publicly financed but managed by private or independent managers free of most bureaucratic regulations and very popular with the current crop of reform proponents. Many of the new generation of reformers had expressed an admirable faith that the greater operational autonomy granted to charters in return for market-style accountability would produce the higher levels of achievement seen in private schools, so much so that they had persuaded the federal government to collect data on a representative sample of charter schools as part of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)—the gold standard of achievement measures often referred to as the nation’s report card.⁵ However, the results reported in the Times directly contradicted the hope that these autonomous schools, modeled after private schools, would outperform public schools.⁶

Almost immediately, some policy advocates and associated academics went on the offensive, attacking the study. In days, one prominent and well-funded education reform group placed a full-page advertisement in the Times, signed by some thirty prominent choice proponents, condemning the research and reprimanding the Times for carrying the piece.⁷ Their concerns centered on the limited methods used in the analysis—the authors of the study did not adequately consider differences in students’ family backgrounds. The critics, many of whom were affiliated with provoucher and charter think tanks, were also bothered by the fact that the study had been conducted by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT)—a teachers’ union known to be critical of charters. They pointed out that the AFT had an announced position on charter schools that might influence the findings and that the study had not been reviewed by independent experts before the Times reported the results.⁸

By coincidence, we were completing an in-depth study of the NAEP data when this story broke—a study that addressed those methodological concerns and would be vetted by experts in the field and published in a leading research journal. We watched in amazement at the hostility as advocates and opponents of charter schools fired verbal volleys at each other through the media and across the blogosphere. We checked the politically charged claims regarding the AFT results against our own initial findings on charter school achievement (which had yet to be released). More importantly, we had already decided to go beyond simple comparisons of achievement in charter and district-run public schools. Since charter schools are designed to emulate private schools in many important ways, and since private schools themselves are the fulcrum of another important debate—the efficacy of programs that provide vouchers to move students from public schools—we chose to include the different types of private schools in our analyses. Readers will find the results reported in the following pages to be intriguing; many will find them to be surprising or counterintuitive; others will find them to be provocative or controversial.

While it is not the debate itself that motivates us to write this, the passionate nature of the discussions that follow the release of reports such as these is telling. Many foundations, policy advocates, interest groups, and philanthropists have invested substantial effort and resources in competing plans vying to reform America’s schools, so it should not be surprising that empirical research results typically challenge one ideological agenda or another and are in turn attacked. Although these debates are often fought on methodological grounds, using research terms as weapons, the actual battle lines are too often ideological, determined by implicit assumptions about the appropriate ways to organize education in a democratic society. And these competing ideas—and associated research studies—often produce more friction than illumination for solving deeply rooted social problems. Our goal in this book is to take a step back from the battles over ideologies, to provide a clearer picture of the assumptions and empirical evidence around efforts to remake American education.

Incentives and Education

Of the many competing plans to improve America’s schools, one overall agenda distinguishes itself in terms of its logical potential for fundamentally changing education. The innovative strategy of giving parents more choice of schools, of encouraging competition between those schools, and of granting schools more autonomy to satisfy parents—in short, incentivizing education—has taken hold as perhaps the most prominent and promising idea for improving American education at its core. This approach is evident in efforts such as charter schools, vouchers and tax credits for private schools, private management of schools, and privatization. All such incentivist approaches draw on market mechanisms modeled after the private sector, including the private education sector.⁹

The reason reformers look to the private sector is obvious. The beauty of the logic is its simplicity. Governments and the bureaucracies they generate are thought to lead to overspending and ineffectiveness—whether the U.S. Postal Service, military procurements, or public schools. This is because governments typically administer enterprises on a monopoly basis, setting up barriers to potential competitors in order to protect their own entities in areas such as education. Hence, virtually all public funding goes only to public schools that are traditionally regulated by government bureaucrats, run by administrators who have obtained an official endorsement from the state, and staffed by teachers who have been certified by state-approved teacher training programs. As with all monopolies, this may lead to complacency, and even disincentives for employees to innovate or otherwise respond to the needs of their customers. But the private sector, driven by choice and competitive market incentives, is thought to produce better outcomes, such as those associated with FedEx, eBay, or private schools. There, school employees have built-in incentives to work harder, or at least more effectively, at providing a better education, for fear of losing students, losing tuition funds, losing their jobs, or even seeing their school go out of business.

At least that is what we thought. Indeed, that is the narrative of the market and, increasingly, public policy in the United States and around the globe. Yet the evidence reported in this book tells quite a different story than what theorists and the current crop of self-proclaimed reformers assert. Specifically, it points to a new, emerging view of the academic performance and impact of public schools in contrast to the outcomes of their more autonomous counterparts in the charter and private sectors.¹⁰ And the question of the impact of different types of schools, or schools in different sectors, is paramount in this era of choice, charter schools, and vouchers for private schools.

Yet, despite the significance and timeliness of this issue, this topic was not really on the research agenda for either of us. We were each happily ensconced in our own work—one studying mathematics instruction and achievement, the other examining school organization and innovations. While the question of achievement in different types of schools had occasionally appeared on the radar of the wider research community in recent years, it was usually around the hotly contested voucher debates—often vicious arguments that seemed to be geared more toward personal acrimony than enlightenment when it comes to social policy. Indeed, like many researchers, we believed the question of a beneficial private school effect on achievement had been essentially settled by the seminal studies of the 1980s and ’90s, and we had virtually no inclination to delve into that area. And then, while examining data on mathematics instruction from the 2000 NAEP, Sarah added private school as a control variable, and some surprising results appeared.

We were both skeptical when we first saw the initial results: public schools appeared to be attaining higher levels of mathematics performance than demographically comparable private and charter schools—and math is thought to be a better indicator of what is taught by schools than, say, reading, which is often more influenced directly and indirectly by experiences in the home. These patterns flew in the face of both the common wisdom and the research consensus on the effectiveness of public and private schools. Immediately, we checked to see what had happened in the analysis, whether public and private had been reverse-coded or some other such error was involved. But after further investigation and more targeted analyses, the results held up. And they held up (or were robust in the technical jargon) even when we used different models and variables in the analyses. We eventually posted a technical paper on a respected website and published a short article, which received some attention.¹¹ And then, like any good researchers, we applied for funding to study this issue in more depth using the most recent, comprehensive databases. As we describe in this book, the results across datasets are consistent and robust—indicating that these patterns are substantial and stable, regardless of changes in the details of the analyses.

These results indicate that, despite reformers’ adulation of the autonomy enjoyed by private and charter schools, this factor may in fact be the reason these schools are underperforming. That is, contrary to the dominant thinking on this issue, the data show that the more regulated public school sector embraces more innovative and effective professional practices, while independent schools often use their greater autonomy to avoid such reforms, leading to curricular stagnation. Considering the substantial amounts of resources that special interests have devoted to advancing their agendas around such issues in education, we completely expect that our findings will create some controversy.

Inquiring minds may want to know a bit about our own backgrounds and preferences with regard to education. We were educated at both public and private schools—parochial in one case, Christian in the other. Our respective families send their children to schools that are public, Lutheran, or evangelical, or they homeschool. We have volunteered our time and efforts in both public and private schools, and one of us served on the board of directors at an urban Christian school. While we see a role for both public and private schools, as of this writing, our own children currently attend public schools—including our neighborhood school and a magnet high school—owing more to convenience than conviction on our part. (While we were writing this book, our children also attended state-funded Catholic, Christian, and public schools overseas.) Regardless of our particular school choices and commitments, we share with many of the reformers and advocates (even those whose agendas are questioned by our findings) a deep concern for equitable, quality education, especially for the most disadvantaged students.

Yet far from the panacea that some of those advocates promised, the evidence presented in the following pages indicates that the choice and competition associated with private education may not by themselves be the best route to effective and equitable educational opportunities for all. In fact, as we note in the conclusion, education may be unique in that it embodies essential elements that resist the easy application of simple structural remedies from the private sector, and it may corrupt the competitive incentives thought to promote improvements in schools. Indeed, despite the bipartisan popularity of choice and charter schools with policymakers, it appears that the major reform movements premised on the assumption of school sector remedies may be misguided.

This book examines the underlying assumptions of those structural reforms; it was not written to offer a simple prescription for the myriad problems facing America’s schools—and, indeed, we believe those problems to be tragically widespread, substantial, and deeply engrained in the American system of education. However, these analyses indicate that public schools have no monopoly on the problems that inhibit student growth. Reform remedies that rely on structural changes in school sectors, while relatively easy and appealing, are (to paraphrase H. L. Mencken) simplistic and probably the wrong response to the complex and deeply embedded problem of academic disparities. Which is not to say that those problems cannot be addressed. Solutions are available, and (while not the point of this book) some are affirmed in the evidence we present. But those approaches tend to be difficult to implement, particularly in terms of mustering the political will to bear the substantial costs they entail.

Authors’ Note

Although the data and analyses on which this book is based are rather technical, the questions and findings at the center of this work are highly relevant and are of interest to a broad audience. Therefore, we present this analysis as much as appropriate in a manner that is accessible to interested observers, even if they do not have experience with the arcane details of logistic regression or multilevel modeling. Consequently, the technical details and supporting information for our analyses are included but relegated to the appendices and endnotes for those interested.

The book’s seven chapters are structured and sequenced to be accessible to a wide variety of interested readers. In the following introductory chapter, we outline some of the main issues regarding the role and organization of schooling in a democratic society and highlight the recent move toward the use of market mechanisms to improve education. Then, in Chapter 2, we focus on the theoretical perspective undergirding much of the current education reform movement. Thus, these two initial chapters have more of a theoretical and even philosophical bent and are in that way distinct from the more empirical sections that then follow.

Chapters 3 through 6 move into more empirical terrain. Chapter 3 offers an overview of some of the challenges and possibilities in examining student achievement in different schools and different sectors. In Chapters 4 and 5 we analyze achievement by school sector using two different and quite distinct nationally representative data sets. The supporting technical details for these analyses are available in the appendices. Chapter 6 goes a step further and examines potential reasons for patterns in school achievement, considering such issues as school size, class size, school climate, teacher qualifications, and instructional practices. Finally, in Chapter 7, we focus on the policy and political implications of our findings, identify reasons for continued confusion about these issues, and discuss some of the virtues and inherent limitations of markets in education.

1

Conflicting Models for Public Education

Societies based on the idea of liberty have two primary templates for organizing their institutions. For many enterprises, free markets are best suited for advancing both individual and collective interests through the private or nongovernment sectors. For other undertakings, especially those needed to nurture or sustain freedom and individual autonomy, government action is often used to initiate, support, or administer essential services. Each of these organizational models evinces specific advantages for recognizing and meeting the needs and preferences of citizens, and each has its own purview of institutions where it is deemed more appropriate and useful.

And yet, while democratic or bureaucratic politics and economic markets are often presented as contrasting ideals, the line between these arenas is often less defined than it may first appear, with government action often necessary for supporting effective market mechanisms and private interests frequently playing a pivotal role in the public arena. Indeed, individual institutions themselves—for example, the military or the federal courts—can often include elements of both politics and markets, so that there is more of a spectrum than a stark boundary between government action and private economic activity. Some concerns can be addressed largely through one organizational model, while the other plays a lesser, perhaps supporting, role in providing goods and services to citizens in that sector. And it is in the area between pure market and government models—on issues such as health care, transportation, the environment, and education—where the most interesting debates play out on the appropriate and optimal roles of the government and the market in social organization.

Where one model is less effective, the other may serve as a better primary template for organizing institutions. For instance, the free market ideals of voluntary participation and individual choice may not be the best tenets for organizing, say, national security. Instead, collective and coercive government action may be better suited for administering that public good, which

Reviews for The Public School Advantage

[devil_llama · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book brings some much needed research to the thorny problem of what schools perform better, and the answer may surprise you. For too long, we have been basing our policies on certain "assumptions" that are based on some research done many years ago (in fact, scary though it is to think about this, it is now decades ago), and research that has been criticized for a weak methodology. The authors pull together the largest database yet collected, and perform multivariate analysis to tease out whether private schools actually perform better, or whether that honor can go to public schools. I needn't bother with a spoiler, since they included the spoiler in the title of the book! Still, it is compelling research, and they have completed both a cross-sectional and a longitudinal analysis in order to cover the territory more completely than past studies. The main weakness in the book, other than the rather dry tone that will be offputting for anyone not looking for a policy analysis type of book, is the tendency to applaud the free market constantly, making statements that you might have been able to say with a straight face a hundred, or maybe even fifty, years ago, but that are hard to stomach in this time of decreasing competition and low quality products, all accepted by the supposed rational consumer. Still, I suppose someone writing a book like this would need to cheerlead a bit for the free market to stave off complaints that they are ideologues for big government. Overall, a must read, especially for anyone who makes policies for public schools.

[Edmond Yap · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Very well researched! If you're not a researcher you'd have to skip some jargon filled sections, if you're a researcher then you'd love every page. Very compelling arguments and quite the eye opener.