Expanding on THIS thread, I’m trying to find out if there is any real difference, on standard test scores, between students that attend Catholic Schools vs. Public Schools?
I attended a Catholic School from 5th grade until I graduated. I was always told that my education was superior to my public school peers. At the time, (1981) this seemed to be obviously true. Well, fellow dopers, is it? I googled and wikied and could only find anecdotal evidence.
In History, I was surprised to learn that there were Non-Catholics who were not involved, but that was in the 60s.
Here is the last thread that I remember that covered this subject.
As for the actual answer, it depends on how you compare the two. When all else is equal, the DOE seems to find them pretty comparable as a whole.
If you are using hierarchical linear modeling…
One of the non-retired teachers will be along shortly to explain it to you. I have to go string some beads.
Schools are as dependent on the protoplasm which attends them as they are on other factors.
Catholic schools self-select for better students, since attendance is voluntary and since it usually costs the student’s family money to them attend.
Catholic schools can also be more selective for their teachers.
I don’t think a typical Catholic school is going to produce better results than a public school which draws from a pool of average higher-IQ students such as might be found in a wealthier suburban district, but they might well outperform an inner city school that has to take all comers.
Chief Pedant has hit the nail upon the head. In comparing the two systems, you are not comparing apples and even oranges. You are comparing apples and cinderblocks. My 34 years teaching in the Detroit Public School system was contrasted with my 12 years as a student in the suburban Catholic school system. Believe me, it was two very different worlds.
And then we persist in the convenient fiction that there actually is some one monolithic public school system in the USA - which there clearly is not.
Not only that, but if someone’s making trouble or just not performing, they can be kicked out of Catholic schools. Public schools have no similar mechanism.
Of course, you can substitute “private” for “Catholic” and see similar results.
In our case, both the schools we are looking at for our oldest begin with “St.” (one is non-denom but founded by a priest and the other is Episcopal, founded by the same priest actually). It’s not just the academics that are a draw- it’s also the atmosphere that can be enforced WRT behavior, etc- at a PS you are stuck with the nightmare kids.
Catholic schools vastly outperform public schools in every measure, ranging from standardized test scores to graduation rates to safety to college acceptance among graduates. What Chief Pedant has said is the standard response, but it simply isn’t true. Here is some actual research.
The article goes on to cover more recent research that investigates the topic in more detail. The conclusion is that Catholic schools do vastly better than public schools in educating urban minorities, and also better in educating white students, though the gap there is not so big. Also, since graduation rates are much higher in Catholic Schools, they can’t be succeeding just by booting out the bad students.
The bottom line is that Catholic school students perform better because Catholic schools are better. Other private schools are probably better than public schools as well. It’s not a difference in the choice of students who enter, it’s a difference in the educational process.
As it stands, this is just an argument from authority. Why did he reject the claim, and what were his arguments?
And how do you completely control for the quality of the students going in? I’m confident in saying that I got a better education at a Catholic high school than I would have at one of my city’s public schools, but that’s at least in part because all of the other students around me were better than they would have been at one of those public schools.
Not picking a side here, but I found it interesting that I had AP physics, AP chemistry, and calculus available to me my senior year, while my Catholic school friend had none of these available to her. ETA Thing might be different now. This was early 90’s.
These “Catholic schools are better” by what standard of objective measurement?
Saying it does not make it so.
Catholic schools have a fundamentally different culture, too. They don’t take more student than they can handle (and they’ll take bad ones as well as good ones). The teachers know everybody. Nobody just gets by.
Can you point to some “actual research” that I could find in that article. I did find references to the CHK research (performed in the early 80s), but no actual research on the author’s part. If you would like to limit the “research” claim to CHK, then we can do that, but that paper has been chewed up and spit out so many times, including by people who used the same data and came up with drastically different conclusions, that you might not like it if we go that route.
I have no idea if that is true or not, but you certainly haven’t demonstrated it to be a fact at this point. My link earlier in the thread not only disagrees with the above statement, but they even go out of their way to give detailed metrics on the various issues. Hell, they even include very detailed coverage of their methodology.
Perhaps on the whole, but I really, really think the point that it depends on what public school system you’re talking about is key (which I understood Chief Pedant’s point to be). I would wager that New Trier (a suburban public school in the Chicago suburbs, notable alumni include Rahm Emmanuel, Liz Phair, Donald Rumsfeld, James McNerney [CEO of Boeing], etc.) outperforms pretty much all Catholic high schools in the Chicago area. Hell, they pay their professors into the six-figures, and draw from an affluent, educated population, so it’s not really unexpected.
I came in to say this as well. My Catholic high school, while I’m sure we had smaller class sizes and fewer behavior problems, also had much fewer AP classes to offer. We also had no drama department, so no school plays, no band, and only two foreign languages to choose from (French or Spanish). I feel I got a good education, but wish my parents had sent me to public school for the variety of courses offered. The high school in our district offers I think 6 languages, a professional theatre, several band and orchestra classes, a photography studio with dark room, a pottery studio, etc.
Private schools can offer a number of programs- of the two we are looking at, one offers a ton of AP classes (which suits kids going to uni in the US), and the other offers the International Baccalaureate curriculum (rigorous but perhaps better suited to kids who may travel and school abroad, which ours might).
Nowadays, if private schools want to compete, they offer MORE academic, social and extracurricular options that the public schools (at least around here).
“Catholic” schools aren’t exactly monolithic, either. There are general education schools, college-prep type schools, schools that focus on academic fundamentals, schools devoted to special education, schools that don’t accept any special ed students, etc.
You can’t even draw a reliable conclusion AMONG Catholic schools, much less between Catholic and public schools, unless you start with specific program-by-program comparisons.
Exactly. You might be able to show that the average private/catholic school is better than the average public school, but on an individual level that’s useless, since individuals are effectively never choosing between two average examples.
You also have to weigh the cost of the school: a 10% lower quality in education (which might exist between two non-average schools) might be worth it if that saved tuition was used to travel abroad every summer, or to pay for lessons, or any number of other opportunities.
Well, I think if you swapped out student bodies between a given Catholic school and a given public school you would see a diminution in any score differences…
I do think Catholic schools offer a better education than many public schools-- most public schools, even.
The OP asks if there is a “real” difference in scores. I meant to suggest that both the difference in the ability of the students and the difference in being able to control the teachers are among the reasons for that difference. I am not convinced that a top student from a top public school would necessarily benefit additionally by going to a Catholic school.