To Publicize or to Privatize? - Applied Social Psychology (ASP)

Parents often have worries when it comes to the education of their children. Will they get good grades? Will they have trouble making friends in school? Do they have learning disabilities? Will they get into trouble? One of the worries I have as a parent is about the quality of the education my child receives. In my pursuit to determine what will provide a high-quality education (and what will not), I have compared private education to public education. I assumed that at the end of my search, I will have been convinced that private schooling is best. What I have found has surprised me.

?In my search, I ran across an interesting report that compares public to private educational settings (Braun, Jenkins & Grigg, 2006). In this study, researchers compared assessment scores from large samples of private and public schools and the results were as expected. In general, private school students scored higher in math and reading skills, with the gap widening as grade level increases (Braun et al., 2006). However, when student variables were controlled for, the differences were much less significant (Braun et al., 2006). These student variables include gender, race, disabilities, socioeconomic status, parental intervention, absenteeism and access to books and computers in the home.

Now, being the analytical thinker that I am, I realized that it is possible that it was not the school itself that makes a student 'smarter', but perhaps the environment surrounding the students. In the summary section of the report, I found support to my hypothesis: The variance decompositions associated with the analyses comparing all private schools to all public schools indicate that there is greater variance among students within schools than among schools (Braun et al., 2006). In addition, when student-level covariates are included in, the averages of private school means is lower than the averages of public school means (Braun et al., 2006).

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What does this mean for my son? It means that I can stop looking for a private school to place him in. It also means that I vow to be an active participant in his learning. I now know that the quality of his education does not depend solely on the school he attends, but also upon his environment and upon himself. It is the students themselves that make the school, with a little help from their parents and their environment.

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Reference:

Braun, H., Jenkins, F., and Grigg, W. (2006). Comparing Private Schools and Public Schools Using Hierarchical Linear Modeling (NCES 2006-461). U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Institute of Education Sciences. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Source: http://www.personal.psu.edu/bfr3/blogs/asp/2013/03/to-publicize-or-to-privatize.html

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