Or this, for that matter

A new study reported in the Christian Science Monitor for Tuesday confirms what previous studies have shown: Private schools do not provide a better education than public schools.

After accounting for students' socioeconomic background, a new study shows public school children outperforming their private school peers on a federal math exam.

Overall, private school students tend to do markedly better on standardized tests. But the reason, this study suggests, may be that they draw students from wealthier and more educated families, rather than because they're better at bolstering student achievement.

The study involved analyzing raw data on test scores for 28,000 4th and 8th graders from 1300 public and private schools.

When the students were divided into four socioeconomic groups, the difference between public and private school math scores was 6 to 7 points for fourth-graders in each group, and 1 to 9 points for eighth-graders.

That differences, said researchers Christopher and Sarah Theule Lubienski, both education professors at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, were not significant, more "small to moderate." But the fact they were there at all runs counter to the line we've been getting fed for I don't know how long, a couple of decades at least. As they note, this doesn't prove that public schools are better than private schools, but it does undermine the claim that they are worse.

The report on the study, called "A New Look at Public and Private Schools: Student Background and Mathematics Achievement, can be found at this link.

Footnote: I think that this is very revealing:

Some, however, are skeptical. Any time studies produce "counterintuitive" results, they should be carefully examined, says Joe McTighe, executive director of the Council for American Private Education (CAPE).

Without having seen the Lubienskis' research, he points out that raw scores have typically shown the country's 6 million private school students, who make up 11.5 percent of US schoolchildren, outperforming public school students.

No, not that he questions the study without having seen it and not even that he refers to raw scores which are exactly the standard the study calls into question. It's that he said the results were "counterintuitive."

Why? Why should it be counterintuitive to say that a public program can function at least as well as a private one? Why is it supposed to be the obvious, natural, expected finding that private, profit-seeking, competition-driven enterprises produce superior results? More than a dozen years ago, Alfie Kohn demolished that notion, citing study after study after study in his book No Contest: The Case Against Competition. So why do we cling to it? McTighe has a reason, he financially benefits from it. What about the rest of us? What's our excuse?

I'll put it more bluntly: If you didn't see what was odd about calling the results of the study "counterintuitive," what's your excuse?