Fourth study this year confirms private schools no better than public

The fourth study this year has found Australian private schools produce no better results than public schools, when students' socio-economic backgrounds are taken into account.

Stéphane Mahuteau and Kostas Mavromaras, academics at the National Institute for Labour Studies at  Flinders University, conducted the latest study, which found a strong and positive association between the  socio-economic status of a student and their test scores.  The core result of the paper is that, after controlling for a number of school and student  characteristics, "school quality does not depend directly on the sector of the school". The main determinant of the higher raw test scores observed in private schools is the higher socio-economic status (SES) of students attending private schools, the report found.

The data indicates the main determinant of higher  scores in non-Government schools is the higher socio economic status of the students  that choose to go to non-Government schools. Those higher raw scores are "not the result of an inherent higher  quality of non-Government schools. It is rather the result of the more privileged high  socio economic status students self-selecting into non-Government schools and taking their existing advantage with them to these schools", the report says.

The study found a strong positive association between SES and test scores at both the  individual student level and the school level. An individual student from a higher SES is  much more likely to achieve higher scores, irrespective of the school they attend. The study  estimated that the reading test score increased by 9.5 points for every one point above the  mean of the measure of SES. The increase was 11 points in maths and science.

Published by the Institute for the Study of Labor in Bonn, Germany, the study's findings are based on a statistical analysis of the results from the 2009 Programme for  International Student Assessment (PISA) for reading, maths and science in each school  sector. It controlled for a number of student and school characteristics apart from SES,  including Indigenous background, location, school type, time spent on subjects,  student/teacher ratio, shortage of qualified teachers, computers per student and absenteeism.

The study also showed that a small part, roughly 6-7 per cent, of the total variation in  test scores is attributable to unobserved factors after controlling for student and observed  school effects. This residual effect is interpreted as a measure of school quality including  influences such as the learning environment of the school, ability of teachers, leadership, etc.

This finding suggests that the part of school quality that is hard to quantify and measure in the data, "has much less of an independent effect on student outcomes than we may  sometimes be asked to believe"

The study also tested whether this residual measure of "school quality" was significantly  smaller or larger for government schools compared with private schools. It found no  significant difference for reading, maths or science.
This is a simple but powerful result, which suggests that when we compare the quality  distributions between Government and non-Government schools, we cannot find any  statistically significant difference.

Similar tests were conducted comparing the estimated quality of government, Catholic and  Independent schools separately. In the case of reading and science, the estimated school  quality does not differ significantly between school sectors. In the case of maths, government  schools performed better than Independent schools while Catholic schools performed slightly  better than government and Independent schools. However, the study warns that these results  should be treated with caution because of the small sample sizes when private schools were  split into Catholic and Independent schools.

The findings of the study are consistent with those of several studies in the past year or so  showing that private schools do no better than public schools. The results from the OECD's  Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in 2012 show no statistically  significant difference in the results of public, Catholic and Independent school results after  taking account of the socio-economic background of students and schools. The report said  that: "students in the Catholic or independent school sectors bring with them an advantage  from their socioeconomic background that is not as strongly characteristic of students  in the government school sector".

A study published in the Economics of Education Review last December by economists from  La Trobe and Monash universities shows Catholic schools' performance has declined  since 1980 relative to government schools.
It says that the advantage that Catholic schools  once held over government schools has virtually disappeared and attendance at Catholic  schools may now lead to lower completion rates in secondary school and university. It noted Catholic schools' falling performance from 1980–2000 coincided  with a large increase in funding. This raises questions, it says, about how well these increased  resources have been used.

I've been saying this for years ... in fact, I often think the standard of education in public is better.

The only benefits to private is the range of subjects offered and the circle of friends that the kids make. The downside is that these kids often grow up wrapped up in cotton wool, with no idea of how the real world works.

Kiron22 wrote on Nov 1^st, 2015 at 9:24am:


10K a yr?

Private school?

Lisa Jones wrote on Nov 1^st, 2015 at 9:27am:


not everyone lives in Sydney dopey. One of the GC's best private school, also considered one of the best in QLD, TSS, charges about $5k a year (board is an additional $5k) ... I'm not sure where you get your figure of $30k from, but someone saw you coming from a mile away.

Kiron22 wrote on Nov 1^st, 2015 at 9:24am:


Good post.
Apart from the quality of the teachers, I think it's the level of discipline the school is able to maintain that makes the difference.
It seems to me from a distant perspective that the better teachers nowadays are attracted to the private system.

As to discipline, the opportunities for that in the public system seem to be far less than they are in the private system.
A private school can after all, with due legal advice, tell a problem student to p*ss off. Not so easy in state schools.
And kids soon learn what they can get away with.

Kiron22 wrote on Nov 1^st, 2015 at 9:09am:



So 4 years to work out that poor people are lazy and stupid, so their children will tend to be the same and nothing will change that.



Must have been commissioned from the University of NS Sherlock.

'THOUSANDS of WA students are at risk of not graduating from high school next year after they failed to pass new minimum literacy and numeracy standards.

About 82 per cent of students whose maths, reading and writing abilities were not up to scratch were from public schools, the online testing revealed.

Education Minister Peter Collier said the Online Literacy and Numeracy Assessment (OLNA) results proved students had been graduating for years with a qualification that didn’t reflect their ability.'

http://www.perthnow.com.au/news/western-australia/year-11-students-in-wa-fail-ba...

So about 18% from private schools.

Disclosure: I went to a number of public schools - itinerant father.

BigOl64 wrote on Nov 1^st, 2015 at 11:32am:


Little to do with wealth, everything to do with culture. As I said, I went to a private school filled with cashed up kids, but because the kids had absolutely no desire to learn, they just spent school doing drugs and pissing off the teachers for no reason. A decade later, most are still CuB cokeheads if my facebook is anything to go by.