Luis Benveniste, Martin Carnoy, Richard Rothstein, RoutledgeFalmer
November 2002
Do private schools really do a better job than public? Not necessarily, say Luis Benveniste of the World Bank, Martin Carnoy of the Stanford ed school and Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute. Based on a miniscule sample of sixteen (elementary and middle) schools, all in California, they contend that private schools are very similar to public schools and that observable differences have more to do with the kinds of communities they're located in and the kids they serve than with the auspices under which they operate. "Within particular communities, similarities between schools and the problems that they confronted overwhelmed the differences." They conjecture that parents don't really value unconventional schools and that public-private differences don't correspond to differences in parent behavior or expectations. Note, though, that this book is based entirely on interviews and observations - no hard data on pupil achievement, for example - and that the authors are known for their animus toward vouchers and others policies that would ease the access of more children into private schools. My sense is that they found exactly what they sought by way of "evidence" to buttress their own dispositions. One interesting (and worrying) point does come through, however: the authors claim that it's as hard (and rare) to remove an unsatisfactory teacher in the Catholic schools they visited as in the public schools. If you want to see for yourself, the ISBN is 0415931975, the publisher is RoutledgeFalmer and you can get more information at http://www.semcoop.com/detail/0415931975.
