In 2023, Sarah Stitzlein—professor of education at the University of Cincinnati—asserted that “the health of our democracy in the United States depends directly on our public schools.” Her assessment summed up decades of thought and scholarship on the subject. But what about private schools, attended by about one in every ten young Americans? Surely they are crucial to democracy as well. A new meta-analysis in Educational Psychology Review aims to find out.
The research team is a stellar one, including Danish Shakeel of the University of Buckingham in England, and a crew from the University of Arkansas that includes professor Patrick Wolf and researchers Mattie Harris, Alison Heape Johnson, and Sarah Morris (the latter two former Fordham EEP Scholars). Together, they dig into the measurable impacts of civics instruction on students. The initial literature search identified a whopping 13,000 quantitative studies. The vast majority, however, duplicated or replicated each other, weeding out the majority and leaving just over 1,500 unique studies. The researchers screened these based on appropriateness and quality—specifically, they were looking for those that showed the impacts of civics education on public and private school students’ political tolerance, political participation, civic knowledge and skills, as well as their voluntarism and social capital.
Their final meta-analysis draws from 40 different databases and includes 57 studies, yielding 531 effects studied across the four outcomes of interest. (More on this methodology later.) The majority of studies came from the United States, with a handful from other countries in Europe, Asia, South America, and Australia. Thirty-one studies utilized nationally representative samples. Data ranged from 1982 to 2020. The private schools studied included those with specific religious identities (Catholic, Protestant, Islamic, and other religions), several non-specific religious schools, as well as secular private schools. The analysts used robust variance estimate (RVE) regression and meta-regression to identify the average association between civics education and the four civic outcomes of interest.
On average, they report, private schooling boosts any civic outcome by 0.055 standard deviations over public schooling, showing statistically significant positive impacts on three of the four civic outcomes, with only political participation showing null effects. Religious private schooling shows an even stronger impact.
These findings come with methodological caveats that must be considered: Only seven of the 40 databases informing the studies were generated using experimental or quasi-experimental designs. The average effect observed in the studies that use those databases, the authors write, “is positive 0.019 SD, but null.” And while the meta-analysis would likely have not been possible using only those gold-standard studies, the observational nature of the majority of the source data—and the reliance on those sources to generate statistically significant effects—should encourage readers to interpret the findings cautiously. The wide chronologic and geographic spread of the data also deserve consideration—Chile and Mexico are not the U.S.—and the America of 1982 is far removed from that of 2020. The fact that effects on parents are included in the overall outcomes—and are larger than the effects on students—is another concern. Additionally, as with meta-analyses in general, we can’t investigate the mechanisms that may be at work.
Still and all, the analysts conclude that private schools appear better than public schools at building civically-engaged citizens and let the rhetorical chips fall where they may. There’s likely some truth to their assertion—and the corollary that public schools are not de facto better than private at building good citizens, despite a century of faith in that tenet, is likely true as well—but this evidence is surely not enough for anyone to declare it a settled question just yet.
SOURCE: M. Danish Shakeel, et al., “The Public Purposes of Private Education: A Civic Outcomes Meta‑Analysis,” Educational Psychology Review (April 2024).
