Kevin Drum summarizes a study of private vs public school performance, based on an analysis of 2003 NAEP results, with links to the study itself, as well as to a NY Times article about it.
Do private schools do a better job of educating our kids than public schools? Lots of people think so. But a new, large-scale statistical analysis of the 2003 NAEP test results suggests that when you control for things like income, race, home environment, and so forth, the performance of private schools actually turns out to be worse or about the same as that of public schools, not better.
Of course, parents send their kids to privates schools in large part in order to “control for things like income, race, home environment, and so forth,” but study goes more to the question of whether the privatization of education is likely to have any benefit for the rest of us.