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In 2015, Harris Polls asked 2,073 people if they thought private schools, public schools or home schooling provided students with the best education.
It wasn’t even close. Private schools came out on top by huge margins in every educational category except physical education, including reading and writing, science, history, preparing students for college, foreign languages and fine arts. (Home schooling ranked third.)
But is the conventional wisdom on private schools vs. public schools accurate?
No, say a pair of researchers who will appear at a town hall meeting today in Las Vegas.
Sarah and Christopher Lubienski, authors of the 2013 book “The Public School Advantage: Why Public Schools Outperform Private Schools,” examined two extensive datasets of students and found that public schools performed better than or equal to their peers in private schools in many respects when compared apples to apples.
Although students at private schools score better on tests, when the Lubienskis stripped away factors stemming from the tendency of private school students to come from more privileged backgrounds than their public school peers, they found that public schools were better at educating students. Among their findings, they reported that public school students gained nearly a half year more of learning than their peers at schools most likely to accept public school students with vouchers.
Their 304-page book contains more details and takeaways than we could possibly list in this space, but it should be required reading for lawmakers in Nevada as they consider the fate of the state’s education savings account program.
Approved in 2015, ESA offers state funding for parents to send their children to private schools. But it was put on hold in 2016 when the Nevada Supreme Court ruled that the funding mechanism for it didn’t pass legal muster.
The program should permanently remain on ice, as it would devastate K-12 public schools. Especially for schools in lower-income areas, ESAs would start a vicious circle where funding and high-achieving students would be drawn away from public schools, reducing their ability to provide a high-quality education and making them even less attractive to parents. Meanwhile, the average ESA funding amount of about $5,200 per student wouldn’t provide enough supplement for many low-income families to afford private-school tuition, trapping their children in lower-performing schools.
Yet Gov. Brian Sandoval has made funding for ESA one of his top priorities in the 2017 legislative session.
With the fate of the ESA program in the balance, today’s appearance by the Lubienskis is timely and relevant.
Time: 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. today
Place: Clark County Library, large conference room, 1401 E. Flamingo
Admission: Free and open to the public
Sponsors: Nevada State Education Association, Culinary Union, Nevada ACLU, Educate Nevada Now, Battle Born Progress and For Nevada’s Future
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