Best edge for students isn’t private school but family life, study finds

In advocating tax dollars for private schools, U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos criticized public schools in America as a dead end. A new major study suggests the private-school edge is an illusion and family factors, rather than school factors, determine student outcomes.

“What the study indicates really clearly is that if kids go to public school or private school, they end up in about the same place — once you consider their family income and background. That is crystal clear,” said author Robert Pianta, dean of the Curry School of Education, Novartis US Foundation Professor of Education, professor of psychology, and founding director of the Center for Advanced Study of Teaching and Learning at the University of Virginia.

Georgia parents paying $25,000 a year for a private school probably don’t want to believe their children would likely have similar attainment had they gone to the public high school down the road, but Pianta said the findings highlight the overarching influence of the home environment on student performance.

“If you want to forecast children’s achievement outcomes, the best predictor is family income, regardless of the high school they go to, public or private,” he said. “It is the family factors that carry the day.”

Despite the federal push for vouchers, the study finds no evidence private schools, exclusive of family background or income, are more effective, said Pianta in a telephone interview Wednesday about the study, which is titled, “Does attendance in private schools predict student outcomes at age 15?”

Using a federal data set, the study tracked more than a thousand students from birth through age 15 with interviews and home and school visits to determine the

extent to which private-school attendance, adjusted for a wide range of family background, child and schooling factors, affected academic, social, psychological and attainment outcomes through ninth grade.

At first glance, children in private schools performed better on nearly all outcomes. However, by controlling for variation in family income, all the benefits disappear. The conclusion of the study: It isn’t the advantages private schools provide that give children a leg up, but the advantages kids bring to the classroom from their homes.

And those advantages often commence at birth with a strong early foundation and wealth of resources such as math camp, museum visits and violin lessons. “Many children are exposed to educational resources at staggeringly higher levels than those coming from much less advantaged homes and from stressed families,” said Pianta. “This gap creates a fundamental challenge to our society, and I think the folks on the positive end of the gap may not understand the differences in the resources they have.”

To narrow the resources gap, Pianta said, “the priority for schools is to utilize community resources and partnerships in a far more systematic manner than they typically do at present. There are tons of these partnerships and one-off programs, but they often are not aligned to the school program per se, are intermittently or irregularly available and not often tied into the curriculum and learning — so they become something that can be more disruptive to the school day. And, yet, communities have come forth with a lot of offerings. So the key is creating ways these are sustained, managed and tied to learning goals. To the extent that it’s also exposure to resources early in life that matters even more — and I think the evidence supports this — then community leadership for a coherent and focused birthto-age 8 learning agenda, in which schools play a major role, is huge.”

It’s not that teachers have no impact on a child’s trajectory, said Pianta. “There is no question an individual teacher makes a big difference. Landing in the classroom of a very effective teacher can close an achievement gap by half in one year. But school doesn’t have the more powerful effect that family factors do because it’s highly unlikely students in a public or a private school will end up in that kind of teacher’s classroom year after year after year. But families have their effect year after year.”

His study underscores how deeply family background fortifies children for success. “Yes, we also have to recognize schools play a role in children’s development, and there are countless examples of schools making a difference for poor kids or for well-off kids,” he said. “What I think we don’t fully appreciate oftentimes is that the role of schools — albeit powerful in many instances — reflects an awful lot of effects from the family.”

“As I look back in my career,” Pianta said, “I have been surprised by the small effect schooling has on students, on average, and the very powerful effect that early experiences in the family have in setting a foundation that is then reinforced over the years.”