The Center on Education Policy (an advocacy group with an agenda to promote public schools over private schools) has released a study in which they conclude that private schools are really no better than public schools.  But there are two problems with this study.

First, the conclusions being drawn from the study by the CEP don’t exactly match the data of the study itself.  According to John Cloud in Time magazine, the study does show that private schools faired no better than public schools when it came to “achievement-test scores in math, reading, science and history” as long as controls were in place for social and economic equality (meaning the study was adjusted so that they weren’t comparing test scores in affluent neighborhoods with test scores in poor neighborhoods).  But even so, many independently-run religious schools still outperformed public schools in this area, and when you went beyond achievement-test scores (which are based on rote learning and memorization) to tests that reflect critical thinking skills (such as the SAT) the private schools outperformed the public schools easily.  Unfortunately, this didn’t quite make into the CEP’s conclusion and will no-doubt be ignored by all the teachers union activists who will be championing the study.

Second, even if private schools and public schools generally performed the same nationwide that still isn’t an argument against school choice.  While any given public school may or may not be better than any given private school, the point of school choice is that parents should be able to make that determination for themselves.  I don’t think there’s many inner-city parents who are going to be convinced that they shouldn’t be allowed to send their children to another school besides the shoddy public school that’s in their district because some study says that, nationally, public and private schools are on par with one another.  That may be true nationally, but for parents in poor school districts it doesn’t make any difference.

Those parents should get to choose a better school for their children, and when parents are allowed to make that choice it helps us all by giving younger generations better opportunities to be successful.  That this gets in the way of the teacher’s union agenda to promote the public school monopoly should matter not a even a little bit.