School Choice or Best Systems_ What Improves Education_ - Margaret C. Wang [31]
Private Schools in the United States
For two centuries, private schools were the dominant form of American K-12 schooling. From the founding of the first colonies through the middle of the 19th century, most schools, many of them with only one room for all grades, were privately owned, privately managed, and funded by tuition and government subsidies from tiny units of local government.1 Curricula, instruction, and tests emphasized English literacy, mathematics, history, and science. Most historians agree that by 1840 the northern states had the highest literacy rate in the world—about 90 percent—unlike today’s poor showing of the United States among industrialized countries, described in Chapter 1.2
Table 4-1 PRIVATE SCHOOL ENROLLMENT IN THE UNITED STATES IN 2004
SOURCE: National Center for Education Statistics, The Condition of Education 2006, pp. 112, 134, http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/2006/pdf/04/2006.pdf.
School Characteristic Number (in thousands) Percentage
Roman Catholic 2,365 46.2
Other religious 1,836 35.8
Independent 922 18.0
Total 5,123 100.0
Despite such early success, local governments around 1850 began placing restrictions on private schools, reducing aid to them, and founding government-owned and government-operated schools. Prominent advocates of government schooling, including Horace Mann in Massachusetts and Henry Barnard in Connecticut, successfully argued for tuition-free government-operated schools for all children. Compulsory school attendance laws were introduced in 1852, and by 1918 all states had passed laws requiring children to attend at least elementary school.
Catholics and other religious groups opposed what they saw as Protestant favoritism in government schools and created their own private sectarian schools. In 1925 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Pierce v. Society of Sisters that states could not compel children to attend public schools, ensuring a continued place for sectarian schools in the United States.
Today, private schools account for about 11 percent of total K-12 enrollment in the United States. Nearly half of all private schools are Catholic (see Table 4-1). About a third are operated by other religious groups, and the remainder are secular (that is, independent of religious groups).
Although the performance of private schools provides some insight into what an extensive school choice program might look like, today’s private schools operate in a distorted marketplace that often reduces real competition. As economist John Wenders writes:
[P]rivate schools have been forced into a niche market that operates under the inferior quality umbrella held up by the public schools. While private schools must be more market oriented, and leaner, than their public counterparts, they are also protected in their niches by the inferior quality public school umbrella under which they serve. Faced with a clumsy, bureaucratic monopolist as a competitor, the private schools may not be anywhere near as efficient as their reliance on parental choice would suggest.3
Thus, if private schools themselves were subject to greater competition, they might be expected to respond with substantially greater effectiveness, efficiency, and consumer satisfaction. Were sizable numbers for-profit, they might be expected to respond more quickly and more fully, and such schools might further be expected to stimulate other schools to improve substantially.
Private Schools and Elite University Attendance
If competition and choice work well in education, and if the absence of the profit motive does not excessively undermine their benefits, then students attending private schools ought to have higher achievement levels than similarly prepared students attending government schools. Achievement comparisons have been a source of controversy since the seminal and provocative 1981 study of Catholic schools by James Coleman.4