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appealing and distinctive, private schools may allow and encourage voluntary integration. To investigate this view, Jay Greene examined the racial composition of a random sample of public and private school students’ classrooms, collected by the National Education Longitudinal Study. He found that “private school students were significantly more likely to be in classrooms whose racial composition resembled the national proportion of minority students and significantly less likely to be in classrooms that almost entirely consisted of white or minority students.”39 Greene’s analyses showed that private school students are more likely to report greater levels of cross-racial friendship and fewer instances of racial fighting than are public school students.40 He also found that voluntary choice in public school systems diversified racial composition:

Public schools with more students from outside their attendance zones, that is with more magnet program or transfer students, had higher rates of integration. It appears that choice systems, where schooling is detached from housing, are better able to transcend racial segregation in housing patterns. Traditional public schools, however, appear to replicate and perhaps reinforce racial segregation in housing.41

Research on Milwaukee and Cleveland, which have voucher programs, shows that students choosing their schools were more likely to attend schools that were racially representative of the broader community. They were less likely to attend racially homogeneous schools than were traditional public school students.42

Private Schools in Other Countries

Private schools in other countries provide an additional database for research on the effects of private schools on academic achievement. Andrew Coulson43 analyzed statistically controlled studies carried out in India, Pakistan, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Tanzania, the Dominican Republic, Chile, and the United States. As shown in the Table 4-5, the results showed an overwhelming advantage of private schools. Of 50 comparisons that could be found for six criteria, 41 (82 percent) showed a private-sector advantage.

Similarly, James Tooley and Pauline Dixon compared outcomes and costs in the two sectors in low-income countries including Ghana, India, Kenya, and Nigeria.44 Their summary indicates that achievement test scores of the poorest students in these poor countries were considerably higher in private than in government schools at between half and a quarter of the teacher salary costs. They find great success taking place in private schools, often contrary to the assumptions of educational authorities and foreign experts.

Table 4-5 NUMBER OF FINDINGS ON PRIVATE- AND PUBLIC-SECTOR ADVANTAGE

SOURCE: Andrew J. Coulson, “How Markets Affect Quality: Testing a Theory of Market Education against the International Evidence,” in Educational Freedom and Urban America, ed. David Salisbury and Casey Lartigue Jr. (Washington: Cato Institute, 2004).

Priyanka Anand, Alejandra Mizala, and Andrea Repetto’s analysis of the Chilean school voucher program, which included nationally standardized controls for parent socioeconomic status, community demographics, per student spending, and other possible influences on achievement, showed significant private-public school differences favoring private schools, and also strongly suggested that the achievement of students that moved from public to private schools was significantly and positively affected.45

Conclusion

The effects of private schools in the United States on academic achievement, costs, racial integration, tolerance, and active citizenship have been studied by many researchers over many years. Higher admissions to elite colleges, exposure to people of different backgrounds, and later civic community involvement are all hall-marks of a private education.

Little of the evidence, however, attains the “gold standard” of random assignment of students to schools, and it is compromised somewhat by the difficulty in controlling for parental socioeconomic status,