Editorial: No trumpets for schools study

Wednesday, July 19, 2006 | 7:39 a.m.

A federally funded study shows that children in public elementary and middle schools generally did as well in reading and math as private school pupils - findings that were not praised by the U.S. Education Department.

In fact, a recent story by The New York Times notes, Education Department officials released the results of the study last Friday afternoon without the usual news conference or comment. That the report was released in this manner suggests that federal education officials were less than thrilled with a study that undermines the Bush administration's support for charter schools and taxpayer-funded private school vouchers.

The study, conducted for the Education Department's National Center for Education Statistics, compared the reading and math skills of fourth- and eighth-graders in private and public schools. A second tier of the study compared the public school students to those who attended private Lutheran or Catholic institutions and, at the eighth-grade level, also included a separate comparison for conservative Christian schools.

Overall, fourth-graders in public schools did as well as their private school counterparts in reading and did a little better in math. Among eighth-graders, private school pupils did better in reading than those in public school. In math, this grade level was even, except that Lutheran school pupils did better than public or the other private schools. Conservative Christian school eighth-graders were on par with public schoolers in reading but fared poorer in math skills.

While the study's preparers called the results "of modest utility," the research does strongly suggest that public schools are better than what the Bush administration has led Americans to believe in its push for tax-funded private school vouchers and its failing No Child Left Behind Act.

It would seem that the Education Department - the highest level of public education administration - would have been crowing about this report. Instead, they released it in the middle of summer on a Friday afternoon. That's the news equivalent of releasing it in the middle of the night. Evidently, federal education officials didn't want this report to gain public attention. Maybe that's because it doesn't support President Bush's version of the truth.