Parochial School Makes You Stupid
15 July 2006 by Sean
Thanks to Cathie for sending this one in. I don’t have anything to add. It speaks for itself.
Study Finds Worst Performance in Conservative Christian Schools
[Okay, I have one thing to add. Note that this was the original title of the NYT piece. I know this because the text comes straight from their newsletter. And note that none of the other outlets that picked up the story -- such as the one I linked to above -- kept that same headline. Not only that, but the Times Online has already rewritten their headline. As a rabid online news reader, I see this all the time.... and it pisses me off. What's going on? Are they responding immediately to hate mail campaigns? I have seen this in person; the knee-jerk reaction to a few highly motivated dickheads swamping you with complaints. I don't know what is behind this at the Times, but I have seen headlines "soften" over the course of a day more than once. In the news biz, we call it "burying the lede."]
WASHINGTON - The federal Education Department reported Friday that, in reading and math, children attending public schools generally do as well as or better than comparable children in private schools. The exception was in eighth-grade reading, where the private-school children did better.
The report, which compared fourth- and eighth-grade reading and math scores from nearly 7,000 public schools and more than 530 private schools in 2003, also found that conservative Christian schools lagged significantly behind public schools when it came to eighth-grade math.
The study, carrying the imprimatur of the National Center for Education Statistics, part of the Education Department, was contracted to the Educational Testing Service and delivered to the department last year.
It went through a lengthy peer review and includes an extended section of caveats about its limitations, calling such a comparison of public and private schools “of modest utility.”
Its release, on a summer Friday, was made without a news conference or comment from Education Secretary Margaret Spellings.
Reg Weaver, president of the National Education Association, the union for millions of teachers, said the findings showed that public schools were “doing an outstanding job” and said that if the results had been favorable to private schools, “there would have been press conferences and glowing statements about private schools.”
“The administration has been giving public schools a beating since the beginning” to advance President Bush’s political agenda, Weaver said, of promoting charter schools and taxpayer-financed vouchers for private schools as alternatives to failing traditional public schools. A spokesman for the Education Department, Chad Colby, said he did not expect the findings to influence policy. Colby emphasized repeatedly that “an overall comparison of the two types of schools is of modest utility.”
“We’re not just for public schools or private schools,” he said. “We’re for good schools.”
The study, along with one of charter schools, was commissioned by the former head of the National Center for Education Statistics, Robert Lerner, an appointee of Bush, at a time preliminary data suggested that charter schools, which are given public money but are run by private groups, were doing no better at educating children than traditional public schools.
Proponents of charter schools had said the data did not take into account the predominance of children in their schools who had already had problems in their neighborhood schools.
The two new studies put test scores in context by examining the backgrounds of children in the schools and taking into account factors like race, ethnicity, income and parents’ educational backgrounds to make the comparisons more meaningful. The extended study of charter schools has not been released.
Findings favorable to private schools would likely have given a boost to administration efforts to offer children in ailing public schools the option of attending private schools. An Education Department official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the climate surrounding the report said researchers were “extra cautious” in reviewing the study and were aware of the “political sensitivity” of the issue. The official said the section warning against drawing unsupported conclusions from data was expanded somewhat as the report went through the review process.
The report cautions, for example, against concluding that children do better because of the type of school they’re in, as opposed to some unknown factors that might influence performance. It also warned that there was great variation of performance among private schools, making a blanket comparison of public and private schools “of modest utility.”
Friday’s report examined fourth- and eighth-grade math and reading scores for students attending public, private and religious schools. Students in private schools typically score higher than those in public schools, a finding confirmed in Friday’s study. The report then dug deeper to compare students of like racial, economic and social backgrounds. When it did that, the private-school advantage disappeared in all areas except eighth-grade reading.
The report separated private schools by type, and found that among private-school students, those in Lutheran schools did best, while those in conservative Christian schools did worst. For example, in eighth-grade reading, children in conservative Christian schools did no better than comparable children in public schools.
In eighth-grade math, children in Lutheran schools did significantly better than children in public schools, but those in conservative Christian schools fared worse.
Two weeks ago, the American Federation of Teachers, on its Web log, predicted that the report would be released on a Friday, suggesting that the Bush administration saw it as “bad news to be buried at the bottom of the news cycle.”
15 July 2006, on 8:50 pm
More and more of late, even that bastion of journalism, the Times has been infected by this conservative corporate oligarchy. From Judith “Rove’s Mouthpiece” Miller, to holding back the NSA wiretapping story for a whole year at the administration’s behest(even though any terrorist who was unaware that telephone and internet eavesdropping was going on was probably not bright enough to read the Times), it’s not been a banner year for the “Grey Lady”. Oddly, just as they’re stepping into line with the rest of the corporate media, the asshats and wingnuts are attacking them even more tha normal as traitors and- still- the “liberal media”- which says to me that they’re not even happy with a conservative slant to the news(still too reality-based, I guess).
As for the school scores, the poor performance of conservative christian schools is no surprise, probably to anyone here. When you fill a kid’s day with admonitions and abominations, Satan and that rascally Old Testament Gawd, what do you expect? Jeebus, I’d guess by fourth grade or so even a kid knows enough about fossils and dinosaurs to tell that creationism is bullshit. So, they’re scared and they’re suspicious. They’re also probably isolated from their neighborhood friends who go to public school. Poor kids.
Somebody might ought to watch them lest they grab Ockham’s razor and try to slit their wrists.
15 July 2006, on 10:43 pm
What the news report doesn’t tell us is that both private and public schools are doing a terrible job of teaching kids how to read and write or do math.
Recent Simpsons episode has teacher in front of class asking them, “What does your calculator tell you is the answer to 7 times 8?”
15 July 2006, on 11:04 pm
F–k, they didn’t just soften the headline, they completely changed the main idea of the piece. How do you find these out, Sean? Do you check your early morning hard copy with online pages later in the day? Not laughing out loud, not for a minute!!!!!
And I wonder why the study ignored Catholic schools, which at one time were the school of choice for many parents who could afford them, Catholic or not.
15 July 2006, on 11:49 pm
catherine Says:
F–k, they didn’t just soften the headline, they completely changed the main idea of the piece. How do you find these out, Sean? Do you check your early morning hard copy with online pages later in the day? Not laughing out loud, not for a minute!!!!!
Um… Almost??
I compare early stories released to the wire and things contained in newsletters with what is online later in the day.
And yeah, I have seen pieces rewritten like this all-too-often. It’s scary. Frankly, I can’t imagine how this happens. When I say “I have seen this in person,” I mean to a much smaller degree. And usually, even under a barrage of complaints, calmer heads win out. I work for the media, but not for these monsters, so I have no idea what goes on in their editorial meetings. Makes one a tad paranoid about information sources.
Anyone recognize the movie in the graphic I picked?
15 July 2006, on 11:59 pm
Raindogzilla Says:
More and more of late, even that bastion of journalism, the Times has been infected by this conservative corporate oligarchy. From Judith “Rove’s Mouthpiece” Miller, to holding back the NSA wiretapping story for a whole year at the administration’s behest(even though any terrorist who was unaware that telephone and internet eavesdropping was going on was probably not bright enough to read the Times), it’s not been a banner year for the “Grey Lady”.
I gave up on the NYT when they destroyed Wen Ho Lee’s life on the word of a few FBI agents.
And let’s not forget Jayson Blair.
Gray Lady down.
16 July 2006, on 12:37 am
Funniest thing, if these findings had confirmed that private school kids do better there would be ZERO excuses as to why.
It’s like the whole prayer doesn’t work thing. That article was FULL of excuses as to why it didn’t work.
The reason these kids in private schools can’t read is because you can’t have them actually READING the violent, over sexed, boring as hell stories in the Bible. If kids can read, they may actually be able to learn!
16 July 2006, on 2:53 am
I went to a parochial school. It may have been religious but I felt I got a good education there. It certainly set me on the road to atheism.
I realize that’s anecdotal, but generalizations tend to piss me off, especially since we atheists are usually on the receiving end.
16 July 2006, on 3:30 am
Chuck S.: I don’t think it’s a generalization. It’s just about this most recent study.
As for my title, I was just being true to the GifS style of being jocular and confrontational. Sorry if I overstepped the line, but come on. They could use a little bashing.
16 July 2006, on 11:26 am
Uh,Sean, since each still has the title “Heaven Help Up” under it, might we be forgiven for assuming that perhaps the stills come from a movie with that title?
Just sayin’
16 July 2006, on 12:11 pm
Ah=ha! Got you, Cathertine! It’s “Heaven Help Us.”
I’m just wondering if anybody has seen it. About a Catholic boy’s school in Brooklyn circa 1965. It has many hilarious scenes, especially for those who are recovering Catholics. I’m not really, but my dad is, and he helped me to appreciate it. Worth watching if only for the scene where Wallace Shawn gives a fire and brimstone rant about sexuality and damnation to the kids just before the Sadie Hawkins dance.
16 July 2006, on 1:32 pm
I swear, if I have kids, I’m moving us to Japan until they graduate.
Anybody got a better idea?
16 July 2006, on 1:37 pm
Damn you, Sean, you bastid (I love Rat’s spelling of that word). No, I haven’t heard of the film but it sounds good. I love Wally Shawn. He and everyone were so fine in “Clueless,” which if people haven’t seen, they should. (Hello, sentence structure?)
16 July 2006, on 2:42 pm
What occurs to me about this is that with the push toward privitization of education. We are seeing how the greedy assholes are lining their pockets at the expense of the next generation. And their parents are being swindled. Shame on them for their failure to verify the education their children are receiving. On the other hand as time moves on WE (freethinkers/atheists) will be in a superior position in all fields of endeavor. So long as we push for people who are qualified to be in positions of power and they are able to prove their qualifications.
No more Duetschs at NASA. No more Religious college grads who can’t add. No more of it at all. Those schools that can not provide a substantial education for their students should be closed down and the people responsible for it should be made to pay for the remedial education that their students need to catch up.
I went to catholic school for 8 years and then to public high. We did not need to play catch up. That was in the 60’s when there were less divisive issues. In fact most catholic schools performed above average because they were small and student to teacher was usually less than 15 to one. I never understood any of it no matter how much bible I read. It never made sense and I tried to keep after it hoping it would. I finally understood what my friends and my studies proved. There is no god to prove.