Reviewed by Michael Fabricant
Title: 
Author(s): Christopher A. Lubienski & Sarah Theule Lubienski
Publisher: University of Chicago Press, Chicago
Over the past twenty five years a cascading literature has accumulated regarding the crisis of public education in the US. The crisis is traced to significant racial and international differences in student achievement as measured by testing. Importantly, the racial gap, although evident over the past fifty years, has not galvanized the recent attention of both legislators and business interests. Rather international decline in a period of intensifying economic competition is what has promoted greater policy attention on public education’s deficits. Lagging test scores of American students in science, reading, and math has been described as a national security issue threatening the very economic foundation of society. This framing has, in turn, birthed a public education reform movement whose policy initiatives largely rely on market principles to fix public problems such as education.
The change theories of the “new reformers” can in large part be traced to a rejection of public bureaucracy. Public institutions are seen as spawning pathological tendencies undermining competition, innovation, choice, and academic achievement. As well, public institutions are described as primarily, if not exclusively, interested in addressing professional interests rather than student need. This ideological policy frame has unsurprisingly produced structural or market solutions of increased choice/competition, teacher/student accountability, metrics, and privatization. This policy agenda has gained increased traction over the past twenty years, as evidenced by the growing number of charter schools, intensifying focus on testing to measure student, teacher, and school worth, and the accelerating transfer of public education dollars to the marketplace. The historic dilemmas of applying market principles to public issues, including but not limited to a tendency to increase inequality and simplify complex public problems, have largely been ignored as ideological rhetoric and economic incentive rather than evidence driven policy decision-making. Fundamental to the new reformers’ policy agenda is the presumption that private schools will outperform public education. Christopher Lubienski and Sara Theule-Lubienski have waded into this political policy discourse with their important volume, The Public School Advantage: Why Public Schools Outperform Private Schools.
Their book is intended to examine the empirical support for the present reform direction. The core question they pose asks, “Are private schools outperforming traditional public schools?” The methodology of the study is reasonably straightforward while being simultaneously rigorous, systematic, and elegant. The authors propose to discern differences in part on the basis of cross-sectional data or snapshot test scores. This cross-sectional approach is bolstered by a longitudinal design element to determine if the test scores of students in private schools rise more rapidly than their counterparts in public settings. The sample for both the cross-sectional and longitudinal research is drawn from secondary data. Two separate datasets underpinned the longitudinal part of the inquiry, The Early Childhood Longitudinal Study Kindergarten Class of 1998-1999 (ECLS-K) and the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) of fourth and eighth graders. The ECLS-K offers a stratified random sample of 21,000 students in both private and public schools entering kindergarten in 1998. Admittedly, the sample is a bit dated. That said, the experiment regarding privatization when the cohort of kindergarten students in the sample entered the fourth grade in 2003 was well underway. Alternatively, the NAEP study sample included 9,791 randomly selected students in 1531 public and private schools. For the cross-sectional study, approximately 190,000 fourth graders and 155,000 eighth graders were randomly selected from the NAEP data set. About 7,500 and 6,000 schools were included in the samples of fourth and eighth graders respectively. The private schools included in the study included Catholic, Christian and charters. This layered and synergistic design has produced a sampling protocol able to capture the snapshot and longitudinal academic experience of students in private and public schools. The careful and imaginative design of this inquiry is especially impressive.
The findings of The Public School Advantage are especially important in this moment of policy consensus regarding a “full speed ahead” approach to privatization. When controlling for student background factors in the fourth grade, an “initial private school advantage was reversed.” Similar findings were discerned for the eighth-grade. The test score difference for fourth and eighth graders ranged between 11 and 21 points. The authors note that a ten to eleven point difference “represents a disparity of about one grade level” (p. 79). The longitudinal results indicate that “math achievement gains of public schools outpaced those of other school types over the course of the study.” Equally important, public school students are a statistically significant 6 points ahead of their Catholic school counterparts by the fifth grade. The authors indicate that the public school advantage is clear. They conclude that “the vaunted private school effect found in past research while it may exist for some students is significantly overshadowed by the public school advantage that is evident in the two most prominent national data sets” (p. 92). The findings of the Lubienski study are confirmed by other research, most notably the CREDO analysis comparing public and charter schools.
The Public School Advantage makes a very special contribution to the public education reform discourse because of its careful methodological rigor and thoughtful interpretation of its findings. It makes a unique and timely contribution to an expansive literature comparing private/charter schooling and traditional public education settings. The evidence is clear that a private school advantage does not exist. Rather, it is largely an ideological illusion. Yet, simultaneous to the emergence of this finding, reform momentum for privatization grows. And so we must acknowledge that another kind of evidence is also growing, empirical findings in the present contested terrain of public education matter less and less in setting policy direction.
We are faced with the dilemma that present reform is not a rational response to the needs of poor, urban communities of color. Rather it is a largely ideological attack on public education that will not be contained by either evidence or reason. To the contrary, advocates for the “new reform” like those who deny climate change will simply offer an alternative logic no matter how devoid of evidence or commitment to a public good. Given the new reformers’ greater access to political, economic and media resources, their narrative and evidence will prevail. And so those who remain committed to traditional forms of public education, the democratic accountability of public institutions, the need to collect objective information to inform policy decision making, and preserving the character of a public good from the degradation of market dynamics must understand that only a corrective power will alter the course of present reform. Those of us committed to a just reform predicated on evidence, strategic investment, and the need to establish clear boundaries between private and public institutions must rethink our relationship to movement politics. A corrective movement power must be built that challenges the present privatization of public education and dismantling of all things public including schools. Some part of the lesson of this important book, The Public School Advantage: Why Public Schools Outperform Private Schools is that, although compelling evidence is necessary to reset policy direction, it is not sufficient. The evidence is an essential tool but the setting of policy direction today, as in the 1960’s and 1930’s, is directed by power blocs driving and/or contesting the reform agenda. Today, evidence that points to the relative effectiveness of public institutions is drowned out by the rhetoric of privatization. To reset policy discourse, new blocs of power must be built to enact an alternate vision, investment, and forms of collaboration for public education. Anything less cedes expansive reform territory to those who would privatize all things public no matter the cost in the long or short term to the larger society. This new social reality is the single most important take away for readers of The Public School Advantage.