All About the Selection

A new paper by Josh Angrist and co-authors shows that top students that went to elite prep schools do no better than top students who did not go to elite prep schools.  In fact, the overall performance of elite prep schools is all down to the fact that they can select.  This is also my take on so-called "successful" charter schools - their success is often a result of selection: motivated families switch their kids while unmotivated ones don't.  Which is another lesson from the good research out there on schools: all the stuff that private schools can offer - nice facilities, homogeneous populations, so called 'rigorous' curriculum and so on, do not matter much in terms of actual academic achievement.  Their success is all about selection.

I refer to this thanks to Felix Salmon, whom I shall simply quote bacause I could not say it better myself:

There aren’t a lot of studies of public vs private schools, but the ones which do exist generally show no difference at all in educational outcome, once you control for the socio-economic status of the kids being admitted. Essentially: middle-class kids who grow up with two well-educated parents and lots of books around the house will generally do very well in school no matter where they go.

Which is why I am always try to be a calming voice to well-educated middle-class parents in PPS who are dismayed at the erosion of support for public education. It is generally not their kids that suffer.