Public schools got some good news this past week in the release of a major statistical study, commissioned by the US Department of Education, that found that public school students performed as well, on average, as students in private schools. The study is a politically-sensitive one, as drafters of the report have acknowledged, and it was clearly viewed as bad news by the Bush White House, which followed its usual strategy in such cases, by quietly releasing the news without comment or press conference late on a Friday afternoon, when most reporters have left the office for the weekend.

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The study, which examined test scores for students in fourth and eighth grade, was designed to correct for such self-selection and all of the other demographic differences between students in public and private schools. And when those corrections were made, the differences between public and private school performance all but vanished. The only exceptions were in fourth-grade math, where public school students actually performed better than those in private schools, and in eighth grade reading, where private students performed better. The study also found that students in private Lutheran schools performed above the average, while those in conservative Christian schools performed at the bottom.

The results differed little from another recent study, which found little or no difference in math scores between public and private school students. The findings were also consistent with studies of charter schools, which have been found to provide no detectable difference in academic achievement.