crumbling buildings, overcrowded classrooms, bare-bones curriculum, and poor
instruction in many public schools today. Unfortunately, those parents most able to
afford private schools probably live in districts where the public schools are actually
pretty good. Because education is funded largely by local property taxes, wealthier
neighborhoods and communities have more money to spend on schools than poorer
ones. Public schools in wealthy neighborhoods can afford state-of-the-art labs
and libraries, small classes, and highly paid teachers. It is the poor neighborhoods
that have the crumbling buildings, overcrowded classrooms, and overworked,
underpaid teachers. The pattern holds up in every city and every state, reproducing
the same class privileges that we find in the public/private school divide (Oakes,
1990).
Racial Segregation.The Supreme Court’s Brownv.Board of Educationdecision
(1954) outlawed the practice of segregation—requiring White and non-White
students living in the same district to attend separate schools. In 1954, nearly 100
percent of Black students were attending intensely segregated (predominantly
minority) schools. Busing programs began to decrease segregation in favor of
integration,in which the school’s ethnic distribution is more balanced.
Integration in U.S. classrooms peaked in 1988, then began to reverse when the
1991 Supreme Court ruling allowed the return of neighborhood schools. In spite of
the increased diversity of the nation as a whole, school districts began to resegregate.
In 1998, more than 70 percent of Black students attended intensely segregated schools.
The most dramatic (and largely ignored) trend affects Hispanic Americans. In 1968,
a little more than 20 percent of Hispanic students were enrolled in intensely segregated
schools. In 1998, more than a third were, an increase of 13.5 percentage points.
Hispanics face serious levels of segregation by race and also poverty, with particularly
EDUCATION AND INEQUALITY 567Studies of stu-
dents attending
public and
private schools do find some greater
performance. But was it because of the
type of school they attended? Christo-
pher and Sarah Lubienski (2006)
analyzed data from 2003 National
Assessment of Educational Progress,
which looked at achievement rates for
166,736 fourth grade students at 6,664
schools and 131,497 eighth grade stu-
dents attending 5,377 schools. This
included students at both public and
private schools and included secular pri-
vate schools and Christian schools.
They found that the rather modest
differences in achievement between
students in public and private schools
were actually explained by demographic
variables, such as parents’ education,
income, and other factors. When they
controlled for these factors, the differ-
ences between public and private
schools disappeared, meaning that there
were no appreciable differences as a
result of the type of school you went to.
In fact, the relationship reversed whenDoes Private School Make
a Difference?How do we know
what we know
comparing public and Christian schools:
When demographic variables were con-
trolled, students at public schools had
significantly higher achievement than
students at Christian schools.
Similar results have been found in
other countries. In a 2002 study of pub-
lic and private schools in ten countries
in Latin America (Somers, McEwan, and
Willins, 2004), raw test scores favored
private schools. But when socioeconomic
status was taken into account, the
advantage shrank (just as the Lubienskis
found). When the “peer effect”—the
influence of other students and school
environment—was factored in, the
overall difference was zero: Public and
private school children performed
equally well.