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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Contribution to an acrimonious debate that dominated a decade.,
By not a natural "Bob Bickel" (huntington, west virginia United States) - See all my reviews (VINE VOICE)
This review is from: High School Achievement (Hardcover)
During the 1980's, the sociology of education and much of educational research shared an obsessive concern with the comparative effectiveness and equity of public and private schools. The acrimony, obsessiveness, and duration of the debate over a seemingly simple question reflect the fact that no topic in education has not been politicized. Furthermore, it seems that the commonsense concepts and super-sophisticated methods of the social sciences are not up to the task of answering important policy questions.One of the early and conspicuous contributions to the public/private school controversy was Coleman, Hoffer, and Kilgore's High School Achievement. Coleman and a variegated set of associates remained intensely involved with this issue until interest waned among social scientists generally. Coleman's involvement is especially fitting since he made substantial contributions to determining the agenda for social policy research over several decades. As early as 1966, he was lead author of Equality of Educational Opportunity, a controversial document that set the stage for school busing as an equity measure. In High School Achievement, Coleman and his colleagues used the first of three waves of data from the soon-to-be-famous High School and Beyond data set. High School and Beyond was very widely used in the long exchange over public and private school quality, but it was also the wrong data set at the wrong time. High School and Beyond had been assembled by the National Opinion Research Center to do status attainment research. It contained data on students from 1015 public schools, but only 84 Catholic schools and 27 other-private schools. Furthermore, the first wave of data was a cross-section, meaning that student pre-test scores were not available. This forced Coleman and his co-authors to use the school as the unit of analysis, and to use 12th grade achievement tests as the outcome measure, with 10th grade scores for the same schools -- but entirely different sets of students -- as a proxy for a pre-test. Coleman's work was further compromised by the fact that the three achievement test scores included in High School and Beyond were extremely brief, limited to 8, 8, and 15 questions. Socioeconomic status controls were available, but Coleman made some odd choices -- number of books in the home, whether there is a pocket calculator in the home ... -- which reflected the arid, sometimes crude empiricism of High School Achievement. Coleman et al. then estimated multiple regression equations for each of the three outcome measures with the school as the unit of analysis. They alternately substituted student means on explanatory variables from public schools, Catholic schools, and other-private schools into the regression equations. Using predicted scores from the regression equations, the authors determined that, given a common set of student characteristics, private schools of both kinds out-preformed public schools. In subsequent analyses Coleman and various sets of co-authors responded to criticism with regard to the obvious methodological deficiencies of the research reported in High School Achievement in a variety of ways, including dropping other-private schools as a separate, unduly small category, and using subsequent waves of High School and Beyond to permit legitimately longitudinal analyses. As with so many authors on both sides of this issue, however, Coleman never wavered in his commitment to the superiority of private schools. Given the many limitations of High School Achievement, I had thought it was now of historical interest but otherwise of little importance. It is, however, discussed favorably and at some length in Morgan and Winship's recent book Counterfactuals and Causal Inference. Though there is no commonly agreed-upon way to declare a winner in the public/private school controversy, heightened interest in so-called charter schools, really private schools in thin disguise, suggests that private schools are favored by policymakers.
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