(originally published June 23)

The Supreme Court has found in Forest Grove School District v. T. A. that a school district that denied special education services to a student diagnosed with learning disabilities must reimburse the family for his $5200-monthly tuition. The press, such as the New York Times, is playing up the fact that the student never recieved special ed services, but strangely not that he was consistently denied FAPE, as seems to be the focus of the majority opinion.

The issue, then, is not that the state must pay for private school tutition, but must pay for an appropriate education if the student has been unjustly denied it.

The funny part of this (to me, anyway), is that, if a 2005 Department of Education study is to be believed, the district paid for a better education than it could have provided itself (that’s a broad statement, actually; the results are not always statistically significant). Reading and math scores were several points higher, on average, at private schools over public schools in the survey of data from across the nation.

Now, why is this? Well, keep in mind that private schools get to pick and choose their students. They also have higher levels of “family engagement”, “parent involvement”, or whatever you want to call it (the research literature seems a little disjointed in the competing ideas of what these terms mean) – you’d be pretty involved, too, if you were dropping 5200 bucks a month into your kid’s education.

Private schools, though, also have more autonomy, with fewer top-down edicts regarding pedagogy, school structure, etc. As there is less influence from a hierarchical administrative structure, so is there a nearly-non-existent union influence.

So what of these factors actually leads to higher performance? Don’t know. There isn’t enough research (and, perhaps, some practical barriers to conducting research) to tell us these things. I wonder, though, why we don’t see public schools at least trying to emulate some of these factors if they seem to be working.

A postscript: the headline of this 2006 release from “progressive” group Common Dreams seems to utterly misrepresent the 2005 report from the Department of Education, particularly regarding the performance of private schools with a conservative Christian dominant philosophy. Of course, the release never calls the report by name and doesn’t link to it, so I’m not 100% certain it’s about the same report – but I don’t know any other DOE reports about private school performance released at this time.